Hilton Worldwide Holdings

Hilton was founded in 1919 by Conrad Nicholson Hilton, born in 1887 in San Antonio, New Mexico Territory, to Augustus Halvorsen Hilton, a Norwegian immigrant from Kristiansand, and Mary Genevieve Laufersweiler, an American of German descent. The Hilton family ran a general store in which the young Conrad worked. He travelled to Cisco, Texas, in 1919 intending to buy a bank, found instead a chaotic hotel called the Mobley with rooms rented twice a day, and bought it. Within a decade Hilton owned a chain of Texas hotels; by 1949 he had bought the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Hilton is now one of the largest hotel companies in the world.