Edward Everett Higgins.
If you should ask Edward E. Higgins, the publisher of Success, what are the characteristics which have given him his present position in the publishing world, he would doubtless reply, “Courage, persistence and patience.” He has had an unusually varied training and experience. He was born on April 4, 1864, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and, after a preliminary education in the local grammar and high schools, which were then considered among the best in the state, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was graduated as an electrical engineer in 1886. He obtained there the mathematical training which has remained with him ever since, and which has contributed not a little to his acknowledged power of distinguishing between the possible and the impossible in both engineering and business matters. Foreseeing the great future of the electric street railroad, he became associated, in its earliest development, with the Sprague and Edison companies, and it was largely through his efforts that electricity was first introduced into Buffalo and other cities of New York state. Acquiring a large fund of information on street railroad matters at home and abroad, Mr. Higgins became, in 1893, the editor of the Street Railway Journal, and has won an international reputation as a statistical, engineering and financial expert on street railway matters. In 1899 he perceived an opportunity to develop a large and important home publication from what was then a small and struggling periodical—Success—and acquired an interest, intending that it should be merely a side issue. But the phenomenally rapid growth of Success soon called for Mr. Higgins’ entire time, and the result is seen in the fact that Success, with its circulation of over 300,000, now, after only four years’ time, is one of the first half-dozen American magazines in circulation, prestige and general standing, and no paper is more useful or valuable in the home.