Charles Frambach Berlitz

A gifted linguist, he graduated from Yale in 1936 and began running his grandfather's intensive language-teaching business. As the need for foreign-language expertise sky-rocketed during World War II, his customer base was primarily the military. They signed up in droves for the Berlitz Schools of Languages and bought Berlitz Publications, which included phrase books, dictionaries, and audio-visual materials. After the war, he shifted his focus to multinational businesses, to whose employees he began offering business courses.