To all of you who might be wondering who this is, A. Henry Rearden is a Henry Rearden

Henry Rearden runs the best steel mills in the country. In 1961, when everyone was saying that steel in Pittsburgh was no longer a profitable enterprise, he bought his mills, which were then long unused wrecks of furnaces and foundries. By 1963, when the "monopolistic" Associated Steel was feeling a shortage of ore and could not fill their orders, Rearden Steel, supplied by Rearden Ore, was flourishing. The production capacity of Rearden's mills were vastly outweighed by those of Associated Steel, yet Associated shut down furnace after furnace, shorting their most important customers, including Taggart Transcontinental, who waited two years (1970 to 1972) for rail desperately needed on their most important line (Rio Norte, handling the oil brought up by Ellis Wyatt in Winston, CO), while Rearden Steel ran at full capacity from 1963 until 1971, never failing to deliver exactly as much steel as ordered, exactly on time.

As if this was not enough, in 1971, Hank Rearden announced that a pet project of his very own, Rearden Metal, an alloy with 50 times the tensile strength of steel, with specific weight and ductility comparable to steel, and costing half as much as steel to produce, was ready for the market.

The operating vice-president of Taggart Transcontinental, in an end-run around the railroad's board of directors, ordered the rail for the Rio Norte line to be built out of Rearden Metal. She was discharged. However, she had enough capital to buy the Rio Norte line, which she, with the support of Hank Rearden, opened as the John Galt Line, which featured the first bridge made out of Rearden Metal -- 1000 feet long, with no trusses, only a cantilever at either end. All the "experts" said it wouldn't, but it stood.

To all of you who might be wondering, Henry Rearden is the Man of Steel.

But this is not Henry Rearden speaking -- this is A. Henry Rearden. "A," as in, "one of," and what it is that A. Henry Rearden is one of, is that type of person which Henry Rearden is, which the aforementioned ex-operating-vice-president of Taggart Transcontinental, Dagny Taggart is, which such real people as Henry Ford and James J. Hill, were.

To some, that type is: A, though this only sufficiently defines it, not necessarily.

To all of you who might be wondering, this Henry Rearden is not the Henry Rearden, who exists at best only in the minds of certain people -- this Henry Rearden, calling himiself only one of what he is, is not the Man of Steel, he is the Man of Cheese, the Man of Butter, and the Man of Milk.

This Henry Rearden does production planning and deployment for a major dairy foods company.