Samuel B. Mosher

Samuel B. Mosher (1892 – 1970) was an American oil entrepreneur, industrialist and horticulturalist who, from a modest start, created Signal Oil and Gas (originally Signal Gasoline), which became the largest California-based independent oil company and then a diversified industrial company. Signal purchased Garrett AiResearch, an aerospace company, in 1964 and attempted to buy Douglas Aircraft in 1966, losing out to McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. In 1967 it purchased Mack Trucks and a bank and changed its name to The Signal Companies in 1968. In 1969, the year before Mosher's death, The Signal Companies had annual revenues of $1.5 billion (over $13 billion in 2025 dollars). The Signal Companies would become one of the founding entities of today's Honeywell aerospace company via AlliedSignal.

Mosher had other non-oil interests including helping privatize shipping company American President Lines and backing the creation and development of Flying Tiger Line, one of the first (and by the 1960s, the leading) US scheduled cargo airline. Signal purchased Laura Scudder's in 1957, selling it on to PET Milk Company in 1962. Mosher also had horticulture interests, cultivating orchids commercially at his Goleta, California estate, Rancho Dos Pueblos, through his Dos Pueblos Orchid Company.