Conrad was born in Minsk, in 1855. His name was Akiba Horowitz, but on coming to the United States he changed it to Conrad Hubert. His father was a wine merchant and distiller, an occupation in which the family had been engaged for several generations.
Hubert attended Hebrew school until the confirmation age of thirteen.
He is said to have had an unusually mature mind for his age – went of his own accord to Berlin, Germany, to study the liquor distillation processes as practised there. He devoted six years to this study, working at odd jobs to support himself, and in 1874 returned to Minsk to become his father's partner. Soon he began applying the methods he had so thoroughly learned. He extended the business to various cities in Russia, and in the course of the succeeding fifteen years was highly successful and gained for himself a wide reputation as a businessman.
Meanwhile, the position of the Jew in Russia had become especially difficult and he decided to go elsewhere. After liquidating all of his commercial holdings he possessed hardly more than enough money for his passage to the United States. He arrived in New York about 1890, merely another immigrant there though a man of repute in Russia, without friend or relative, yet hopeful of engaging in the business he knew. The opportunity did not exist, however, and in order to support himself Hubert was compelled to start anew in other fields. For six or eight years, therefore, he tried successively operating a cigar store, a restaurant, a boarding house, a farm, a milk wagon route, and finally a jewelry store.
About 1898 his attention was called to an electrical device for lighting gas. While it was very crude, the idea it embodied appealed to him. Purchasing the device, he proceeded to perfect it and then applied for a patent, which was granted on March 6, 1900, patent No. 644, 860. He began immediately to manufacture his gas lighter, selling it himself. He also turned his attention to the invention of other electrical contrivances which might have market value, and on May 20, 1902, he obtained patents No. 700, 496, No. 700, 497, and No. 700, 650 for an electric time alarm, electric battery, and small electric lamp, respectively. The last two are the basic patents of the electric flashlight of today.
While Hubert had great difficulty at first in establishing a market for his new products, success eventually crowned his efforts and yielded him a fortune. As the business grew, he organized the American Ever Ready Company in New York and conducted its affairs in the capacity of president. He continued to make and patent improvements on his "portable electric light" until 1914, when he sold the entire business to the National Carbon Company of Cleveland, Ohio. Subsequently, he formed the Yale Electric Corporation, and at the time of his death was the chairman of its board of directors. He was a retiring man and had but few friends. By his will, however, three-quarters of his entire estate of about $8, 000, 000 was bequeathed to unnamed organizations that serve the public welfare. By the unanimous decision of Calvin Coolidge, Alfred E. Smith, and Julius Rosenwald, composing the committee of three selected by Hubert's executors to decide on the distribution of the bequest, thirty-three American institutions devoted to charitable, religious, medical, and educational needs shared in the estate.
He died in Cannes, France, and was buried in New York.
Hubert married late in life (1914), and was divorced in 1927.
