Edward Elsworth was the son of a very successful New York City man of the same name. With his family money, Edward ventured into his own entreprenurial waters in 1890 when he purchased Hornby's Oats from the estate of Alexaner Hornby in Craigville, NY. Only Hornby had perfected the formula for quick-cooking oats, and Elsworth picked a winner because breakfast cereals were beginning to soar in popularity. He moved the entire factory to Lockport, Illinois, close to the source of grain and to Great Lakes shipping. He named his rolled oats product Paw-Nee and it sold very well in the Midwest.

In 1893, the New Yorker looked to Buffalo to expand his production. In his mid-30s by this time, he was tall with graying hair and was considered 'colorful.' At 54 Fulton Street, he constructed a wood-framed food mill, a feed mill, and an elevator. Between 1896 and 1908 he added a brick-framed elevator, and appended the buildings for use as storage, laboratory, and offices. [These original buildings survived until 1987 when destroyed by fire.]

Until 1901, his company was small but profitable. Then, he illustrated why he was nicknamed "The Duke."

The heart of the ad campaign was the jingle as featured at left. A sample went thus:

Jim Dumps would fume at cars so slow
When from his work at night he'd go;
When heavy dames stood on his corn
He'd curse the day that he was born.
But now there's FORCE at home for him
No crowded cars daunt Sunny Jim.

This amateur advertising campaign was an astounding success. The jingles were placed in magazines, streetcars, and billboards. The Force factories were expanded and put on three shifts to meet the demand for the cereal. People memorized the jingles to amuse their friends and over 5,000 unsolicited jingles were sent to the company. The character appeared in musicals, songs, waltzes, and became a fixture of everyday culture.

Elsworth changed the packaging which had previously showed muscular wrestlers in action to feature Sunny Jim, and changed the box to a bright yellow with red and blue block letters.

Edward Elsworth decided that he could sell anyting with advertising and so he hired a professional advertising agency, Calkins & Holden in New York, to take over. He spent one million dollars in 1902 on advertising. One associate said that he "liked to play with advertising as if it were a game of chance."

In 1902, Elsworth purchased the H-O Company and used this as the overall name for his companies. As his advertiser, Earnest Calkins said of him later, "No sooner had one thing made good than all the profits were thrown on the board on another chance." By 1904, there were four Force factories (2 in Buffalo, 1 in Chicago, and 1 in Hamilton, Ontario); in all, they produced 360,000 packages of this cereal daily. Additionally, the two Buffalo mills were capable of producing 1,000 barrels of Hornby's Oats daily.

Buffalo was the headquarters for the company, with its offices over three floors of the Mutual Life Building on Main Street. It employed 200 office workers and 700 production workers. Local author Roger Dooley said in his novel, "Days Beyond Recall," that young South Buffalo women who reached the age of employment would go to work at the H-O or, "better still," the Larkin Company.

Edward Elsworth was included in "Buffalo 1908," published by the Buffalo Evening News, with the note that his company was "looked upon by the business world as the pioneer company of extensive advertising." It described his Buffalo facilities as capitalized at a total of $2 million dollars.

But by 1907, Elsworth was badly overextended, having invested in a huge new plant in Cedar Rapids for production of Paw-Nee. He also introduced Korn-Kinks, a corn cereal that was not successful. And he had expanded his companies into feed grains and flour milling. In that year, he reorganized under a new name, the Edward Elsworth Company and borrowed large sums of money, most of it from banks.

In 1908, he filed for bankruptcy, and his creditors took over the company. "The Duke" would never again gamble and win. In 1917, in his late 50s, he committed suicide at his home in New York City.