Robert Joseph Collier (June 17, 1876 – November 8, 1918) was the son of Peter Fenelon Collier and a principal in the publishing company P. F. Collier & Son. Upon his father's death, he became head of the company and, for a time, was editor of Collier's Weekly. He was president of the Aero Club of America.
Collier was born in New York City, the only son of Katherine Louise Collier ( Dunue) and Peter Fenelon Collier. He attended St. Francis College, then transferred to Georgetown University and graduated in 1894, winning the Merrick Medal from the Philodemic Society that same year. He received the degree of A. B. from Georgetown University. He then spent two years at Harvard University and Oxford University.
Collier assumed the role of editor and publisher of Collier's Weekly, where he was known to have converted the illustrations in the publication from black and white ink to color.
Collier was an aviation enthusiast. A friend of Orville Wright and a director of the Wright Company, purchased a Wright Model B aircraft in 1911 and loaned it to the United States Army, which assigned it to Lieutenant Benjamin Foulois. Foulois and civilian Wright Company pilot Phil Parmalee. They used this aircraft to fly along the Rio Grande border of Mexico and the United States in one of the first scouting duties by the U.S. Army using an airplane. Foulois and Parmalee later crashed the airplane into the Rio Grande but escaped from drowning. Having that plane repaired, he then took it to fly Jimmy Hare to film the construction of the Panama Canal by flying over the construction site in the same Wright Biplane, B type. He commissioned a hydro-aeroplane plane to be constructed in 1913 to attempt to cross the Atlantic.
Collier had many influential friends and an active social life. An enthusiast of polo, he encountered many injuries. In 1899, he was playing polo with George Jay Gould I for the Lakewood Team when he fell and broke his collarbone. In 1906 he was playing against Harry Payne Whitney when he took a mallet strike to his eye and tore his eye socket.
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