Intellect PlusBrands & companies
704 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 12.
Italy's power giant Enel had to shut every nuclear plant after one voteEnel's Caorso reactor, Italy's first major nuclear power station, went quiet in 1986 for routine refuelling. It never restarted. After the Chernobyl disaster, Italians voted again…
Why the Italian energy company Eni chose a six-legged dog for its logoThe emblem of Eni, Italy's oil and gas giant, is an imaginary dog with six legs. Chosen in 1952 as the company was taking shape, it stands for a car's four wheels plus the two leg…
Chess.com grew so big that one game number overflowed its softwareIn June 2017 someone on Chess.com started game number 2,147,483,647, the largest value a common 32-bit integer can hold, and the app stopped working. It was a strange milestone fo…
Dunkin' grew from a factory-lunch hunch into a chain of fourteen thousand shopsBill Rosenberg noticed that when he sold food at factories and building sites, coffee and doughnuts outsold everything else. So in 1948 he opened a small shop outside Boston selli…
DuPont went from making gunpowder to inventing nylon, Teflon and KevlarA French refugee started DuPont in 1802 to make better gunpowder on a Delaware creek. A century later it controlled most of America's explosives trade, and then its laboratories t…
Duracell's name means durable cell, and its roots lie in military mercury batteriesThe copper-topped battery in your remote began with a 1920s partnership between a scientist and a businessman who made mercury cells for military equipment. After passing through …
EA Sports started as a pretend TV network and became a gaming empireEA Sports began as a marketing trick: Electronic Arts dressed its games up as broadcasts from an imaginary EA Sports Network. The pose stuck, the label grew into Madden, NHL and t…
JR East runs every bullet train north of Tokyo and ships seafood on themJapan's biggest passenger railway was carved out of the old state network in 1987, though it took until 2002 to be truly sold off. Today JR East runs the high-speed lines fanning …
EasyJet started with 70 staff and a free building at LutonIn 1995 a young Greek-Cypriot entrepreneur borrowed from his father, set up an airline at Luton, an airport mostly used by charter flights, and sold seats far below the big carrie…
EBay's first sale was a broken laser pointer bought by a collector of themIn 1995 a programmer put up a hobby auction site, and one of its first items was a laser pointer that no longer worked. It fetched 14.83 dollars. Puzzled, the seller checked the b…
Russia's central bank traces its roots to a tsarist bank founded in 1860The Bank of Russia dates officially from July 1990, when the Soviet Union was still standing, yet it claims descent from the State Bank of the Russian Empire founded in 1860. It m…
Chanel began as a hat shop and freed women from the corsetIn 1909 Gabrielle Chanel began selling hats from a friend's Paris flat. Within a decade her loose jersey garments, borrowed partly from wartime uniforms, were on every European bu…
Canonical built a business around giving away Ubuntu for freeCanonical gives its flagship product away. The London firm, started and bankrolled by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, makes its money by selling support for Ubuntu, …
Capcom's name comes from capsule computers, arcade machines of the early 1980sThe company behind Street Fighter and Resident Evil takes its name from Capsule Computers, its term for the arcade machines it built in its early years. The capsule idea was twofo…- Carl's Jr. grew from a Los Angeles hot dog cart bought with a car loanIn 1941 truck driver Carl Karcher and his wife Margaret borrowed $311 against their Plymouth, added $15 of savings, and bought a hot dog cart in Los Angeles. Hot dogs and tamales …
Carlsberg gave the world lager yeast and the idea of pHA Danish brewery lab gave chemistry the pH scale. Brewer J. C. Jacobsen founded the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1875 to tackle brewing problems, and there Emil Christian Hansen isolat…- Carrefour is named after a crossroads and invented Europe's hypermarketCarrefour means crossroads, and that is exactly where its first shop stood, in suburban Annecy in 1960. Three years later the company put a supermarket and a department store unde…
- Casio's calculator empire was funded by a ring that held cigarettesBefore Casio built calculators it sold the yubiwa pipe, a finger ring fitted with a cigarette holder. Earnings from Toshio Kashio's odd invention helped fund the four brothers' fi…
Caterpillar got its name from a photographer peering at a tractorSteam tractors kept sinking into the soft farmland around Stockton, California. Benjamin Holt's fix was to swap the wheels for wooden tracks bolted to chains, first tested on Than…
Cathay Pacific was started by two wartime pilots with one DC-3Two former air force pilots who had flown the Hump over the Himalayas founded Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong in 1946. Their first plane was a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed Betsy. They added…- Calvin Klein made American men care about the label on their underwearMen's underwear used to be plain white and bought in packs of three by a wife or mother. Calvin Klein turned it into something men chose by brand, even though almost nobody sees i…
Canon's brand name comes from Kannon, a Buddhist bodhisattvaCanon's first camera, a 1934 prototype, was called the Kwanon after Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva known in China as Guanyin. The spelling was later anglicised into Canon. Oddly…
Tatra's streamlined cars left their fingerprints on the Volkswagen BeetleIn 1965 Volkswagen quietly paid the Ringhoffer family one million Deutschmarks to settle a claim that dated back to the 1930s. Czech carmaker Tatra had sued over patents, arguing …
TED lost money at its debut and took six years to try againThe first TED conference in 1984 featured a compact disc demonstration, an early look at the Apple Macintosh and a talk by Benoit Mandelbrot. It still lost money, and a second eve…
Telefónica bought Britain's O2 and then spent a decade trying to sell itIn 2006 Spain's former phone monopoly completed a 17.7 billion pound takeover of O2, the British mobile operator. A later deal to sell it to Li Ka-shing was blocked by European re…
Facebook kept Sun Microsystems' old sign as a warning to itselfWhen Facebook moved into Sun Microsystems' former Menlo Park campus in 2011, Mark Zuckerberg did not tear down the entrance sign. He had it flipped around and put Facebook's logo …
Supercell throws parties for its killed games and tests new ones in CanadaAt the Finnish studio behind Clash of Clans, small teams of five to seven people decide for themselves when to kill their own games, and staff celebrate the successful failures. N…- Sweden's SVT is called SVT because Scottish Television already owned STVThe logical abbreviation for Sveriges Television would be STV. When the Swedish broadcaster got its own company in 1979, though, those letters were already registered within the E…
Swarovski chose an Alpine village for its cheap hydroelectric powerGrinding glass into sparkling crystals by machine devours energy. So when Daniel Swarovski, a Bohemian glass cutter's son, set up his company in 1895, he built the factory in Watt…
Switzerland's central bank is a listed company anyone can buy shares inMost central banks belong wholly to their governments. The Swiss National Bank has traded on the stock exchange since 1907. Cantons and cantonal banks hold most of the voting shar…
Tabasco peppers are picked by matching them against a little red stickTo judge whether a pepper is ripe enough for Tabasco, pickers hold it up to a small painted stick called le petit baton rouge. Only peppers matching its shade go into the sauce. T…
A Heuer stopwatch rode along on America's first crewed orbital flightWhen John Glenn circled the Earth aboard Mercury Atlas 6 in 1962, he carried a backup clock: a Heuer stopwatch he started by hand 20 seconds after launch. It made Heuer the first …- Tamagotchi's runaway success left Bandai with a six billion yen lossThe original Tamagotchi sold about 40 million units, a hit so unexpected that Bandai staff were told not to carry company-branded bags in case thieves targeted them. Then the craz…
Target began as a department store's discount experiment in suburban MinnesotaIn May 1962 the Minneapolis department store Dayton's opened a cut-price spinoff in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul, named after the centre of a shooting target. By the end of tha…- Subway began with a borrowed thousand dollars meant to fund medical schoolIn 1965 Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from family friend Peter Buck to open a sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, hoping it would pay his way through medical school. He never …
- Stellantis borrowed its starry name from Latin to unite fourteen car brandsJeep, Peugeot, Maserati, Fiat, Opel and Ram now sit under one roof with an invented name. Stellantis comes from the Latin stello, to brighten with stars, and was picked by brandin…
Sony's name blends Latin for sound with American slang for a young ladSony's founders wanted a short name Americans could say. Their initials, TTK, already belonged to a railway, and Totsuko tangled American tongues. So they combined sonus, the Lati…
A factory fire in New Mexico helped push Ericsson into Sony's armsOn March 17, 2000, a fire contaminated a Philips chip plant in New Mexico. Nokia quickly found other suppliers. Ericsson, which bought all its phone chips from that one site, coul…- Sony owns the Columbia record label almost everywhere except JapanSony Music puts out records under the Columbia name around the world, with one exception: its home country. In Japan the Columbia trademark belongs to an unrelated firm, Nippon Co…
- Southwest settled a trademark fight with an arm-wrestling match between CEOsIn March 1992 an aviation company told Southwest that its new slogan, Just Plane Smart, infringed a trademark. Instead of suing, the two chief executives arm-wrestled for it at a …
- Spotify has no fixed price per play, so every stream earns a different amountBuy a CD and the artist gets a set cut. Stream a song on Spotify and there is no set rate at all. The company pools about 70% of its revenue and divides it by share of listening, …
Sprite began life in West Germany as a clear lemon FantaThe Sprite name first belonged to a Houston bottler's line of strawberry and orange drinks. The lemon-lime recipe came from somewhere else entirely: West Germany, where Coca-Cola …- Final Fantasy was made to answer Dragon Quest, then the two rivals mergedIn 1987 a struggling Tokyo developer called Square built a role-playing game to cash in on the success of Enix's Dragon Quest. It named the game Final Fantasy, and it sold over 40…
Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, went public through a gold minerThe film company Lionsgate took its name from a Vancouver bridge and got onto the stock market by merging with a small gold-mining firm, whose mines it quickly sold. Twenty-seven …- India's biggest bank traces its roots to a Calcutta bank founded in 1806The State Bank of India only took that name in 1955, but its lineage reaches back to the Bank of Calcutta, opened in June 1806, which makes it the oldest commercial bank on the su…
Snickers: named after a horse, sold as Marathon, and quietly shrinkingMars launched Snickers in Chicago in 1930 and named it after the family's favourite horse. It is widely rated the world's bestselling candy bar, yet British shoppers bought it as …- Sofia Metro: Bulgaria's only subway, dug through layers of Roman ruinsPlanned since the 1960s and stalled for lack of money in the early 1990s, the Sofia Metro finally opened on 28 January 1998. Tunnelling beneath one of Europe's oldest cities expos…
- SoftBank: from a 24-year-old's software shop to the boldest gambler in techMasayoshi Son was 24 when he founded SoftBank on 3 September 1981 to distribute software. Its greatest bet came in 2000: $20 million in a fledgling Chinese venture called Alibaba,…
- Shenzhen Bao'an: the airport that swapped three terminals for one flying fishShenzhen's airport opened on 12 October 1991 on the east bank of the Pearl River. In November 2013 it shut all three of its old terminals and opened a single enormous replacement …
Singapore Airlines: how a split from Malaysia produced a five-star flag carrierSingapore Airlines began life in 1947 as Malayan Airways, flying from Kallang to Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Penang. After Singapore and Malaysia went separate ways, a 1972 division ga…
Sinopec: the state oil giant where profit shares the ledger with policySinopec is the world's biggest oil refining group and one of the top earners on the planet, with revenue of RMB 2.78 trillion in 2025. Yet Beijing sets its fuel prices, and in 200…- Sigma Olomouc: a Moravian club of cup glory, corruption fines and a 7–1 nightFounded in 1919 as FK Hejčín Olomouc, Sigma spent three decades in the top flight and once thrashed Fenerbahçe 7–1 in a European tie. Its finest domestic moment, the 2012 Czech Cu…
- Slavia Prague: the literary cycling club that became a Czech football powerMedical students in Vinohrady founded Slavia on 2 November 1892 as a society for literature and cycling. Football arrived in 1896, along with a goalless draw against Sparta that s…
- SkyTeam: the last of the big three airline alliances and its shifting rosterSkyTeam was born on 22 June 2000, when Delta, Aeroméxico, Air France and Korean Air met in New York. Arriving after Star Alliance and Oneworld, it has grown into the second larges…
SM Entertainment: how a failed hip hop bet built the K-pop idol factoryIn 1989 Lee Soo-man opened a small studio in Seoul's Apgujeong and signed a hip hop singer whose career collapsed after a drug arrest. Burned, Lee pivoted to carefully trained ido…- Shein: from wedding-dress drop shipper to the world's biggest fashion retailerShein began in Nanjing in October 2008 under the name ZZKKO, reselling clothes from Guangzhou wholesalers without designing a single garment. Within about fourteen years it had be…
The riveted jean was a Reno tailor's idea, patented with Levi's moneyJacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, had a customer who kept tearing his trousers. Davis hammered copper rivets into the stress points, but he could not afford a patent. So he wrote to …- LG's two letters stand for a chemical firm and GoldStarThose two letters on televisions and washing machines worldwide are an abbreviation of two old Korean brands: Lucky, a chemical company, and GoldStar, its electronics arm. GoldSta…
- Lidl bought its name from a retired teacher to avoid 'black market'Dieter Schwarz had an awkward problem when he opened discount shops in the 1970s: his family name would turn them into Schwarz-Markt, German for black market. He wanted his father…
- Henry Ford bought Lincoln from the man who had once pushed him outIn 1902 investors led by Henry Leland forced Henry Ford out of his own car company and reorganised it as Cadillac. Twenty years later Leland's next venture, Lincoln, was bankrupt,…