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Wealth & Business

882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 15.

781. A Franciscan friar wrote the first published guide to double-entry bookkeepingThe accounting system behind every modern balance sheet first appeared in print in 1494, in a mathematics book by Luca Pacioli, an Italian friar now nicknamed the father of accoun…
782. The oldest known printed ad sold needles in Song dynasty ChinaA copper printing plate from Song dynasty China turned out square posters for Liu's needle shop in Jinan, complete with a rabbit logo and a promise of fine steel needles ready for…
783. To manage once meant to hold a horse's reinsBefore it meant spreadsheets and meetings, managing was horsemanship. The 15th-century French verb behind the English word described keeping the reins of a horse in hand, and Ital…
784. The yen is named for round coins, and spelled with a lost YYen means round, a name that traces back to Spanish and Mexican silver coins the Chinese called silver rounds. Japanese people actually say en. The English spelling comes from a p…
785. Economists don't count everyone without a job as unemployedA retiree, a full-time student and a stay-at-home parent may all lack paid work, yet none counts as unemployed. To labour economists, you are unemployed only if you are actively h…
786. Layoff once meant a temporary break, until corporate euphemism changed itBeing laid off originally meant a pause in work, with the expectation of returning. Over time the word came to mean losing the job for good, so now people must say temporary layof…
787. Why unsecured loans nearly always cost more than secured onesWhen a borrower pledges a house or car, the lender has something to seize if payments stop. Without that pledge, a lender who goes unpaid must sue, win a judgment and chase whatev…
788. Logistics started as the job of finding soldiers somewhere to sleepThe word logistics comes from the French for lodgings. Napoleonic-era staff officers included a marshal of lodgings, responsible for billeting troops on the march. A Swiss militar…
789. London's stockbrokers were once banned from the exchange for bad mannersIn the 17th century, London's stockbrokers were considered too rude to trade inside the Royal Exchange. So they set up in coffee houses nearby, and at one of them a broker began p…
790. Macroeconomics looks at whole economies across three very different timescalesAsk why unemployment jumped this year and you get one kind of answer; ask why some countries grew rich over half a century and you need a completely different one. Macroeconomists…
791. Humans were hunting long before there were humans like usThe oldest undisputed evidence of hunting dates to roughly 1.7 million years ago, around when Homo erectus appeared and spread. Hunting is older than our own species, and chimpanz…
792. Before computers, IBM's ancestor companies sold scales, time clocks and cheese slicersIn 1911 a financier named Charles Flint merged four businesses making computing scales, dial recorders, tabulating machines and workplace time clocks. The new firm, based in Endic…
793. Britain once burned its income tax records to celebrate the tax's repealWhen Britain scrapped its wartime income tax in 1816, a year after Waterloo, opponents wanted every trace of it gone. The Chancellor of the Exchequer duly burned the tax papers in…
794. One king's pilgrimage flooded Cairo with gold and sank its price for yearsIn 1324 Mansa Musa, king of Mali, passed through Cairo on his way to Mecca with a vast caravan and spent or gave away so much gold that its value in Egypt slumped. A historian wri…
795. Lloyd's of London, the famous insurance market, began in a coffee houseToward the end of the 1680s, Edward Lloyd started serving coffee in London, and his premises became the place where shipowners and merchants met people willing to cover their carg…
796. A puzzle about compound interest led Jacob Bernoulli to the number ePut one dollar in an account paying 100 percent a year and you end with two. Add half the interest at mid-year and you get 2.25. Jacob Bernoulli wondered what happens if interest …
797. Buying foreign goods can be a way of importing foreign labourWorkers move across borders far less freely than products do. So countries often trade the goods that contain those inputs instead. When the United States buys labour-intensive pr…
798. The world's first public company also founded the first stock exchangeIn 1602 the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, became the first company to offer shares to the public, and trading in them created the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. It grew so large t…
799. Henry Ford's first car company became Cadillac after he walked outHenry Ford's first carmaker, founded in 1901, was renamed the Cadillac Motor Company after he left and took the rights to his own name with him. So when he launched Ford Motor Com…
800. Foresters judge hungry deer by checking a small woodland flowerDeer nibbling young saplings can change which trees a forest grows into, so foresters need to know how hard they are browsing. One study proposed a clever gauge: the large white t…
801. Russia had little gold or silver, so it paid its way in soft goldIn the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Russia wanted Western European goods but had no gold or silver mines to pay for them. What it did have was fur. Sable and marten pelts b…
802. General Electric grew from Edison's companies and ended as three separate firmsGeneral Electric was born in 1892 when J. P. Morgan's bank merged Thomas Edison's electric business with a rival. For more than a century it made nearly everything, from fridges t…
803. GM's founder was a horse-carriage king who once tried to buy FordBy 1900 William Durant ran America's biggest maker of horse-drawn carriages and was not keen on cars. He took over Buick anyway, built General Motors around it in 1908, and a year…
804. When you pay to have rubbish taken away, it has a negative priceUsually money flows one way and the product flows the other. With household rubbish, both the cash and the bin bags travel toward the collector. Economists call such unwanted thin…
805. Google's founders opposed advertising, which now brings in nearly three-quarters of revenueLarry Page and Sergey Brin started out against putting advertising on their search engine. As years passed without profit they relented, but on strict terms: every ad had to match…
806. When fish run short, countries have sent warships over cod and halibutIn March 1995 Canadian officials boarded and seized a Spanish trawler in international waters off Newfoundland, and Spain sent navy patrol ships to guard its fishing boats. The st…
807. Almost everyone alive eats from the food industry, and a third work in farmingUnless you grow everything you eat or live by hunting and gathering, you depend on the food industry. That web reaches from seed makers and tractor factories to lorries, warehouse…
808. A unit of energy saved is worth almost exactly as much as one producedThe energy business stretches from oil rigs and coal pits to wind farms and the firewood gathered for cooking in poorer countries. Yet some of its most valuable output is energy n…
809. For three years the euro existed only as an accounting unitThe euro launched on 1 January 1999, but nobody could hold one. For three years it lived only in bank ledgers and financial markets, replacing an older accounting unit one for one…
810. Economists agree free trade is best, but not on how to set exchange ratesEconomists broadly treat free trade as the ideal, yet they have no consensus on the best way to manage a currency's value. Floating, pegged or something in between, each country's…
811. India sells the most cinema tickets, yet ranks only fourth in film revenueHollywood makes the most money, but India makes the most films and fills the most seats. In 2009 alone it produced 2,961 films on celluloid. Rock-bottom ticket prices explain the …
812. A bank earns its keep in the gap between two interest ratesWhen you deposit money, a bank pays you interest, then lends those funds to a borrower who pays a higher rate. The difference is the bank's reward for matching savers with people …
813. Overfished Devon waters gave birth to the modern deep-sea trawlerBy the early 1800s, fishermen at Brixham in Devon had emptied their local grounds and needed to sail farther than ever. The fast, sturdy boat they developed could tow big nets in …
814. Europe's biggest financial centres both sit outside the European UnionThe European Union is the world's second-largest economy by nominal output, behind only the United States, yet the continent's two largest financial hubs, London and Zürich, lie b…
815. A country of farmers became a quarter of the world economyIn the early 1800s, over four in five Americans worked the land. Today the United States produces about 26 percent of global output, the most of any nation measured at market exch…
816. Whether you are an employee or a contractor decides who owns your ideasIf a company hires you to invent, it owns your inventions even without a signed assignment. Commission the same work from an independent contractor, and the copyright stays with t…
817. The invisible engine driving the global meat industryIt is the world's most widely grown legume, yet most people only encounter it indirectly. From the protein in your meat substitutes to the massive scale of global livestock farmin…
818. The surprising linguistic roots of the word bookWe often think of books as modern paper objects, but their very name points to an ancient forest. From clay tablets to digital screens, the evolution of the book is a story of tec…
819. How a $1,300 garage startup became a $4 trillion titanIn 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak raised just $1,300 by selling a Volkswagen bus and a calculator. Today, Apple is a global powerhouse valued at over $4 trillion, having survi…
820. How a garage-based bookstore became the world's largest revenue-generating companyIn 1994, Jeff Bezos launched a company called Cadabra to sell books online. Today, that venture has evolved into a global conglomerate so vast it has become the world's largest co…
821. How Did a Graphical Shell Become the World's Dominant OS?The concept of 'Windows' began as a simple graphical shell layered over MS-DOS. Yet, this initial iteration evolved through complex architectural shifts, achieving a market domina…
822. How a family of weavers built the world's largest automakerBefore it conquered the global highways, Toyota was a company built on looms. By applying the logic of automated weaving to the assembly line, a Japanese family transformed a text…
823. How a two-cent news bulletin became a global financial powerhouseIn 1889, it was a four-page sheet costing just two cents. Today, The Wall Street Journal commands millions of subscribers. Discover how a specialized stock market bulletin survive…
824. Is it murder if there is no premeditation?The legal line between murder and manslaughter is often thinner than you think. While we often imagine a cold-blooded killer planning for weeks, many legal systems define murder t…
825. How a penniless orphan became the architect of a global empireBefore he was a prophet, Muhammad was a man of modest means, facing poverty and rejection. Yet, through a combination of business acumen and spiritual conviction, he transformed t…
826. How a 1975 software deal created 12,000 millionairesBefore it was a trillion-dollar titan, Microsoft was a small venture selling interpreters for a single microcomputer. A strategic pivot in the 1980s didn't just dominate the PC ma…
827. The shifting meaning of liberalism: from a 'necessary evil' to the welfare stateOnce a movement to dismantle absolute monarchy and royal monopolies, liberalism has undergone a profound transformation. While its roots lie in protecting individuals from state c…
828. Beyond the acronym: the complex history and diverse identities of the LGBTQ communityWhile the acronyms vary, the movement represents a vast spectrum of sexual and gender identities. From the 1969 Stonewall Uprising to the legal milestones of the early 2000s, unde…
829. The disputed origin of the world's most famous sandwichWas the hamburger born in a German city, a Texas lunch counter, or a Wisconsin fair? While global icons like the Big Mac dominate the market, the true inventor of the hamburger re…
830. How a medicinal tonic for morphine addiction became a global empireIn 1886, John Pemberton sought a cure for his own morphine addiction. He didn't just find a remedy; he created a patent medicine that would eventually evolve into the world's sixt…
831. The 13% genetic gap between humans and our closest living relativesWe often view chimpanzees as mere shadows of ourselves, but the biological reality is far more complex. While our DNA sequences are remarkably similar, the true divergence lies in…
832. The legal shield that protects your personal wealth from business failureWhen a business fails, who pays the debts? For many entrepreneurs, the answer is 'everyone.' Understanding the critical distinction between a sole proprietorship and a corporation…
833. How a private wireless consortium became a global public service monopolyIn 1922, the BBC began as a private company funded by royalties on radio sets. Today, it is a global giant with 22,000 employees. Discover how a period of intense industrial crisi…
834. Jobs saw Xerox’s mouse GUI and bet Apple’s future on itSteven Paul Jobs (1955–2011) co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and helped drive the personal-computer revolution. After Reed College and a 1974 India trip, he studied Zen. A 197…
835. Ted Turner built CNN and gave a billion to the UN FoundationRobert Edward Turner III (1938–2026) founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network, and WTBS, a pioneering superstation. After his father’s 1963 suicide he took over a $1 mill…
836. A gold-rush merchant helped drive the Central PacificAmasa Leland Stanford (1824–1893)—attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, Republican politician—grew rich as a California merchant after 1852, then as a Central Pacific Railroad …
837. A Chaozhou refugee built a Pacific business archipelagoSir Ka-shing Li, born 1928 in Guangdong to Teochew parents, chaired CK Hutchison and CK Asset before retiring from those roles. Investments span transport, property, finance, reta…
838. Rome's richest man died on a doomed Parthian campaignMarcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BC), often called Rome's richest man, bankrolled Julius Caesar and joined Pompey in the First Triumvirate. After a second consulship he governed Sy…
839. Frankfurt's Rothschilds built Europe's private banking webThe Rothschilds, an Ashkenazi Jewish banking dynasty from Frankfurt, rose from sixteenth-century records to nineteenth-century dominance of European finance, holding what was then…
840. An Adelaide paper became a global News Corp empireKeith Rupert Murdoch, born 1931 in Melbourne, inherited his father's small Adelaide paper The News in 1952 and scaled it into News Corp—hundreds of local, national, and internatio…

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