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882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 15.

  1. Marvel went bankrupt in 1996 and sold to Disney for $4 billion 13 years laterIn 1989 Ronald Perelman bought Marvel for $82.5 million and called it a mini-Disney of intellectual property. By the end of 1996 it had filed for bankruptcy, and a toy company had…
  2. Mastercard began as small banks teaming up because Bank of America hid its profitsBank of America's credit card lost money at its 1958 launch, turned profitable by 1961, and the bank kept quiet so rivals would stay away. When the secret got out in 1966, hundred…
  3. ICBC, the world's biggest bank, was carved out of China's central bankFor three decades after 1949, China had essentially one bank doing everything. When reformers split it apart, one of the pieces became the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.…
  4. A units mix-up at Lockheed Martin cost NASA an entire Mars probeNASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because of a simple unit mix-up. Lockheed Martin supplied NASA with software that worked in US customary units of force, while the mission exp…
  5. Logitech set out to write software and ended up making a billion miceThe name Logitech comes from logiciel, French for software, and its founders began by writing a word processor for a Swiss client, who cancelled it. Their fallback was a small poi…
  6. Lonely Planet's name came from a misheard song lyricA song by Matthew Moore sings of a lovely planet, but the founders heard it as a lonely planet. The mistake stuck, and it became the name of perhaps the best-known guidebook brand…
  7. Postwar Lufthansa bought its own famous name for DM 30,000The airline that flies today as Lufthansa is not the one founded in 1926. That company was dissolved after the war. A new West German firm called Luftag bought the old name and lo…
  8. Lukoil's name joins three Siberian oil towns to one English wordThe letters L, U and K in Lukoil stand for Langepas, Uray and Kogalym, three oil towns in western Siberia whose state producers merged in 1991. The founders tacked on the English …
  9. Bernard Arnault did not found LVMH, he won it in a boardroom feudBernard Arnault is so closely tied to LVMH that many assume he founded it. He did not. The luxury giant was formed in 1987 by merging Louis Vuitton with the drinks group Moët Henn…
  10. The Mac was one engineer's cheap computer idea before Steve Jobs took it overJef Raskin dreamed up the Macintosh in 1979 as an affordable, easy computer for ordinary people, and named it after his favourite apple, the McIntosh. Two years later Steve Jobs, …
  11. Maersk's seven-pointed star began as a sea captain's prayerThe white star on Maersk's pale blue containers has a tender origin. In 1886 Captain Peter Mærsk Møller's wife Anna fell gravely ill on a voyage. He prayed for a star to appear in…
  12. IndiGo built India's biggest airline by ordering Airbus jets in bulkIn June 2023 an Indian budget airline placed an order for 500 Airbus jets, the largest aircraft order in commercial aviation history. It was IndiGo's third record-breaking Airbus …
  13. Zara's parent can move a design to the shop rail in about two weeksTraditional fashion houses plan collections many months ahead. Inditex, the Spanish group behind Zara, can reportedly take a garment from sketch to shop shelf in as little as 15 d…
  14. A boy, his dog and a candy-coloured iMac helped pull Apple back from the brinkIn one early iMac advert, a seven-year-old named Johann and his border collie Brodie raced a Stanford business student to set up a computer. The boy and dog got their iMac running…
  15. HTC built the first Android phone and briefly led America's smartphone marketIn late 2011 the biggest smartphone seller in the United States was not Apple or Samsung but HTC, a Taiwanese firm that had started out making laptops for other brands. It had als…
  16. Huawei started by reselling Hong Kong phone switches with $5,000 in capitalHuawei was registered in Shenzhen in 1987 with RMB 21,000, then about $5,000, put up by Ren Zhengfei and five partners. Its first business was reselling office telephone switches …
  17. North America's oldest company began with two French traders and a frozen seaThe Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, once held a trading monopoly over a third of modern Canada and acted as its de facto government. Its origin lies with two French fur t…
  18. Hugo Boss made Nazi uniforms but did not design the black SS outfitA popular story says the fashion house Hugo Boss designed the SS uniform. It did not: that black outfit was drawn up in 1932 by two SS members, the artist Karl Diebitsch and graph…
  19. Hyundai went from punchline to third-largest carmaker with a bold warrantyIn the late 1980s, American comedians joked that Hyundai stood for Hope You Understand Nothing's Driveable And Inexpensive. The company's answer was to spend heavily on quality an…
  20. Before Doom, id Software's founders built a Super Mario PC demo Nintendo turned downIn September 1990 John Carmack worked out how to scroll graphics smoothly on a PC. That night he and Tom Hall recreated a level of Super Mario Bros. 3, swapping in a character cal…
  21. IGN kept changing how it scored games, and once reversed itself within one articleFor years IGN rated games from 0.1 to 10.0. In 2010 it switched to half-point steps. In 2012 it announced a move to whole numbers out of 100, applied to every old review, then add…
  22. IKEA's one-way maze is designed to walk you past everything it sellsMost shops let you head straight to what you came for. An IKEA store usually steers you counter-clockwise along a single route the company calls the long natural way, through furn…
  23. How a Hong Kong trade bank became HSBC, a London giant built on takeoversHSBC began in 1865 in Hong Kong, founded by merchants who needed a bank to finance trade between China, India and Europe, much of it in opium. Its first home was chosen partly for…
  24. Hasbro called G.I. Joe an action figure so boys would buy a dollIn 1964 a Rhode Island company that had started out selling textile scraps launched a posable soldier and refused to call it a doll. The label action figure let boys play with it …
  25. Heckler & Koch began by making sewing machine parts in a gutted factoryAfter the war, French occupiers stripped the Mauser works in Oberndorf and destroyed its records. Three of its former engineers salvaged what they could and set up a machine shop …
  26. A pupil of Louis Pasteur gave Heineken the yeast it still brews withIn 1886 a chemist trained under Louis Pasteur isolated a yeast strain in the Heineken laboratory in Amsterdam. Known as the A-yeast, it remains central to the lager today. The bre…
  27. The label V.S.O.P. began as a request from a British princeIn 1817 the Prince Regent, the future George IV, asked a cognac house founded by an Irish soldier for a very superior old pale spirit. The phrase had been used for sherry. Henness…
  28. Hermès made horse harnesses before it made a single handbagFor its first 85 years, Hermès served horses and riders. The Paris workshop opened in 1837 turning out harnesses and saddles, and handbags only arrived in 1922, after the owner's …
  29. HP sold an early personal computer by calling it a calculatorIn 1968 Hewlett-Packard launched the 9100A, which Wired later named the first machine ever described as a personal computer. The company deliberately marketed it as a desktop calc…
  30. Hitachi pays to look after a Hawaiian tree it uses as a mascotSince 1975, a giant rain tree in Moanalua Gardens on Oahu has starred in Hitachi's television commercials, accompanied by a jingle asking what tree this might be. Three other tree…
  31. Moscow's GUM kept its famous initials by swapping one wordFor most of the Soviet era the shopping arcade on Red Square had a single vendor, the state itself. When it was privatized, the new owners changed the first word of its name from …
  32. A coin toss decided whose name came first in Hanna-BarberaWhen MGM shut its cartoon unit in 1957, the two men behind Tom and Jerry started their own studio for television. Flipping a coin settled the billing, and William Hanna won. Withi…
  33. Did Wilber Hardee really lose his burger chain in a poker game?Wilber Hardee opened a burger stand in Greenville, North Carolina, in September 1960. Within a year two partners had control of the business, and Hardee later claimed they won it …
  34. Haribo started with a sack of sugar and a copper potIn 1920 a Bonn confectioner registered a company whose name stitched together the first syllables of Hans Riegel Bonn. His starting kit, the firm says, amounted to one sack of sug…
  35. The cereal giant that once built spy balloons and a deep-sea submersibleGeneral Mills is known for Cheerios and Betty Crocker, but for a time it also made high-altitude balloons for the US Navy and designed Alvin, the submersible later used to explore…
  36. Gibson borrowed a violin trick and went on to shape the electric guitarOrville Gibson began selling mandolins from a single-room Kalamazoo workshop in 1894, carving their tops into arches the way violin makers did. That idea became the archtop guitar…
  37. Glencore, the little-known trader behind much of the world's zinc and copperFor decades one Swiss firm quietly handled most of the zinc traded across borders and half of the copper, yet it stayed private and largely out of sight. Only when Glencore floate…
  38. Goodyear survived by betting big on the radial tyre when rivals hesitatedIn 1970 America had five big tyre makers, and only Goodyear was still independent in the new century. The difference came down to one expensive decision: tearing up factories buil…
  39. Google's Pixel phones won on camera software and whimsical colour namesThe first Pixel came in Very Silver, Quite Black and Really Blue. Later ones arrived as Just Black, Clearly White, Not Pink and Oh So Orange. Behind the jokey paint names sat a se…
  40. Google Play began as Android Market and slowly shed its media storesAndroid's app store opened in 2008 under a plainer name, with a 25-megabyte ceiling on app size. Four years later Google folded music, films and books into one brand called Play, …
  41. Google Workspace started as Gmail accounts for one California collegeBefore it had a grand name, Google's office suite was a trial run hosting email for students at San Jose City College in 2006. Through a string of rebrands, from Google Apps to G …
  42. The drug giant GSK traces part of its family tree to New Zealand baby milkIn 1904 a trading firm in Wellington started drying surplus milk from nearby dairy farms into baby food. It called the powder Glaxo, from a Greek word for milky. That modest produ…
  43. Gucci's founder learned luxury by carrying rich guests' bags in LondonBefore launching a fashion house, Guccio Gucci worked as a bellhop at the Savoy Hotel, hauling the trunks of wealthy travellers and noting what they prized. Back in Florence he op…
  44. General Dynamics grew out of a 19th-century submarine start-upThe US Navy paid $150,000 in 1900 for a submarine designed by John Philip Holland's small firm. That firm, renamed Electric Boat, later swallowed a Canadian aircraft maker and an …
  45. Before Norton Antivirus, Symantec was an AI startup with no productThe company behind Norton Antivirus started in 1982 as an artificial intelligence venture staffed by Stanford language researchers. Two years later it had nothing to sell, so a sm…
  46. How Fiat bought a bankrupt Chrysler piece by piece and built FCAIn 2009 Chrysler walked out of bankruptcy with a union pension fund, two governments and an Italian carmaker as its main owners. Fiat started with a fifth of the company, graduall…
  47. Fila went from Alpine underwear to a Korean-owned sportswear and golf empireThe brand on those chunky 1990s basketball shoes began in an Italian wool mill making underwear for people living in the Alps. A century later it belongs to a company in Seoul tha…
  48. Finnair, the century-old airline that reached Tokyo by flying over the North PoleIn 1983 a Finnish DC-10 with extra fuel tanks took off from Helsinki, headed north over the pole and came down through the Bering Strait to Tokyo, the first non-stop flight from W…
  49. Fitch Ratings, the smallest of the Big Three credit judgesFounded in New York on Christmas Eve 1914 as a publishing company, Fitch became one of three agencies whose letter grades help decide what governments and companies pay to borrow.…
  50. Fuji TV began on a channel most Japanese sets could not even tuneWhen Fuji Television went on air in 1959, it broadcast on channel 8, while most Japanese television sets only went up to channel 6. The station persuaded appliance makers to mass-…
  51. How a Japanese film maker survived digital cameras by selling far more than filmBy 2006 photographic film brought in just 3% of Fujifilm's sales, yet the company still vowed to keep making it. The firm that once fought Kodak over camera rolls now makes medica…
  52. Fujitsu, from Japan's first computer to the world's fastest supercomputerFujitsu built Japan's first computer in 1954, and 66 years later a machine it developed with a national research institute was named the most powerful supercomputer on Earth. Alon…
  53. Gap began as a shop selling only Levi's jeans and recordsThe first Gap, opened in San Francisco in August 1969, sold just two things: every size and style of Levi's, and LP records to lure teenagers in. The idea was borrowed from a Sacr…
  54. Garuda Indonesia's first plane was bought with money raised by the people of AcehDuring Indonesia's fight for independence, merchants and residents of Aceh raised 120,000 Malayan dollars to buy a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed Gold Mountain. That aircraft flew the fir…
  55. Fanta was invented in wartime Germany from the leftovers of leftoversWhen war cut Coca-Cola's German bottler off from its syrup, the local boss Max Keith improvised. Using sugar beet, whey and apple pulp, ingredients he later called the leftovers o…
  56. Slovan Liberec was the first club outside Prague to win the Czech titleFor the first nine seasons of the independent Czech league, the champions always came from Prague. In 2002 a club from the northern city of Liberec broke the pattern. Slovan Liber…
  57. FedEx started as a Yale term paper that failed to impress its professorAs a Yale student, Frederick Smith wrote a paper proposing a delivery network built specifically for urgent packages. His professor was unimpressed. Smith pressed ahead anyway, fo…
  58. Fender's guitar empire grew out of a small-town radio repair shopIn 1938 Leo Fender, a trained electronics technician, opened Fender's Radio Service in Fullerton, California, fixing radios, record players and public address systems. Repairing m…
  59. Karl Lagerfeld designed for Fendi for fifty years and drew its double-F logoMost people link Karl Lagerfeld with Chanel, but his longest partnership was with a Roman fur house. He joined Fendi in 1965, sketched its interlocking double-F logo the next year…
  60. Nutella began as a cheap solid loaf sliced with a knifeIn 1946 cocoa was scarce and expensive in Italy, so the pastry maker Pietro Ferrero stretched it with plentiful local hazelnuts. His first product, Pasta Gianduja, came as a solid…

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