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Wealth & Business

879 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 15.

  1. ExxonMobil reunited two pieces of Rockefeller's broken-up Standard OilIn 1911 the US government forced John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil to split into pieces. Nearly ninety years later, two of the biggest fragments, Exxon and Mobil, merged again. T…
  2. Before it was Enron, the company nearly named itself after the intestinesIn 1986, after spending over $100,000 on consultants and focus groups, Kenneth Lay announced that his newly merged gas company would be called Enteron. Within weeks the plan was d…
  3. Norway's state oil company launched the first big floating wind turbineOn 9 June 2009, Statoil towed a 120-metre wind tower out into the Amoy Fjord off Stavanger and left it bobbing in water 220 metres deep. Called Hywind, it was the world's first op…
  4. El Al broke an airline taboo by shrinking the Atlantic Ocean in an advertAirlines in the 1950s never showed the ocean in their advertising, fearing it would remind passengers of crashes. In 1958 El Al ran an American newspaper ad with a shrunken Atlant…
  5. Electrolux got its name from a vacuum motor maker and a lamp companyThe word Electrolux is a merger in miniature. Elektromekaniska, a Stockholm firm making motors for vacuum cleaners, joined forces with Lux, which made outdoor kerosene lamps. In 1…
  6. Electronic Arts almost became Electronic Artists until one employee objectedAt an off-site meeting in 1982, Trip Hawkins' tiny games start-up was stuck choosing a name. Several staff liked Electronic Artists, a nod to the film studio United Artists. Then …
  7. Embraer learned its trade building American Piper planes under Brazilian namesBefore Embraer became the world's third-largest maker of civil aircraft, it spent years assembling someone else's. From 1974, Piper shipped kits from the United States for Embraer…
  8. The record company behind the Beatles also built the first CT scannerEMI is remembered for Abbey Road and the Beatles, but its laboratories in Hayes produced something very different. In the early 1970s engineer Godfrey Hounsfield developed the fir…
  9. 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…
  10. 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…
  11. 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…
  12. 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…
  13. 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…
  14. 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 …
  15. 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…
  16. 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 …
  17. 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…
  18. 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…
  19. 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…
  20. 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…
  21. 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, …
  22. 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…
  23. 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 …
  24. 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…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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…
  28. 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…
  29. 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…
  30. 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…
  31. A European computer model saw Sandy's sharp left turn nearly eight days earlyOn October 23, 2012, a forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, England, predicted something unusual. Instead of curving out to sea, Hurric…
  32. Someone ordered a 100-patty burger at In-N-Out, and the chain changed its rulesIn-N-Out once stacked patties and cheese to any height a customer would pay for. In 2004 somebody asked for a 100×100: one hundred patties with one hundred slices of cheese. Word …
  33. Britain handed Indians gold sovereigns to spend, and most were never seen againIn 1900–1901 the colonial government released gold sovereigns worth 6,750,000 pounds into India, hoping they would circulate as everyday money. According to John Maynard Keynes, l…
  34. Britain's famous insanity test grew from judges answering Parliament's hypothetical questionsThe M'Naghten Rules, still a touchstone for the insanity defence, were never meant as a formal definition. In 1843 Parliament put hypothetical questions to a panel of judges after…
  35. The web's memory lives inside a former church in San FranciscoSince 2009 the Internet Archive has had its headquarters at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a building that was once a Christian Science church. From there a non-profit found…
  36. The first iPhone shipped without copy and paste, or an official name for its softwareWhen the iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007, its operating system had no formal name; Steve Jobs simply said the iPhone runs OS X. It also could not cut, copy or paste text. Tha…
  37. Apple dreamed up the iPad before the iPhone, then put it on holdThe iPad's roots run deeper than the iPhone's. Designer Jonathan Ive sketched a stylus tablet in 1991, and Apple began a larger tablet prototype, codenamed K48, in 2004. Ive wante…
  38. H&M's M comes from a Stockholm shop that sold hunting clothesErling Persson opened his first shop in Västerås, Sweden, in 1947 and named it Hennes, Swedish for hers, because it sold only women's clothing. In 1968 he bought Mauritz Widforss,…
  39. The cancer cell pathologists recognise by its pair of owl eyesUnder the microscope, the classic cell of Hodgkin lymphoma is huge for a cell, 20 to 50 micrometres across, with two mirror-image nuclei that each hold a prominent nucleolus. Path…
  40. Home Depot's first two stores moved into old discount hypermarkets near AtlantaHome Depot opened its first two shops on June 22, 1979, in metro Atlanta, inside spaces leased from J. C. Penney that had been Treasure Island hypermarkets. The founders' bet was …
  41. The word hacker began as MIT slang for pointless, playful tinkeringTo most people a hacker breaks into computers. To many programmers it is a badge of honour for clever tinkering. Both meanings trace back to students at MIT around 1959, when mode…
  42. HBO began with a hockey game shown to 365 homes in PennsylvaniaThe channel that later gave the world blockbuster prestige dramas launched on a November evening in 1972 with a Rangers hockey game, watched by 365 cable subscribers in Wilkes-Bar…
  43. HBO Max dropped the HBO, became Max, then took its old name backIn 2023 Warner Bros. Discovery decided its streaming service would be called simply Max, burying one of television's most famous brands. Two years later it reversed course, and th…
  44. Printing is thousands of years older than Gutenberg's pressGutenberg usually gets the credit, but printing began more than five thousand years before him, with Sumerian cylinder seals rolled across clay. China printed a dated book in 868,…
  45. George Hamilton called himself a first-rate con man and a third-rate actorGeorge Hamilton won a Golden Globe for his very first film, then became better known for a permanent suntan, Ritz Cracker commercials and a talent for surviving flops. He joked he…
  46. GitHub grew from a bootstrapped side project to a billion code repositoriesGitHub took no outside money for its first four years; its founders paid the bills from revenue. Today it hosts more than a hundred million developers, Microsoft owns it, and in J…
  47. Gmail launched on April Fools' Day with storage rivals thought impossibleGoogle unveiled Gmail on 1 April 2004, offering every user a full gigabyte of storage when competitors handed out a sliver of that. The date made some people think it was a prank.…
  48. Gog and Magog started as a man and his land, then became end-time hordesIn the Book of Ezekiel, Gog is a ruler and Magog is his country. Over the following centuries the pair merged into a single menacing phrase, were walled off by Alexander the Great…
  49. Gravity Falls ended after two seasons because its creator chose to finish itMost cartoons end when a network cancels them. Gravity Falls stopped because Alex Hirsch said the story was done. He insisted the show wasn't being cancelled but finished, entirel…
  50. The first Green Lantern's magic ring was useless against anything woodenThe original Green Lantern, in 1940, was a railroad engineer whose magic ring needed recharging every 24 hours and could not touch wood. Nineteen years later DC reinvented the her…
  51. Fugazi turned down millions from record labels and festivals, repeatedlyIn 1993 the head of Atlantic Records went backstage at a sold-out Fugazi show and offered them anything they wanted, including their own label. They said no. Two decades later the…
  52. Nintendo's boss cancelled the Game Boy, and its creator quietly kept goingIn the summer of 1988, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi looked at a Game Boy prototype, found the screen unreadable and cancelled it on the spot. Designer Gunpei Yokoi refused …
  53. Nobody agrees exactly when Generation Z begins, or what to call itZoomers, iGen, Homelanders, Centennials: the cohort after Millennials has collected more nicknames than almost any before it. Even its birth years shift depending on who is counti…
  54. Generative AI's family tree reaches back to a 1906 poem analysisChatbots seemed to appear from nowhere in late 2022, but machines producing text have a surprisingly long pedigree. It starts with a Russian mathematician counting vowels and cons…
  55. Fox Corporation is what remained after Disney bought most of Murdoch's empireIn 2019 Disney swallowed the film studio 20th Century Fox and much of Rupert Murdoch's entertainment business. What Disney legally could not or would not take was spun off the day…
  56. Francesco Totti's mother turned down Milan so he could stay in RomeWhen scouts came calling for a gifted Roman boy, his mother refused a lucrative offer from AC Milan. His youth club had nearly sold him to city rivals Lazio. Instead Francesco Tot…
  57. English's most notorious swear word is not an acronym, whatever the legends claimPopular stories say the rudest word in English began as a legal acronym stamped above punished adulterers, or as a taunt by medieval archers. Neither is true. Its real history is …
  58. The EP was invented to squeeze more music onto a small recordIn the late 1940s a 7-inch 45 rpm single held only about four minutes a side. To compete with Columbia's new long-player, RCA Victor launched Extended Play 45s in 1952, cutting na…
  59. Fight Club flopped in cinemas and then became a defining cult filmStudio executives disliked David Fincher's Fight Club so much that they reworked his marketing plan to limit expected losses. Released in October 1999, it disappointed at the box …
  60. Two former Amazon staff built Flipkart into India's biggest online storeIn October 2007 Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, IIT Delhi graduates who had worked at Amazon, started selling books online from a two-bedroom flat in Bengaluru's Koramangala. Each…

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