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882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 15.

  1. Kirk Douglas made Spartacus after losing Ben-Hur to Charlton HestonKirk Douglas wanted the lead in William Wyler's Ben-Hur and watched Charlton Heston get it instead. Soon afterwards he paid out of his own pocket for the rights to a novel about a…
  2. Mumbai's Taj hotel holds a trademark on its own silhouetteIn 2017 the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai became the first building in India to win intellectual-property protection for its architecture, registering its look as an image trademark.…
  3. Half of Hollywood tried to film Howard Hughes before Scorsese didChristopher Nolan wrote a Howard Hughes script with Jim Carrey in mind. Nicolas Cage was going to play both Hughes and his hoaxing biographer Clifford Irving. Johnny Depp, Edward …
  4. India's big watchmaker now earns most of its money from jewelleryTitan began in 1984 as a Tata joint venture making quartz watches in Tamil Nadu, and by 2019 it ranked fifth among the world's watchmakers by volume. Yet more than 80% of its reve…
  5. U.S. Steel went from two-thirds of American steel to eight percentIn 1902, its first full year, U.S. Steel poured 67 percent of all the steel made in the United States and was valued as the first billion-dollar corporation anywhere. A century la…
  6. Pearl Jam began life named after a point guardBefore they were Pearl Jam, four Seattle musicians played their first gig as Mookie Blaylock, borrowing the name of an NBA guard. Their debut album, Ten, took its title from his j…
  7. Peyton Manning's number 18 was borrowed from a brother who never played onPeyton Manning wore 18 for most of his career because his older brother Cooper had to quit football with spinal stenosis. The quarterback who honoured him would collect more MVP a…
  8. The first American robber baron was branded for undercutting pricesMedieval German lords who squeezed illegal tolls from travellers on their roads and along the Rhine lent their name to a famous American insult. When The New York Times first pinn…
  9. Before the presidency, Rutherford Hayes defended fugitive slaves and took five woundsRutherford Hayes once formed a law partnership that lasted three days, ended by the shots at Fort Sumter. He joined a volunteer company of friends from his literary club, was woun…
  10. Mira Nair cast real street children and won at CannesFor her first feature, Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair sought out children who actually lived on Bombay's streets. She finished editing just three days before its 1988 Cannes premiere, …
  11. Oral cancer makes up 40 percent of cancers in parts of IndiaIn Britain, cancers of the mouth account for about 4 percent of all cancers. In India the figure reaches up to 40 percent. Much of that gap traces to chewing betel quid and areca …
  12. John Cleese's family name was Cheese until his father changed itThe man who wrote a famous sketch set in a cheese shop was nearly born John Cheese. His father found the family surname embarrassing, signed up for the First World War as Cleese, …
  13. John Overdeck turned an Olympiad silver medal into a machine-driven hedge fundAt 16, John Overdeck won a silver medal for the United States at the 1986 International Mathematical Olympiad in Poland. Fifteen years later he co-founded Two Sigma, a New York he…
  14. A rich men's fishing club lowered the dam above JohnstownAbove the steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a group of Pittsburgh industrialists led by Henry Clay Frick turned an old canal reservoir into a private resort lake. They trimme…
  15. Jon Voight's breakout film remains the only X-rated Best Picture winnerIn Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight played Joe Buck, a naive Texan hustler drifting through New York alongside Dustin Hoffman's ailing con man. Released with an X rating in 1969, it be…
  16. Kansas mixed heartland boogie with symphonic rock and a fiddleMost progressive rock violinists leaned on jazz and classical music. In Kansas, Robby Steinhardt's violin sounded like the American heartland, riding over boogie rhythms and shift…
  17. Coppola spent decades and his wine fortune getting Megalopolis madeFrancis Ford Coppola first imagined Megalopolis in 1977, near the end of filming Apocalypse Now. Studios turned the project down again and again, so he waited until winemaking had…
  18. Only up to 60 people a year join the Royal Society's fellowshipEach spring, from roughly 700 nominees, the Royal Society elects at most 60 new fellows, foreign members and honorary fellows. The honour, given to Isaac Newton in 1672 and Charle…
  19. Guy Pearce appeared in back-to-back Best Picture winnersGuy Pearce played a bomb disposal sergeant in The Hurt Locker and the future Edward VIII in The King's Speech, and both films won the Oscar for Best Picture. That made him the fir…
  20. Horace Mann, father of American public schools, taught his own children at homeHorace Mann persuaded Massachusetts and then most northern states to fund elementary schools through taxes and to train teachers in normal schools. Yet the reformer later called t…
  21. Warren Buffett charged his son Howard rent on the family's first farmWhen Howard Graham Buffett began farming in Tekamah, Nebraska, in 1977, his father Warren bought the land for $760,000 and then charged him rent. Nearly five decades later, on Sep…
  22. Howard Warren Buffett wants philanthropy managed like an investment portfolioWarren Buffett's grandson Howard Warren Buffett argues that nonprofits should be lined up systematically against social needs, an idea he calls social value investing. He set it o…
  23. Jamie Dimon's college paper on Shearson mergers launched his banking careerAs a Tufts student, Jamie Dimon wrote a paper on the mergers at Shearson, and his mother sent it to Sandy Weill. Weill hired him for a summer, later coaxed him away from Goldman S…
  24. Jerry Cantrell wrote rock star as his childhood ambition in a Dr. Seuss bookAs soon as he could write, Jerry Cantrell filled in the line about what he wanted to be when he grew up in a Dr. Seuss activity book: rock star. He went on to found Alice in Chain…
  25. The Russell dukes of Bedford once held 86,335 acres, not counting LondonIn 1883 the 9th Duke of Bedford's country estates covered 86,335 acres across England, from 32,269 in Bedfordshire to a single acre in Lincolnshire, bringing in £141,793 a year. T…
  26. England's Dissenters ranged from Quakers to Muggletonians who cursed their criticsBetween the 16th and 19th centuries, many English Protestants broke away from the Church of England, which they saw as too Catholic, though they rarely agreed on the remedy. Some …
  27. America's national cemetery was planted in Robert E. Lee's front gardenWhen Union burial grounds near Washington filled up in 1864, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs chose the estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The high ground rarely f…
  28. Arteriosclerosis is the slow stiffening of the body's blood pipesThe word comes from Greek for artery and hardened, and that is the core of it. Artery walls thicken, stiffen and lose their stretch, gradually squeezing the flow of blood to organ…
  29. Bear Stearns survived the 1929 crash but not a week of rumoursFounded in 1923, Bear Stearns came through the Wall Street Crash without laying off a single employee. Eighty-five years later its ready cash fell from 18.1 billion dollars to 2 b…
  30. Charles Koch grew his father's oil firm two thousandfoldIn 1967 Charles Koch took charge of a medium-sized Wichita oil company and renamed it after his father. By 2006 Koch Industries was bringing in 90 billion dollars a year, growth o…
  31. Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist before switching to Soviet studiesCondoleezza Rice began French, music, figure skating and ballet at three, and took up serious piano at 15 aiming for the concert stage. At the Aspen music festival she met student…
  32. Cyrus Mistry ran the Tata empire without carrying the Tata nameWhen Cyrus Mistry took charge of the Tata Group in 2012, he became only the second chairman in its history not named Tata. His family had owned a slice of the holding company sinc…
  33. A sewing machine label gave AC/DC its nameBrothers Malcolm and Angus Young were searching for a band name in 1973 when their sister Margaret pointed at the AC/DC symbol on her sewing machine's power adapter. Alternating c…
  34. 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 …
  35. 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…
  36. 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…
  37. 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 …
  38. 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…
  39. 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…
  40. 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…
  41. 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…
  42. 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…
  43. 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 …
  44. 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…
  45. 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…
  46. 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 …
  47. 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…
  48. 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…
  49. 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…
  50. 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…
  51. 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 …
  52. 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, …
  53. 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 …
  54. 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…
  55. 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 …
  56. 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…
  57. 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 …
  58. 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…
  59. 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,…
  60. 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 …

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