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In 1982 Texas Instruments managers Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto sketched a portable computer on a placemat at a House of Pies in Houston, after considering opening Mexican restaurants instead. Backed by venture capitalist Ben Rosen, they built the nearly 30-pound Compaq Portable, fully compatible with the IBM PC, and spent $1 million on clean room reverse engineering so two separate teams...

Harlan Sanders was born in 1890 near Henryville, Indiana, lost his father at five and was cooking for his siblings by seven while his mother worked at a canning plant. He left home at 13 and drifted through jobs as a farmhand, streetcar conductor, railroad fireman, insurance salesman and ferry operator, and practiced law in justice of the peace courts, where he got into a brawl with his own client...

In 1949 Samuel Wurtzel watched television reach a Richmond, Virginia barbershop, moved his family there and opened Wards Company. His son Alan Wurtzel took over in 1975 and opened Wards Loading Dock, a warehouse showroom that put stacked inventory in plain view, renamed the Circuit City Superstore in 1978. The company became Circuit City Stores in 1984, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, built...

Christian Dior ran his own fashion house for only about a decade. In 1946 textile magnate Marcel Boussac, whose vertically integrated business ran from sheep to weaving mills, asked Dior to revive the fading Philippe et Gaston label. Dior refused and demanded a new house under his own name, winning legal leadership of the firm, a non-controlling stake, a generous salary and one-third of pre-tax pr...

This episode works from a single Wikipedia disambiguation page to trace what happened to one name. At the top is Pontiac, the Odawa leader and war chief who lived from around 1714 or 1720 until 1769 and fought during 18th century colonial expansion. Directly beneath him sits the Pontiac automobile, the former General Motors brand whose decades of advertising made a car, not a man, the name's main...

Less than a mile west of Chicago's Gold Coast, the 70 acres that became Cabrini-Green began as a swampy 1850s immigrant district nicknamed Little Hell, after a gas refinery that shot flames into the air day and night, and later known as Little Sicily. The Frances Cabrini Homes opened in 1942 as 54 two-story row houses, followed by the red brick Cabrini Extension in 1957 and the concrete William Gr...

In 1917 Pierre Cartier traded a double-stranded natural pearl necklace and $100 in cash to banker and railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant for his neo-Renaissance mansion at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in New York. The deal caps the story of three grandsons who turned a Parisian workshop into a global house. Louis, who took over Paris around 1899, pioneered platinum in fine jewelry, letting hair-thin...

Carl Icahn grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the son of school teachers; his father was a synagogue cantor and an avowed atheist. He wrote a Princeton philosophy thesis on the empiricist criterion of meaning, graduated in 1957, left NYU medical school and joined Wall Street in 1961. In 1968 he used $150,000 of his own money and a $400,000 loan from his uncle to buy a New York Stock Exchange seat. I...

Calvin Klein grew up in the Bronx, in the same Jewish community that produced Ralph Lauren, and in 1968 started a company with childhood friend Barry K. Schwartz on $10,000, making coats out of the York Hotel in New York. A placement at Bonwit Teller led to a Vogue cover in September 1969 and Coty Awards in 1973, 1974 and 1975, the first making him the youngest winner. He then moved into denim, cu...

Keith Kramer and Matthew Burns visited the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino and in 1953 opened Insta-Burger King in Jacksonville, Florida, built around the Insta-Broiler oven. It struggled, and Miami franchisees David Edgerton and James McLemore bought it in 1959 and dropped the "Insta." The quarter pound Whopper of 1957 let the chain compete on size rather than speed. Pillsbury bought the comp...

Thomas Burberry was 21 when he opened his shop in Basingstoke in 1856, and in 1879 he introduced gabardine, waterproofing cotton yarn before weaving it so tightly that rain stayed out while sweat could escape. Roald Amundsen's 1911 South Pole party wore it, as did Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition and George Mallory on Everest in 1924. In World War I the company made the trench coat fo...

David Cook ran Cook Data Services, a database company for the Texas oil industry, before opening the first Blockbuster in Dallas on October 19, 1985, with 8,000 VHS and 2,000 Betamax tapes. He walked away from a VideoWorks franchise over its refusal to allow his blue and yellow color scheme, and built a $6 million barcode driven distribution center in Garland, Texas, to tailor each store's stock....

BlackBerry began in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, as Research in Motion, a company building data products for packet switched wireless networks such as Mobitex. Its 1999 BlackBerry 850 pager, named because its keys resembled the drupelets of a blackberry, brought push email routed through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, with encryption strong enough to win banks, corporations and governments. Consu...

Bill Ackman grew up in Chappaqua, New York, in a real estate finance family, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1988 with a thesis on Harvard admissions, and earned a Harvard MBA in 1992 before founding Gotham Partners. In 2002 he bet against bond insurer MBIA, arguing its AAA rating hid exposure to risky debt; his law firm copied 725,000 pages of financial statements, and he endured regula...

Bear Stearns was founded in 1923 by Joseph Ainslie Bear, Robert B. Stearns and Harold C. Mayer with $500,000, and survived the 1929 crash without laying off a single employee. It went public in 1985 and, under Alan "Ace" Greenberg and later James Cayne, grew to more than 15,000 staff at 383 Madison Avenue. By late 2006 it held over $350 billion in assets and about $13.4 trillion in notional deriva...

Subprime, also called near prime, non prime or second chance lending, is a lender's price for a higher statistical chance of default: steeper rates, weaker collateral and harsher terms. The label can attach to the product rather than the person, so a borrower with a perfect score taking an interest only or low documentation loan can still pay the subprime premium, and an 18 year old with no histor...

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his first boutique in San Sebastián in 1917 and later dressed the Spanish royal family from shops in Madrid and Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War closed his stores in 1936, and in August 1937 he opened a couture house on Avenue George V in Paris with a debut inspired by the Spanish Renaissance. Under German occupation his was one of about 60 houses allowed to operate; hi...

When Vickers sold the Rolls-Royce car division in 1998, Volkswagen outbid BMW, £430 million to £340 million, and got the factory, designs, grille and the Spirit of Ecstasy mascot. But the Rolls-Royce name and logo belonged to the separate aero engine company, which licensed them to BMW for £40 million. BMW also supplied the engines for the existing cars under a contract it could end on 12 months'...

Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford founded Aston Martin in 1913, naming it after Martin's races at the Aston Clinton Hill Climb. Their first car put a Coventry Simplex engine in a 1908 Isotta Fraschini chassis. Bamford left in 1920, the company went bankrupt in 1924, and Martin was forced out in 1925. Augustus Bertelli's cars raced at Le Mans, yet only about 700 road cars were built before World War...

Andrew Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1855 to Judge Thomas Mellon, who schooled his children privately at home. At 19, during the Panic of 1873, Andrew called in loans and calmly paid out depositors, restoring T. Mellon and Sons, which his father handed him outright in 1882. He then turned banker into industrial investor: a $25,000 loan in 1889 to a struggling aluminum venture grew into Alcoa, a...

American Motors Corporation was born in 1954 when Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson merged, then the largest corporate merger in U.S. history, to survive a price war between Ford and GM. CEO George W. Romney refused to fight Detroit on its terms and bet on the compact Rambler, traveling some 70,000 miles in a year to call the Big Three's cars gas guzzling dinosaurs. Shared parts and no annual restyling m...

Alex Mashinsky founded Celsius Network in 2017 with Daniel Leon and Nuke Goldstein, pitching it as a populist alternative to legacy banks: deposit Bitcoin or Ethereum and earn interest. A March 2018 coin offering raised $50 million through the company's CEL token, investors valued Celsius at $3 billion by late 2021, and by May 2022 it held almost $12 billion in assets for 1.7 million users. Yields...

For most of the 20th century the Bell System was the American telephone network, from the research labs to the phone you were required to rent. In 1899 its Boston parent, American Bell, was absorbed by its own New York long distance subsidiary, AT&T, to take advantage of friendlier corporate and tax law. When the founding patent expired in 1894, roughly 6,000 independent phone companies sprang...

The word stagflation was popularized by British Conservative politician Iain Macleod in a 1965 speech to the House of Commons warning of rising prices and slowing growth together. Postwar Keynesian policy relied on the Phillips curve, a trade-off in which lower unemployment meant higher inflation, so governments believed they could steer between the two. The 1970s broke that model. Egypt's Gamal A...

Redlining was the systemic withholding of home loans and insurance from certain neighborhoods. Economists such as Richard T. Ely theorized about race and property values in the 1920s, and the 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration, whose chief land economist Homer Hoyt wrote the first underwriting criteria. From 1935 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew residential...