pplpod

An automated clearing house, or ACH, is a computer-based electronic network that processes domestic, low-value payments between participating financial institutions. It replaced a paper system that by the 1960s moved millions of checks a day by armored car, with bank staff sorting paper late into the night. The first ACH was BACS in the United Kingdom, which began processing payments in April 1968...

In 1880 mining entrepreneur and future US senator George Hearst bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner, and in 1887 he handed it to his 23-year-old son, William Randolph Hearst. The younger Hearst became editor and publisher and championed yellow journalism: giant headlines, sensational scandals, exaggerated crime stories and lavish illustrations. He bought papers in Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Los...

General Dynamics traces its lineage to 1899, when businessman Isaac Leopold Rice bought John Philip Holland's struggling torpedo boat company and renamed it the Electric Boat Company. Its first sale, the USS Holland of 1900, cost about $150,000 and became the US Navy's first submarine. Electric Boat built 85 submarines in World War I and 74 submarines plus 398 PT boats in World War II, growing to...

GEICO, the Government Employees Insurance Company, has never been a government agency. Leo Goodwin Sr. had worked at USAA since 1925 but hit a ceiling as a civilian, so in 1936 in San Antonio he and his wife Lillian put up $25,000 and Fort Worth banker Cleaves Rhea added $75,000. They sold auto insurance by mail directly to federal employees, a stable, low-risk group, cutting out agent commissions...

Block began with a lost sale in 2009, when St. Louis glass artist Jim McKelvey could not take a credit card for a $2,000 set of glass faucets. He and Jack Dorsey, then also building Twitter, created Square, a small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack. The real innovation was the software behind it: Square acted as merchant of record, absorbing risk, compliance and fraud detection so...

Hughes Aircraft Company was founded in 1934 in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company so Howard Hughes could build his H-1 racer and set speed records. In World War II it grew from four full-time employees to 80,000 in Culver City, making B-25 struts and machine gun feed chutes, but Hughes's own prototypes, the D-2, the XF-11 and the H-4 Hercules mocked as the Spruce Goose,...

This episode starts from an unusual source: a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Admiral Kuznetsov, a short list of four links. The first is the man behind the name, Nikolai Kuznetsov, a military officer who lived from 1904 to 1974 and rose to Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy. His lifespan covered a shift from coal-fired engines and early dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines, ballistic...

J. Willard Marriott first felt Washington, D.C.'s summer heat while serving a mission for the LDS Church in the 1920s. After earning his degree at the University of Utah, he returned in 1927 and bought the franchise rights to an A&W root beer stand in Columbia Heights, run with his wife Alice and a business partner. Winter killed root beer sales, so they added hot food and renamed it the Hot S...

In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into a shallow inlet in Southern California and named it the Bay of Smokes. San Pedro Bay was a soft mudflat, and in 1834 Richard Henry Dana Jr. described ships anchoring miles out or running aground on purpose. Phineas Banning built the area's first railroad to Los Angeles in 1868 and in 1871 dredged a 10-foot channel to Wilmington. In the 1890s Free Harbor...

In 1929, when Keystone Aircraft bought Loening Aircraft and moved operations to Bristol, Pennsylvania, Leroy Grumman and colleagues including William Schwendler stayed in New York and started their own company. In January 1930 they opened in an abandoned factory in Baldwin, Long Island, welding aluminum tubing to repair truck frames while pitching designs to the Navy. Their retractable landing gea...

The Carlyle Group was founded in 1987 by five partners including David Rubenstein, William E. Conway Jr. and Daniel A. D'Aniello, named for the Carlyle Hotel in New York but run from Washington, D.C., with $5 million from backers such as T. Rowe Price and the Richard King Mellon family. Rubenstein, a former Carter administration lawyer, understood federal procurement, and the firm bought defense b...

RTX began in 1922 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Vannevar Bush, Laurence K. Marshall and Charles G. Smith founded the American Appliance Company. Smith's study of the star Zeta Puppis led to a gaseous helium rectifier that let radios run from wall current instead of leaky acid batteries. The tube was called the Raytheon, and in 1925 the business became the Raytheon Manufacturing Company. In Wor...

Nvidia was sketched out in late 1992 in a Denny's on Berryessa Road in East San Jose by Jensen Huang, a director at LSI Logic who had designed microprocessors at AMD, and two frustrated Sun Microsystems engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Their spouses wanted all three to commit, so Priem resigned on New Year's Eve 1992 and Huang quit on February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday. They starte...

Northrop Grumman is the fifth largest contractor to the U.S. federal government, which supplied 87 percent of its 2024 revenue. It joins two very different companies. Grumman, founded in New York in 1929 by Leroy Grumman, built rugged Navy fighters such as the Wildcat, Hellcat and Avenger, later the F-14 Tomcat and the Apollo lunar module, and made aluminum canoes after World War II. Northrop, fou...

Liaoning, China's southernmost northeastern province, wraps around the Yellow and Bohai Seas and borders North Korea across the Yalu River. Its name means the pacified Liao River, though the fertile Liao basin was fought over from the fourth century BC onward. In the 1440s the Ming built the Liaodong Wall, mostly dirt dikes and moats meant to stop cavalry rather than withstand sieges. The Jurchens...

Walt Disney World began as a fix for Disneyland's limits. Seventy-five percent of Americans lived east of the Mississippi, yet only 5 percent of Disneyland's guests came from there, and cheap motels and neon signs crowded the Anaheim park's edges. In 1963 the company chose Orlando, near the planned Interstate 4, and from 1964 bought land through shell companies such as the M.T. Lot Company and the...

Discover was born inside Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1981 Sears bought the brokerage Dean Witter Reynolds and the real estate firm Coldwell Banker, aiming to become a one-stop financial supermarket, and in 1985 it quietly acquired the Greenwood Trust Company, a small bank founded in Greenwood, Delaware, in 1911, whose charter became the legal vehicle for the Discover card. Customers did not wan...

Broadcom Inc. traces its roots to 1961, when it began as HP Associates, a semiconductor division inside Hewlett-Packard making LED displays and optical sensors. The unit went with Agilent Technologies in HP's 1999 spinoff, and in 2005 KKR and Silver Lake Partners bought it for $2.6 billion and renamed it Avago Technologies. Avago went public in 2009, bought LSI Corporation for $6.6 billion in 2013...

The FV4034 Challenger 2, a 64-ton British main battle tank, grew out of embarrassment. In 1987 the Challenger 1 finished dead last at the Canadian Army Trophy, NATO's most prestigious tank gunnery competition, and the UK studied buying the American M1 Abrams or the German Leopard 2 instead. To keep a domestic tank industry alive, the Thatcher government gave Vickers a £90 million development contr...

To compete with a fuel-efficient Airbus jet, Boeing fitted its low-slung 1960s 737 design with larger LEAP-1B engines mounted farther forward and higher, which could pitch the nose up during some maneuvers. Its fix was software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, which pushed the nose down automatically, and to preserve fleet commonality and avoid costly simulator traini...

Fiat money, from the Latin for let it be done, is currency by government decree with no backing and no claim on any asset, unlike commodity or representative money. The Lagos and Wright search model says it solves the double coincidence of wants, and the Kiyotaki and Wright model treats acceptance as a Nash equilibrium. China's Song dynasty issued the jiaozi, the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan mad...

Before the 1950s, credit depended on loan officers judging character, family background and even a customer's suit. In 1958 engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac created the first scoring algorithms, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and its 1976 expansion pushed banks toward computer scoring as a legal shield, though critics say inputs tied to wealth and zip codes carried old...

Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy's in Columbus, Ohio, in November 1969, modeling it on Kewpee Hamburgers in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, known for thick malts and square burgers. Square patties tile a flat-top grill with no wasted space, and their corners poking past a round bun signal more meat. Basketball star John Havlicek was one of the earliest backers. Thomas named the chain for hi...

Svenska Aeroplan AB, the source of the Saab name, was founded in 1937 to build military aircraft for neutral Sweden. In 1945, as demand for fighters faded, it started Project X9248, shortened to Project 92 because it followed the Saab 91 trainer, and gave it to aeronautical engineers, several of whom had no driver's license. The Ursaab prototypes led to the 1949 Saab 92, with front-wheel drive, a...

The episode argues that pure white is a convention rather than a fixed fact: screens and printer paper target CIE standard illuminant D65, the average color of noon daylight. People perceive white when light is distributed like a black body radiating at 5,800 to 6,800 kelvin, and sunlight seen from space is closest to sRGB FFF3EF, with a hint of red and green, before Rayleigh scattering in the atm...