bsnsHistory

Everyone knows how this story is supposed to end. This time, it doesn't. Blockbuster CEO John Antioco eliminated the company's unpopular late fees in 2004 and launched Total Access, a hybrid service that competed directly with Netflix and was genuinely working by 2006 and 2007. Activist investor Carl Icahn, who had forced his way onto Blockbuster's board in a 2005 proxy fight, pushed Antioco out i...

Two brothers with no scientific training turned a chimney fire observation into the most talked-about spectacle in France. On October 15, 1783, in the garden of a Paris wallpaper factory, science teacher Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier made the first tethered human ascent in a Montgolfier hot air balloon, following a shorter test flight by Étienne Montgolfier himself earlier that same morning. The...

Nine of America's most powerful bank CEOs walked into a Treasury Department conference room on October 13, 2008, believing they still had a choice. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made clear they didn't, and by six thirty that evening, all nine had signed identical agreements accepting government capital in exchange for preferred shares. On October 14, 2008, the Treasury made it official, launchin...

Sailors had been able to calculate their position at sea for well over a century by the time the world finally agreed on where longitude should start counting from. On October 13, 1884, delegates from twenty five nations meeting in Washington, D.C. voted 22 to 1, with France and Brazil abstaining, to establish the meridian running through Britain's Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the world's off...

A brand-new king's son threw open his wedding to an entire city, and the gesture never really stopped. On October 12, 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and rather than keep the celebration confined to the royal court, officials invited ordinary Munich residents to join days of public feasting and a closing horse race that drew forty thousand spec...

Some recoveries don't look anything like the crisis that caused them. In early 2006, a leaking pipe at Cadbury's Marlbrook plant in Herefordshire, England, allowed a rare strain of salmonella into the company's chocolate production, sickening 37 people and forcing a recall of over a million bars. UK sales fell as much as 14 percent in the weeks that followed, and the recall cost the company roughl...

A four a.m. phone call from a sportswriter was how Curt Flood learned he'd been traded, and his refusal to accept it eventually rewrote the economics of professional sports. On October 8, 1969, Flood found out the St. Louis Cardinals had sent him to the Philadelphia Phillies, and rather than report, he stayed home and challenged Major League Baseball's reserve clause in federal court, a fight that...

Everyone knows Ford doubled wages to five dollars a day. Almost nobody knows what it actually took to keep the full amount. On October 7, 1913, Ford's Highland Park plant began assembling Model T chassis on a moving line, a process innovation so punishing to the workers running it that annual turnover climbed above 370 percent within months. The famous five dollar day announced that January was Fo...

Warner Bros. was still the smaller studio chasing Paramount and MGM when it bet its future on a sound technology called Vitaphone, and the brother who pushed hardest for that bet didn't live to see whether it paid off. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at the Warner Theatre in New York, becoming the first feature film to include synchronized spoken dialogue, most famously Al Jolson's l...

A Washington courtroom forced the largest company in the world to break itself into pieces, and one of the smallest pieces eventually bought the parent back. On October 5, 1983, Southwestern Bell Corporation was incorporated as the new holding company for a regional telephone carrier caught up in the court-ordered breakup of AT&T, following Judge Harold Greene's August 1982 ruling that dismant...

Some companies collapse over years. This one started collapsing in the middle of a laugh. On April 23, 1991, Gerald Ratner, CEO of the world's largest jewellery retailer, told a room of six thousand business leaders and journalists at the Institute of Directors' conference that his own products were "total crap," joking that one of his earring sets wouldn't outlast a supermarket sandwich. The rema...

Coffee is one of the most valuable traded commodities on earth, and for most of its modern history, almost none of that value made it back to the people growing it. On October 1, 2015, the International Coffee Organization launched the first International Coffee Day at Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy, a coordinated effort across dozens of countries to shift the industry's focus from consumers to the sma...

A sheet metal shop that started out making window frames in Oakland, California ended up building more than 600,000 of the phone booths that once lined nearly every American street corner. On September 30, 2005, Benner-Nawman, Inc. assembled its last telephone booth at its manufacturing plant in Wickenburg, Arizona, closing out a business that began in 1950 when Pacific Telephone and Telegraph fir...

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical event involving the death of a child and other family members.) A 12-year-old girl took one Tylenol capsule for a sore throat. She was dead within hours, and six more people would die the same way that week. On September 29, 1982, cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules killed seven people across the Chicago area, including Mary Kellerman an...

Alexander Fleming almost threw the dish away. On September 28, 1928, the London bacteriologist returned from a two week vacation to find a stray mold had wiped out the staph bacteria in one forgotten petri dish, the accidental discovery that would eventually become penicillin, the world's first antibiotic. Fleming published his findings the next year to almost no attention, and the discovery sat m...

Some inventions fail loudly. This one just quietly disappeared into tour groups and mall cops. On December 3, 2001, inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the Segway on Good Morning America after months of secretive hype that had tech titans like Steve Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr predicting it would reshape transportation itself. A five thousand dollar price tag, two major safety recalls, a very...

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler had already turned down a bond salesman's strange proposals more than once by the time the man showed up at his hotel room with cash in hand. On September 24, 1933, Gerald MacGuire visited Butler in Newark, New Jersey, during a National Guard reunion, and threw $18,000 in thousand dollar bills onto the bed, the latest in a series of approaches that...

Minutes before he walked on set, his own party's staff told him it wouldn't matter how well he did. He went on television anyway. On September 23, 1952, at 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Senator Richard Nixon delivered a live, unscripted half hour broadcast from the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, defending himself against allegations of a secret $18,000 campaign fund and famously refusing to give up...

Some of the most lasting institutions start with the smallest possible meeting. On September 22, 1949, Kansas City businessman Hilary Bufton Jr. sat down in a downtown coffee shop with three working women, Shirley Cupp, Irma Beisel, and Frances Stuckey, and pitched an idea he couldn't stop thinking about: a professional organization open to women across every occupation, not just one trade. By the...

A financial gamble that nearly cost a company its independence ended up producing one of the most enduring aircraft in aviation history. On September 21, 1961, the helicopter that became the CH-47 Chinook took its first flight, the product of Vertol Aircraft Corporation's high-risk bet on two simultaneous, self-funded helicopter programs, a decision that led directly to Boeing acquiring the compan...

Some empires don't collapse from a bad product. They collapse from a rule nobody read closely enough. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ray Loewen built The Loewen Group into the second largest funeral home company in North America, buying up small, family-owned funeral homes across the United States and Canada while deliberately keeping their local names on the door. In 1995, a contract dis...

NASA wanted to name its first space shuttle Constitution. A woman who'd already saved a canceled TV show with 116,000 letters got a phone call asking her to do it again. On September 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first Space Shuttle orbiter, Enterprise, at Rockwell International's facility in Palmdale, California, with the original Star Trek cast in attendance. The name change came after Bjo Trimb...

A man who once said he wouldn't give a hundred dollars for every car in the country ended up building the company that would define the automobile industry for the next century. On September 16, 1908, William Crapo Durant filed paperwork in Trenton, New Jersey, incorporating General Motors for a modest $2,000, less than two weeks later, the new company had raised more than $12 million in stock and...

Seven months after losing his title in one of boxing's biggest upsets, Muhammad Ali stepped back into the ring against the man who beat him, and the broadcast deal built around that rematch said everything about who the real draw was. On September 15, 1978, Ali faced reigning heavyweight champion Leon Spinks at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, in a rematch ABC paid a record $5.3 million to...

A diplomat's personal irritation with mismatched dates on his own letters ended up rewriting an entire nation's calendar. On September 14, 1752, Britain completed its switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, a change championed in Parliament by Lord Chesterfield, whose smoother public performance won him credit for work that actually belonged to the mathematician George Parker, Earl of Ma...