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The Virginia-class attack submarine, the SSN-774 class, came out of the cost shock of the Seawolf, a $2.8 billion boat built to hunt Soviet submarines and canceled after three hulls once the Cold War ended. The Navy's Two for Four goal sought two boats for $4 billion by fiscal 2012. Only two U.S. yards are certified to build nuclear submarines, General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and New...

GlobalFoundries, or GF, is the world's third-largest semiconductor foundry by revenue and the only major one with large plants in the United States, the European Union and Singapore. It began in 2008, when AMD decided to go fabless and spin off its manufacturing. Mubadala, the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, paid $700 million for a majority stake and absorbed $1.2 billion of AMD debt,...

The AMX-30 was France's Cold War main battle tank, and it grew out of failure and a diplomatic split. The postwar ARL 44 heavy tank was obsolete after about 60 were built, and the 50-ton AMX-50, with an oscillating two-piece turret, could not be sealed against fallout while the U.S. supplied free M47 Pattons. In 1956 France, West Germany, Italy and others pursued a common 30-ton Europa Panzer. The...

FICO is a publicly traded data analytics company, not a government agency or a utility. Engineer William R. "Bill" Fair and mathematician Earl Judson Isaac met at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park and founded Fair, Isaac and Company in 1956 to replace a loan officer's gut feeling with a statistical model weighing payment history, debt and length of credit. It took two years and pitches...

Union Pacific runs over 32,000 miles of track and about 8,300 locomotives across 23 states, and in 2025 it proposed an $85 billion merger with Norfolk Southern billed as the first transcontinental railroad under one company. The 1869 line met that description only as a partnership: Union Pacific built west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, largely with Irish laborers, and met the Central Pacific at Promo...

USS Wisconsin, BB-64, was an Iowa-class battleship authorized in 1938 and commissioned in April 1944, the highest-numbered U.S. battleship ever built. She was 887 feet long, displaced over 57,000 tons fully loaded, carried nine 16-inch guns and made 32.5 knots from eight boilers and four geared turbines producing 212,000 shaft horsepower. That speed let her escort fast carriers, and in late 1944 s...

The A12 Matilda II was a British infantry tank built for a doctrine shaped by the First World War. Thinkers such as Percy Hobart and Basil Liddell Hart split British tanks into fast cruiser tanks and slow infantry tanks that would walk alongside foot soldiers, crush wire and take enemy fire. Specified in 1936 after the two-man Matilda I proved too small, the Matilda II carried frontal armor up to...

The USS Enterprise, hull number CVN-65, was the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its keel was laid at Newport News in 1958 and it was commissioned in 1961: 1,123 feet long and driven by eight Westinghouse A2W reactors, because the Navy scaled up smaller submarine reactors for a ship no one had powered before. The final cost of $451.3 million forced the Navy to cancel the five sister...

The British Centurion was drafted in 1943 as a heavy cruiser tank able to take hits from German 88mm guns, and it reached Europe in May 1945, just after the war there ended. The Directorate of Tank Design under Sir Claude Gibb was first bound by the 10-foot-8-inch British railway loading gauge until the War Office lifted the width limit and let weight rise to 50 long tons. Designers replaced Chris...

USS Missouri, BB-63, was an Iowa-class fast battleship ordered in 1940 and commissioned in 1944, the last battleship commissioned by the United States. More than 887 feet long and over 57,000 tons fully loaded, she had more than 200,000 shaft horsepower, up to 19.5 inches of armor on her turret faces, a 32.5-knot top speed and a narrow beam to fit the Panama Canal locks. Her nine 16-inch guns fire...

Project 1144 Orlan, known by NATO as the Kirov class, are the largest surface combatants in service apart from aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, displacing about 28,000 tons fully loaded. First conceived to hunt submarines, the design shifted to attacking U.S. carrier strike groups with 20 P-700 Granit anti-ship missiles in silos below deck. Air defense came in layers: 96 S-300F long...

The Mall of America sits on the 78-acre site of Metropolitan Stadium, the old home of the Minnesota Vikings and Twins, demolished in 1985. Its original pitch included an indoor lake with six-foot surfing waves and submarines. Today it covers 5.6 million square feet and draws about 32 million visitors a year. A red seat high on a wall marks Harmon Killebrew's 520-foot home run of 1967, and floor pl...

COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Company, was founded in 1961 as a Chinese government agency. Its Guangzhou subsidiary bought a used British vessel, renamed it Guanghua and sent it on its maiden voyage to Jakarta in April 1961. After the U.S. and China resumed diplomatic relations, COSCO signed a 1979 agreement with the Lykes Brothers Steamship Company that opened commercial sea routes between the...

William J. Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1907 to a second-generation Jewish immigrant family. His father, real estate attorney Abraham Levitt, founded Levitt & Sons in 1929, and William left NYU to run the business while his brother Alfred designed custom homes on Long Island. Service in the Navy Seabees taught him rapid construction, and a 1,600-home project in Norfolk, Virginia, built with...

Salomon Brothers was founded in 1910 by brothers Arthur, Herbert and Percy Salomon with clerk Ben Levy; the brothers descended from Haym Salomon, a primary financier of the American Revolution. For decades it was a quiet bond brokerage. Percy's son William Salomon became managing partner in 1963, and in 1967 the firm sponsored Muriel Siebert as the first woman to hold a trading license on the New...

The T-90 came out of a post-Soviet crisis. In 1992 Russia was fielding three incompatible tank families, the T-64, T-72 and T-80, on a collapsing budget. The T-80's gas turbine burned fuel at an unsustainable rate and the tank had suffered heavy losses in the First Chechen War, while the T-72 carried the image of televised losses in Middle Eastern wars. The Kartsev-Venediktov Design Bureau put the...

Reader's Digest began with DeWitt and Lila Bell Wallace, who married in 1920 in Pleasantville, New York, and launched the magazine in 1922 from a Greenwich Village basement beneath an illegal speakeasy. With scissors and glue they condensed articles from other monthlies, and DeWitt persuaded publishers that the shorter versions were free advertising for the originals. The digest was about half the...

Paytm was founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in August 2010 with an initial investment of $2 million, starting as a platform for prepaid mobile and satellite TV recharges in a cash-heavy India where topping up meant paying cash at a kiosk. The Paytm wallet launched in January 2014, and adoption by Uber and Indian Railways made it everyday infrastructure: it let a cash economy pay for rides without cr...

Motorola began in 1928 in Chicago as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin. Its first product was a battery eliminator that let radios built for direct current run from new household AC outlets instead of leaky acid batteries. In 1930 it sold its first car radio for $30 to a customer in Indiana and began equipping police cars in Evanston and Cook County....

Michael Milken's rise ran through Drexel Burnham Lambert, a firm that began in 1935 when I.W. "Tubby" Burnham opened a small New York retail brokerage with $100,000 in capital, $96,000 of it borrowed from his grandfather, a Kentucky distillery founder. Classed as a "sub major" firm and shut out of Wall Street's elite underwriting syndicates, Burnham bought pedigree in 1973 by merging with Drexel F...

Merrill Lynch began on January 6, 1914, when Charles E. Merrill opened his firm on Wall Street; his friend Edmund C. Lynch joined months later, and by 1915 it was Merrill, Lynch & Co., a comma kept until 1938. Merrill believed in everyday consumer commerce: the firm bought Pathé, later RKO Pictures, in 1921 and took control of Safeway in 1926, building it into the third largest U.S. grocery ch...

Morgan Stanley exists because of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which forced banks to choose between commercial and investment banking. J.P. Morgan & Co. kept commercial banking, and Henry Sturgis Morgan, J.P. Morgan's grandson, and Harold Stanley opened Morgan Stanley at 2 Wall Street on September 16, 1935. It took a 24 percent market share in its first year, with $1.1 billion in public offerin...

The Littoral Combat Ship began with the Street Fighter, a concept from Navy strategists Wayne Hughes and Arthur Cebrowski for a 1,000-ton, heavily armed coastal ship costing about $90 million in 2001 dollars, cheap enough that its crew could abandon it if badly hit. After the Cold War, threats had moved into shallow coastal waters crowded with quiet submarines, cheap mines and fast attack boats. W...

RJR Nabisco was formed when R.J. Reynolds, a tobacco company rooted in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, since 1875, bought Nabisco Brands in 1985 for $4.9 billion in cash and a $1.9 billion stock swap; the combined company took its name in April 1986. It sold KFC to PepsiCo, Canada Dry and Sunkist to Cadbury Schweppes, and Heublein to Grand Metropolitan. F. Ross Johnson took charge in early 1987, ju...

The Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers exists because the Nimitz class ran out of room. A 2005 RAND report concluded the 1960s-era design had hit its limits: the A4W reactors lacked spare electrical capacity, and decades of added topside equipment had eroded the center of gravity margin. The CVN-21 program produced USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), a roughly $13 billion ship in a class that cost...