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Hapag-Lloyd grew from two bitter German rivals: HAPAG, the Hamburg-America Line founded in Hamburg in 1847, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, founded in Bremen in 1857. HAPAG went for scale and luxury, starting the Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck in 1912, the first liners above 50,000 gross register tons, a measure of enclosed volume rather than weight. NDL chased volume and speed, carrying about 218,000...

HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every other battleship obsolete. Pre-dreadnoughts carried mixed batteries, but as torpedoes pushed engagements out to 6,000 yards, gunners could not tell the splashes of heavy shells from those of the smaller guns. British observers including Captain William Pakenham saw in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 that 12-inch guns did the decisive damage at...

In the summer of 1971, cable executive Charles Dolan was aboard the Queen Elizabeth II on a family vacation, trying to save his money-losing company. Sterling Manhattan Cable was building the first urban underground cable system in the U.S., trenching wire past water mains, subway lines and gas pipes beneath New York. His idea, first called the Green Channel, was unedited Hollywood movies and live...

George Lucas founded Lucasfilm in December 1971 in Marin County, Northern California, deliberately far from the Los Angeles studio system. After THX 1138 and the 1973 hit American Graffiti, Universal rejected his space fantasy script, but 20th Century Fox took Star Wars. In 1977 he set up a subsidiary, the Star Wars Corporation, to hold the copyrights, sequel rights and merchandising rights, accep...

The company most recently known as WarnerMedia began far from Hollywood. In the 1960s Kinney National Services ran parking lots, office cleaning and funeral homes, a conglomerate built on countercyclical cash flow. Steve Ross used that money to buy the struggling Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio in 1969, and by 1972 the company spun off its service businesses and renamed itself Warner Communications...

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac, was created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 to compete with Fannie Mae, which had been privatized in 1968 and was the only big buyer of mortgages. Freddie Mac does not lend to homebuyers. It buys loans from banks, bundles them into mortgage-backed securities for global investors and charges a guarantee fee to promise timely payment...

John C. Bogle's 1951 Princeton thesis found that mutual fund managers rarely beat market indexes over time and that fees ate any edge. He joined Wellington Management that year, became president in 1967 and CEO in 1970, but a 1966 merger with a Boston fund group went badly and he was fired in 1974, later calling his conduct inexcusable. He negotiated a separate administrative unit named Vanguard a...

Fidelity Investments is privately owned: parent FMR LLC is about 40 percent held by CEO Abigail Johnson and her family and 60 percent by current and former employees. In mid-2026 it had $7.8 trillion in assets under management and $19.9 trillion under administration, and 2025 revenue reached $37.7 billion with 80,000 employees and retirement plans for over 28,800 businesses. Founded in 1930 as the...

In 1955 physicist William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, to build a hard-to-manufacture four-layer diode. His erratic management drove eight researchers, including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, to leave. Noyce pitched Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument on silicon over germanium, and in 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was born in a...

Experian is an Irish multinational credit bureau and data broker based in Dublin and listed in the FTSE 100, with almost $8.5 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue and nearly 22,000 employees. It traces to Credit Data Corporation, bought in 1968 by aerospace and automotive firm TRW. In November 1996 TRW sold the unit to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, who sold it a month later to Great Universal...

Evergreen Marine Corporation was founded in Taiwan on September 1, 1968, by Chang Yung-fa with a single cargo ship, the Central Trust, offering a go-anywhere service. A second ship joined in 1969 for Middle East routes, and a U.S. office opened in 1974. The parent rebranded as Evergreen International SA in 1981, and in 1984 the company launched a round-the-world service in both directions. Acquisi...

Equifax began in Atlanta in 1899 as the Retail Credit Company, founded by brothers Cator and Guy Woolford to provide risk reports for insurers and employers. By the 1960s its local inspectors were interviewing landlords, grocers and employers and filing rumors about people's marriages, sex lives and politics, with negative findings rewarded. When the files were computerized around 1970, public out...

In 1994 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen founded DreamWorks SKG, the first new major Hollywood studio since 1928. Their pact promised fewer than nine films a year, freedom to work elsewhere and being home for dinner. Each put in $33 million, Paul Allen added $500 million and Miky Lee of South Korea's CJ Group $300 million. Based on the Universal lot, they launched television w...

Celebration is a town in Osceola County, Florida, built by the Disney Development Company on roughly 4,900 acres at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion. CEO Michael Eisner saw it as a nod to Walt Disney's unbuilt vision of EPCOT as a real city, but planners Jaquelin T. Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern looked backward, using New Urbanism and New Classical architecture. Houses sat close to the street w...

Delbert Eugene Webb was born on May 17, 1899, in Fresno, California, to fruit farmer Ernest and Henrietta Webb. He dropped out of high school, worked as a carpenter and ship fitter, and married nurse Hazel Lenora Church in 1919. Typhoid fever at 28 sent him to Phoenix, where he formed the Del E. Webb Construction Company in 1928. In 1942 the federal government hired his firm to build the Poston Wa...

DHL began in 1969 with Larry Hillblom, a UC Berkeley law student who flew overnight between Oakland and Los Angeles as an insurance courier. He teamed with Adrian Dalsey and Robert Lynn, and their initials became the name. Their first big client was Seatrain Lines: DHL flew bills of lading from Honolulu to San Francisco in suitcases on commercial flights so cargo ships could unload on arrival. The...

DC Comics began in 1935 when Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson launched National Allied Publications and the magazine New Fun, betting on original stories rather than newspaper reprints. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Dr. Occult that year. Deep in debt to distributor Harry Donenfeld, the major formed a lopsided partnership to publish Detective Comics, the source of the DC initials, and Done...

The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 led President Eisenhower to authorize the Advanced Research Projects Agency in February 1958, with $520 million and a place inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Its first director, Roy Johnson, left a $160,000 job at General Electric to take the post for $18,000. When NASA formed later in 1958, ARPA lost its civilian space work and most of i...

Cyrix was founded in Richardson, Texas, in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman. It started with math coprocessors such as the FasMath 83D87, which used hardware multipliers instead of Intel's CORDIC algorithm and ran faster on less power. Its 486SLC and 486DLC chips ran 486 instructions while fitting older 386 motherboards. With about 300 employees and no factory of its own, Cyrix contracted pr...

Curtiss-Wright formed on July 5, 1929, when the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company of Buffalo and Wright Aeronautical of Dayton consolidated 12 companies with $75 million in capital, becoming the largest aviation company in the United States. Its airplane, engine and propeller divisions carried it through the Depression on military engine contracts, and under president Guy Vaughan the P-36 fighte...

A credit default swap is a contract in which a buyer pays regular premiums, called the spread, to a seller who promises a payout if a reference entity defaults on its debt. The modern version took shape at J.P. Morgan in 1994 under Blythe Masters. Exxon, facing a possible $5 billion in punitive damages over the Exxon Valdez spill, asked for a $4.8 billion credit line, and Basel I rules would have...

Countrywide Financial was founded in 1969 by David S. Loeb and Angelo Mozilo and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1985. Over two decades its stock returned 23,000 percent, and by 2006 it financed 20 percent of all U.S. mortgages, worth about 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP. It originated loans, packaged and traded mortgage-backed securities through its own capital markets arm, ran Countrywide Bank...

Convair, formally Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, was formed in 1943 when Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft merged to meet wartime demand. It ranked fourth among U.S. corporations in wartime production contracts, ahead of Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. With its contractors it built about 18,500 B-24 Liberators, still the most produced bomber and the most produced American military...

Conrail was the federal answer to the collapse of Northeastern railroading. The 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central formed Penn Central, which went bankrupt in 1970 amid clashing cultures and lost trains. Hurricane Agnes in 1972 washed out track and pushed lines such as the Erie Lackawanna into ruin, and by late 1973 Penn Central threatened to stop running trains. Pre...

Coinbase began in 2012 when Brian Armstrong, a software engineer at Airbnb, received $150,000 from Y Combinator and recruited former Goldman Sachs trader Fred Ehrsam after spotting him on Reddit. A third founder, British programmer Ben Reeves, split with Armstrong over custody: Reeves wanted users to hold their own keys, while Armstrong wanted Coinbase to hold them like a bank. The company reached...