pplpod

Panamax is the set of size limits imposed by the Panama Canal's original locks, which opened in 1914 with chambers 1,050 feet long and 110 feet wide. For a century, ships built for global trade were held to about 950 feet in length, with some container and passenger ships allowed to 965 feet, a 106-foot beam and 190 feet of height above the waterline, a ceiling set by the Bridge of the Americas, t...

The Panzerkampfwagen V Panther was a rushed answer to the Soviet T-34, whose wide tracks and sloped armor stunned the German army during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. After Heinz Guderian's commission studied the T-34, Daimler-Benz proposed a diesel, leaf-spring design close to a copy, which Hitler initially favored. MAN won because its traditional layout could use an existing Rheinmetall turret a...

Mediterranean Shipping Company began in 1970, when Naples sea captain Gianluigi Aponte and his wife Rafaela bought a secondhand cargo ship, the Patricia, followed by a second named Rafaela, and ran a single line from the Mediterranean to Somalia. With no outside investors, the family kept buying used ships cheaply during downturns and in 1978 moved headquarters to Geneva for financial and regulato...

In 1952 Memphis resident Kemmons Wilson drove his family to Washington, D.C., and came home angry about filthy, unpredictable motor courts that charged extra for children. In August 1952 he opened his first motel on Summer Avenue, on the main road to Nashville, and named it Holiday Inn after his architect scrawled the title of the 1942 Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire film across the blueprints. With...

The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine displaces 18,750 tons submerged, runs 560 feet long with a 42-foot beam, and ranks as the third largest submarine class ever built, behind the Soviet Typhoon and the Borei. General Dynamics Electric Boat built the boats in Rhode Island and Connecticut as 42-foot-diameter sections, fitting out each slice before welding them together. Despite a 35,000 shaft...

All 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers were built at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia between the late 1960s and 2006. Each stretches over 1,000 feet, weighs roughly 100,000 tons, moves at more than 35 miles per hour and runs about 25 years before refueling. Starting with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the yard moved to modular construction, prefitting wiring, ventilation and plumbing into steel...

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in California in 1997, and by 1999 they had pioneered a monthly DVD subscription with no late fees; by 2005 the company shipped a million DVDs a day. The founders saw mail as a waiting room until broadband could carry video. In the mid-2000s they built a proprietary Netflix box that downloaded movies overnight, but early YouTube showed that people va...

NBC was founded in May 1926 as a radio network by RCA alongside General Electric and AT&T, and it ran the NBC Red and NBC Blue networks while RCA built the radios people listened on. In 1932 the government forced General Electric to divest RCA and NBC on antitrust grounds, and by 1939 NBC was pioneering commercial television. In the 1950s executive Sylvester "Pat" Weaver replaced single-sponso...

In the 1950s electronics were built from discrete resistors, capacitors and transistors joined by hand-soldered wires, a limit engineers called the tyranny of numbers, since one failed joint among thousands could crash a computer. The Army's 1957 Micromodule Program shrank the parts but not the wiring problem. In the summer of 1958 Jack Kilby, newly hired at Texas Instruments, carved a whole circu...

In 1984 Bill Bain asked consultant Mitt Romney to lead a spinoff of Bain & Company that would buy companies and fix them with consulting methods. Romney founded Bain Capital with T. Coleman Andrews III and another partner, and he was its president, CEO and sole shareholder of the management company. It took a full year to raise $37 million from investors including Mortimer Zuckerman, Robert Kr...

MetLife began in 1863, when New York businessmen raised $100,000 to launch the National Union Life and Limb Insurance Company, which insured Union sailors and soldiers against wounds, disability and sickness. When the war ended it switched to standard life insurance in 1868 as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, then nearly failed after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Panic of 1873. In...

The Mercedes-Benz story began with two rivals: Benz & Cie, founded by Carl Benz in 1883, and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, founded by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1890. In 1900 DMG board member Emil Jellinek, an Austrian diplomat and racer, ordered high-performance cars on the condition that they be named after his 11-year-old daughter, Mercedes. The Mercedes 35 HP dominated motorsp...

McDonnell Douglas joined two empires built by men with parallel lives. James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas shared Scottish ancestry, both graduated from MIT and both worked for the Glenn L. Martin Company. Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles built roughly 10,000 C-47s in World War II with a peak workforce of 160,000, then the DC-6, DC-7 and DC-8. McDonnell Aircraft outside St. Louis built m...

Martin Marietta was born in 1961 from the merger of the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore, builder of the Titan ICBM for the Air Force, and the American Marietta Corporation of Chicago, which made paints, dyes, cement and driveway sealant. The pairing was a hedge: construction materials sold steadily while defense contracts rose and fell with Pentagon budgets. The engineering output was wide. I...

Maersk's seven-pointed white star dates to 1886, when Danish captain Peter Mærsk Møller, aboard the steamship SS Laura with his gravely ill wife Anna, saw a single star break through an overcast sky and painted it on the ship's funnel. The family business founded in 1904 now operates in about 130 countries with more than 100,000 employees, and its 2025 revenue topped $53 billion. In 2021 it held a...

MTV went on the air on August 1, 1981, cutting from Apollo 11 moon landing footage to a mutating spray-painted logo and The Buggles singing "Video Killed the Radio Star." Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment hired the collective Manhattan Design, which built a heavy block letter M with graffiti TV letters and refused to fix any brand colors. To pressure cable operators into carrying the channel, ad...

MGM Resorts traces back to a regret. In 1970 Kirk Kerkorian, who had just bought the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio and an airline, was forced by debt to sell much of his first big casino to Hilton at a discount, and it became the Las Vegas Hilton, the city's most profitable hotel. Kerkorian used the studio's name to open the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas in 1973 and another in Reno in 1978; by 19...

Allan Loughead and his brother Malcolm founded the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company in 1912, flying sightseeing passengers in wooden seaplanes in California. After World War I the military dumped thousands of surplus planes for pennies, demand for new aircraft vanished, and by 1920 Allan was selling real estate and Malcolm hydraulic brakes. In 1926 they restarted with partners including Jac...

Klarna started in 2005 as Kreditor, founded by Stockholm School of Economics students Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson in the school's incubator. Online shoppers then distrusted handing card numbers to unknown sites, and merchants feared stolen cards, so Kreditor let buyers receive goods first and pay later by invoice while it took on the fraud and credit risk. Angel...

KKR began at Bear Stearns in the 1960s and 1970s, where senior corporate finance banker Jerome Kohlberg Jr. and his younger colleagues, cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts, saw that postwar family businesses had founders nearing retirement, no successors, no path to an IPO and no wish to sell to rivals. Their answer was the bootstrap investment, now called the leveraged buyout: put down perhap...

Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook, a former Procter & Gamble product analyst, and Tom Proulx, a Stanford programmer who coded the first Quicken in Microsoft BASIC for the IBM PC and UCSD Pascal for the Apple II. When Microsoft launched Microsoft Money in 1991, Cook used a packaged-goods tactic: a $15 rebate that brought shoppers into stores like Egghead and CompUSA and won Quicken front...

Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, in 1968 by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight who had left Fairchild Semiconductor, with investor Arthur Rock. They passed on the name Moore Noyce, which sounded like more noise, chose Integrated Electronics, and bought the Intel trademark from a hotel chain. Their target was memory: in 1970 the 1103 DRA...

The Intel 4004 began in April 1969, when Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel, then a small memory-chip startup, to build chips for a programmable desktop calculator to compete with the Olivetti Programma 101, which stored data as acoustic pulses in magnetostriction wire. Busicom's engineers wanted seven custom chips. Marcian Ted Hoff, Intel employee number 12, saw that Intel lacked the s...

Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire, where he designed aircraft from the S-1 through the S-27 before the Russian Revolution drove him to the United States. On March 5, 1923 he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation near Roosevelt Field in New York. His projected S-28, a four-engine, 32-passenger biplane, never left the drawing board, so his first American aircraft was t...

Micron Technology started in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, founded by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consultancy. In 1981 they decided to make chips themselves, building a plant called Fab One to produce 64K DRAM, the short-term working memory of a computer. Because a fab needs clean rooms, atomic-scale machinery and vibration-proof buildings, the m...