bsnsHistory

For a full year before the stock market crashed, the one man at the Federal Reserve who actually knew how to stop a panic wasn't there to do it. On October 29, 1929, now remembered as Black Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange saw more than 16 million shares change hands in a single day, and the ticker tape reporting prices ran nearly four hours behind the actual trading. A year earlier, Benjamin...

Every time you hear the word credentialed, licensed, or certified, you're looking at a trade that started nearly five centuries ago. On October 28, 1538, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull elevating a small Dominican seminary in Santo Domingo into a full university, the first one anywhere in the Americas. What started as a school for theology and canon law became the template Spain used across its...

A drawing did what financial records alone couldn't. On October 27, 1871, officers arrested William "Boss" Tweed, the head of New York's Tammany Hall political machine, on charges of fraud, forgery, and larceny tied to a kickback scheme that had drained tens of millions of dollars from city taxpayers. Tweed had survived years of scrutiny by controlling the courts, the police, and the ballot box, b...

For decades, a company could fill a file on you with rumors, gossip, and outright fabrications, and you'd never know it existed until you were denied a loan, a job, or an apartment. On October 26, 1970, President Nixon signed Public Law 91-508, bundling two very different measures into one bill. The Fair Credit Reporting Act finally gave consumers the right to see their own credit files and correc...

Some collapses take everyone by surprise. This one had a paper trail years in the making. On January 15, 1990, Federated Department Stores and Allied Stores, the parent companies of Bloomingdale's, Rich's, Jordan Marsh, and Abraham & Straus among others, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest retailing bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time. The companies had been acquired in 1986 and 19...

A ten-by-ten-foot burger stand in Baldwin Park, California opened its speaker box for the first time on October 22, 1948, and the discipline behind it outlasted five different presidents over the next seventy-seven years. Founders Harry and Esther Snyder built the company on a refusal to franchise or cut corners, a principle their son Rich carried through seventeen years of growth before his death...

A tree marked for removal at a Minnesota research station and an abandoned London market that hadn't sold fruit in sixteen years both proved the same unlikely lesson about produce and business value. On October 21, 1990, the UK charity Common Ground, founded by Sue Clifford and Angela King, held the first Apple Day at Covent Garden's old Apple Market, a celebration meant to protect disappearing or...

An engineer sitting on a Florida beach in 1948 dragged his fingers through the sand and sketched an idea nobody would know what to do with for twenty five years. On October 20, 1949, Norman Joseph Woodland and classmate Bernard Silver filed a patent for a machine-readable barcode, inspired by Morse code Woodland had learned as a Boy Scout, but the technology to actually use it didn't exist yet. Th...

A federal judge's ruling forced the largest employer in America to change a policy it had defended for seventeen years, and someone walked through the door before the day was over to test it. On October 19, 2010, the Pentagon publicly confirmed that military recruiters had been instructed to accept openly gay and lesbian applicants, following Judge Virginia Phillips's injunction against "Don't Ask...

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...