pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The E-3 Sentry, the Airborne Warning and Control System, grew out of the look-down problem: the 1960s Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star could not pick low-flying jets out of ground clutter. Westinghouse beat favored Hughes Aircraft with a digital radar that used an 18-bit programmable computer and a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John Francis Queeny founded Monsanto in St. Louis in 1901 and named it after his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto. It started with food additives, saccharin, caffeine and vanillin, then moved into sulfuric acid and PCBs in the 1920s. During World War II it ran the Dayton Project, which assisted the M...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1963 Ralph Roberts, Daniel Aaron and Julian Brodsky paid $500,000 for American Cable Systems in Tupelo, Mississippi, a five-channel system with about 12,000 customers, and soon added a Muzak franchise built on the same wire-and-subscription model. The company became Comcast in 1969 and went...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! After World War II, veteran Troy Smith went home to Seminole, Oklahoma and worked as a milkman, then switched to delivering bread because it was lighter. In Shawnee he bought and sold the Cottage Cafe, then opened Troy's Pan Full of Chicken. In 1953 he and a partner bought a five-acre lot holdi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Bob Carr co-founded Heartland Payment Systems in Princeton, New Jersey in 1997 to bring enterprise-grade card processing to small and mid-sized merchants. A $40 million private equity investment from Greenhill Capital Partners and LLR Partners came in 2001, and the company listed on the New Yor...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In November 1977 a U.S. reconnaissance satellite photographed an unknown twin-tailed jet at the Ramenskoye flight test center, and analysts dubbed it Ram-L. It was the Mikoyan MiG-29, later NATO's Fulcrum. Its roots lay in Vietnam, where nimble MiG-17s troubled heavy American F-105s and pushed...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Barnes & Noble executive John Foley pitched colleague Tom Cortese on a connected spin bike, and they founded Peloton Interactive in early 2012. A 2013 Kickstarter asked $1,500 for an early bike, the first tablet-connected model shipped in 2014 alongside showrooms in high-end malls, and the...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Eurofighter Typhoon began in the late 1970s with clashing national needs: Britain's AST-403 concept for a low-level strike jet to replace the Jaguar, and West Germany's TKF-90 high-altitude interceptor aimed at Soviet bombers. France joined early but demanded design leadership, carrier capa...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1806 English immigrant William Colgate opened a shop on Dutch Street in New York City, boiling animal fats with lye to make starch, soap and candles. A heart attack in 1833 briefly halted sales, and after his death in 1857 his reluctant son Samuel took over out of duty. The company sold soap...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The U.S. Navy built Aegis because 1960s shipboard radars could track only two to four targets while the Soviet Union was developing supersonic anti-ship missiles meant to arrive in swarms. A first attempt, the Typhon system begun in 1958, proved unreliable and was canceled in 1963. The Advanced...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1969 Soviet intelligence learned that the United States was building the F-15 Eagle, and the general staff asked for a fighter with Mach 2 speed, bomber-escort range, dogfight agility and short-runway performance. The requirement was split: the light fighter became the MiG-29 and the heavy l...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Sanofi was founded in 1973 as a subsidiary of the French oil company Elf Aquitaine. It merged with Synthélabo in 1999, then in 2004 took over Aventis, which had been formed in 1999 from Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst Marion Roussel. Hoechst was one of the companies created when the Allies broke up I...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! F. Hoffmann-La Roche was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1896 by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, and in 1934 became the first company to mass produce synthetic vitamin C, sold as Redoxon. During World War II it moved its Jewish employees from Europe to the United States, while its factories in German...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Chuck E. Cheese began as a way to sell video games. In the late 1970s Atari founder Nolan Bushnell wanted his arcade machines out of bars and pool halls and into family spaces, so he built them a pizza restaurant: pizza's 20 to 30 minute bake time kept children at the game cabinets, and an anim...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Olive Garden was created by General Mills, the cereal maker, which opened the first restaurant in Orlando, Florida on December 13, 1982, with co-founders including Blaine Sweatt. Following the Red Lobster playbook, it reached 145 locations by 1989, and in 1995 General Mills spun off its restaur...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the 1940s most American ice cream came in vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Irv Robbins learned the trade as a teenager in his father's shop in Washington state, while his future brother-in-law Burt Baskin made ice cream for fellow Navy men in the Pacific during World War II. In 1945 Robbins...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John F. Kennedy International Airport sits on more than 5,000 acres of former Queens marshland that included the Idlewild Beach Golf Course. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, seeing his first airport overwhelmed soon after it opened in 1939, secured the Jamaica Bay site, and Idlewild opened in 1948 wi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Priceline was founded in Connecticut in 1997 by Jay Walker with early funding help from Michael Loeb, launched its website in 1998, and went public in the 1999 IPO wave under CEO Richard Braddock, formerly the number two executive at Citicorp. Its hook was Name Your Own Price, a form of opaque...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The MGM-31 Pershing was a two-stage, solid-fueled theater ballistic missile, and solid fuel posed a hard problem: once lit, the motor cannot be shut off. Before engineers could solve that, the Army had to get past a memo from Defense Secretary Charles Wilson limiting it to missiles under 200 mi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco: it sits in unincorporated San Mateo County, on what began in 1927 as Mills Field, a 150-acre experimental pasture leased from the Mills estate. The city bought the land in 1930, expanded it to about 1,100 acres, and renamed it San Fra...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Royal Caribbean was founded in Norway in 1969 by three shipping companies tied to the Skaugen, Wilhelmsen and Gotaas-Larsen names. Its key decision came in 1997, when it bought Celebrity Cruises, founded in 1988 by Greece's Chandris Group, and kept the brands separate under a holding company in...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Qwest began in 1996 when Philip Anschutz, owner of the Southern Pacific railroad, laid an all-digital fiber optic network along his existing track, sidestepping years of right-of-way fights. When Southern Pacific merged with Union Pacific in 1997, he kept the telecom unit separate and took it p...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! North Korea's Lazarus Group, which defector accounts say is known internally as the 414 Liaison Office, grew from crude website attacks into a state-run operation that steals money to fund the country's missile and nuclear programs. Gifted students are tracked from childhood into a six-year pip...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 2013 a three-year-old biotech called Moderna accepted a $25 million DARPA grant to develop technology that could suppress a pandemic within 60 days. Founded in 2010 by a group including Derrick Rossi, Robert Langer and Noubar Afeyan, its name blends "modified RNA" and "modern." The idea was...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Johnson & Johnson trademarked a red cross design for its medicinal plasters in 1905, years before Congress protected the emblem for the American Red Cross, and later sued the Red Cross in federal court over it before the two settled. The company traces to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in P...