pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Titan Rain was the U.S. government's designation for a coordinated series of cyberattacks first detected in 2003 and known to have continued for at least three years. Intruders reached defense contractor networks, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal and the Def...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Orbitz incorporated in 2000 and launched in June 2001, built by airlines that together controlled 75 percent of the U.S. air travel market, and Nielsen NetRatings called it the biggest e-commerce launch in history. Competitors raised antitrust alarms, but the Department of Transportation and, i...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The PGM-17 Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile became the core of one of the most important space launch families, whose Delta descendants retired only in 2024. Its first space work tested reentry vehicles for the Atlas missile: the Thor-Able topped the Thor core with an Able stage built...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In February 2023 an F-22 shot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon off South Carolina with an AIM-9X Sidewinder, a missile whose origins date to 1946. At the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, physicist William B. McLean started the heat-seeking project with leftover lab f...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The FGM-148 Javelin, the launcher cradled by the viral Saint Javelin icon of the Russo-Ukrainian War, replaced the wire-guided M47 Dragon, which forced its gunner to stay exposed while steering the missile to the target. The Javelin is fire and forget. A small launch motor pushes the missile ou...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! More than 16,000 Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters have been built since 1960. In the early 1950s the U.S. Army needed a medevac and utility aircraft to replace underpowered piston-engine helicopters, and in 1955 Bell won the contract for its Model 204. The XH-40 prototype flew in late 1956 with a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Exocet, French for flying fish, was named by Jean Guillot, technical director at Nord Aviation, whose work is now part of MBDA. It flies at Mach 0.93 with a 165-kilogram warhead, using inertial guidance and then active radar homing, while skimming one to two meters above the sea. That keeps...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Brothers Bill and T.J. Palmer opened the first restaurant in Decatur, Georgia, in November 1980 as T.J. Applebee's Rx for Edibles & Elixirs, after finding the name Applebee already registered; Cinnamons and Peppers were also floated. They sold the company to W.R. Grace in 1983, with Bill Pa...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Lockheed C-5 Galaxy's cargo hold is one foot longer than the Wright brothers' entire first flight. It began with the Air Force's CX-HLS requirement to carry outsized equipment such as tanks and helicopters; Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed all proposed swept-wing jets with nose and rear doors a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! During the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a helicopter clipped the compound wall and crash landed. The team destroyed it, but a surviving tail section revealed radar-evading surfaces and extra rotor blades on what was underneath a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk. The...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Clifford Stoll, born in Buffalo, New York, in June 1950, worked as assistant chief engineer at public radio station WBFO, studied astronomy at the State University of New York at Buffalo while working in an electronic music lab where Robert Moog mentored him, and earned a PhD from the Universit...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! WD-40, short for water displacement, 40th formula, was created to keep the Atlas missile's bare, unpainted steel from rusting on the humid launch pads of Cape Canaveral. Convair, a division of General Dynamics, built Atlas as an intercontinental ballistic missile and flew its first successful t...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space atop a Mercury-Redstone, a rocket descended from a missile built to carry a 3.8-megaton W39 nuclear warhead. The PGM-11 Redstone, the first large American ballistic missile, was a short-range weapon developed from the German V-2 by...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Tokuji Hayakawa opened a small metal workshop in Tokyo in 1912, invented the Tokubijo snap buckle, and in 1915 created the Ever-Ready Sharp mechanical pencil, whose name would later become his company's. The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake destroyed his factory and took his family. He moved to Osak...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1993, Culinary Institute of America graduate Steve Ells, a former line cook under Jeremiah Tower at Stars in San Francisco, borrowed $85,000 from his father to open a burrito shop in a former Dolly Madison ice cream store near the University of Denver. It was meant to fund a fine dining rest...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In April 1946, engineer Tadao Kashio opened a small workshop, Kashio Seisakujo, in Mitaka, Tokyo, machining gears and microscope parts as a subcontractor. His brother Toshio invented the yubiwa pipe, a ring worn on the finger that held a cigarette so workers could smoke it to the end with their...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the biggest rewrite of U.S. communications law in more than six decades, replacing a framework built by the Communications Act of 1934 around the old AT&T Bell System monopoly. With the Bell System already broken into regional companies and new technol...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Zeus surfaced in July 2007 in an attack on the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Windows Trojan spread through phishing emails and drive-by downloads and stole banking credentials two ways: keystroke logging, and form grabbing, which hooks into the browser and copies login data just before...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Yahoo suffered the largest data breaches in internet history. An August 2013 attack hit all 3 billion accounts, a figure Yahoo did not fully admit until October 2017, and a late 2014 breach exposed more than 500 million accounts, which Yahoo knew of in 2014 but disclosed only in September 2016....

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! White Castle was built by two men born in 1880: Walter A. Anderson, a short-order cook who by 1916 was testing burgers in converted streetcar diners in Wichita, Kansas, and Edgar Waldo "Billy" Ingram, a real estate and insurance salesman. Starting in 1921 with a $700 investment, they faced a pu...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1900 Frederick Weyerhaeuser, already a wealthy Mississippi River lumberman, moved west to Tacoma, Washington and with 15 partners founded the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Its first deal bought 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill, who gaine...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Merck began in 1668 when Friedrich Jacob Merck bought the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1827 the family business industrialized morphine extraction from opium, later doing the same with cocaine. In 1891 longtime employee Theodore Weicker and 23-year-old George Merck, grandson of the...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Vodafone grew out of Racal Electronics, the UK's largest maker of military radios in 1980. Racal had battlefield radio technology from America's General Electric, and chairman Ernest Harrison asked his head of military radio, Gerry Whent, to find a civilian use for it. Teaming with Millicom in...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! By the early 1960s Tokyo's Haneda Airport was boxed in by dense neighborhoods and out of capacity, so in 1966 the Transport Ministry chose the farming villages of Sanrizuka and Shibayama in Chiba Prefecture, about 60 kilometers east of central Tokyo, for a five-runway hub. It finalized the site...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! When regulators broke up the AT&T Bell System in 1983, Bell Atlantic emerged as the Baby Bell for the Mid-Atlantic states. It merged with NYNEX in 1996 and moved to New York City, then in 2000 merged with GTE and renamed itself Verizon, a blend of veritas and horizon. That year it formed Ve...