pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1901 J.P. Morgan bought out Andrew Carnegie's steel empire and combined it with Federal Steel, National Steel and others into the United States Steel Corporation. The merger cost about $492 million, yet the new company was capitalized at $1.4 billion when the entire federal budget was under...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! ZTE was founded in Shenzhen in 1985 as Zhongxing Semiconductor by investors tied to China's Ministry of Aerospace Industry, with Hou Weigui as founder. In 1993 it became Zhongxing New Telecommunications Equipment under a "state-owned and private operating" model: at holding company ZTE Holdings...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Travelocity's roots run back to 1978, when American Airlines opened its Sabre reservation mainframe to outside travel agents. In the mid-1980s, under Kathy Misunas, American offered a consumer slice called Easy Sabre, spelled with a double A to nod to the airline, over text-only dial-up network...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! During the 2006 Second Lebanon War, about 4,000 rockets, mostly unguided Katyushas fired by Hezbollah, killed 44 Israeli civilians and forced a quarter million people from their homes, while more than 8,000 projectiles, mostly Qassam rockets and mortars, were fired from Gaza between 2000 and 20...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Toshiba grew from two struggling 19th century firms: Tanaka Seisakusho, founded in 1875 by inventor Tanaka Hisashige to make Japan's first telegraph equipment, and Hakunetsusha, a bamboo-filament light bulb maker founded in 1890 by Miyoshi Shoichi and Fujioka Ichisuke. After rebranding as Shiba...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The M777 began in 1987 as the Ultralight Field Howitzer developed by Vickers in the United Kingdom and was later taken over and largely Americanized by BAE Systems. About 70 percent of its parts are now U.S. built, with barrels made at Watervliet Arsenal in New York and final assembly in Missis...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Titan rocket family flew 368 missions between 1959 and 2005, and it began as a weapon. The Martin Company built Titan I as a costly backup to the slow Atlas ICBM program. It burned RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen, which boiled off and could not be kept in a sealed silo, and it was steered b...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! TiVo began in 1997 as Teleworld, founded by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay to build a home network device before pivoting to a machine that digitized, compressed and stored television on a hard drive. After Ramsay promised a first-quarter release, engineers hit March 31, 1999, a blue moon, and code...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1883 Warren S. Johnson, a professor at the Whitewater Normal School in Wisconsin, patented the first electric room thermostat, a bimetallic strip that rang a bell for the janitor in the boiler room, and later used compressed air to open valves automatically. Backed by Milwaukee investors, he...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Berlin's Tempelhof stands on land once held by the Knights Templar and later used as a Prussian army parade ground, where French aviator Armand Zipfel and Orville Wright gave flight demonstrations in 1909. It became an airport in the 1920s, around the founding of Lufthansa. From 1934 architect...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On June 27, 2017, radiation monitoring screens at Chernobyl went dark, Maersk's global shipping operations froze, and a chocolate factory in Tasmania stopped. The weapon descended from Petya, ransomware discovered in March 2016 that overwrote the master boot record, showed a fake CHKDSK repair...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1965 Alan Stillman, who had no restaurant experience, used $5,000 of his savings and $5,000 borrowed from his mother to buy The Good Tavern, a bar near the Queensboro Bridge on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood full of young singles and flight attendants. He renamed it with the Buc...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! T-Mobile US traces back to VoiceStream Wireless, spun off from Western Wireless to win urban markets in the western U.S. using the GSM digital standard. That choice drew Deutsche Telekom, which bought VoiceStream for $35 billion in 2001, largely for its GSM spectrum licenses, and renamed it T-M...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Sweden began studying a replacement for its Saab 35 Draken and 37 Viggen in 1979 under the Bas 90 doctrine, which dispersed fighters to road runways 800 meters long and 17 meters wide in case main air bases were destroyed. The JAS 39 Gripen was named for three roles in one airframe: Jakt for ai...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Sprint grew from two roots: the Brown Telephone Company, founded by Cleyson Brown in 1899 around Abilene, Kansas, which became United Telecommunications, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose trackside telegraph lines grew into a private microwave relay network. In the 1970s Southern Pacific...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the 1970s Singapore's main airport at Paya Lebar, opened in 1955 to replace Kallang, grew from about 300,000 passengers to 4 million by 1975. A 1972 plan for a second runway there stalled after the 1973 oil crisis, and planners saw that expansion would trap the airport inside the city with j...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Shake Shack began in 2001 as a hot dog cart supporting the I Heart Taxi art exhibit in a run-down Madison Square Park, set up by Randy Garutti, director of operations for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, and prepped in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park. After three summers, Meyer...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Kintaro Hattori began a clock shop apprenticeship in Tokyo at 13 in the 1870s, working at the Kobayashi, Kameda and Sakata shops. In 1881, at 21, he opened K. Hattori, and in 1885 he bypassed domestic wholesalers to buy directly from foreign trading firms in the Yokohama settlement, gaining imp...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein fired modified Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel, which was not in the coalition, hoping an Israeli response would split off the Arab members of the U.S.-led alliance. The Great Scud Hunt followed: A-10s by day, F-15E Strike Eagles with LANTIRN pod...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Amsterdam Airport Schiphol moves nearly 69 million people a year on ground 11 to 15 feet below sea level, the bed of the Haarlemmermeer lake that the Dutch pumped dry in the mid-1800s to create a polder. Records of the name date to 1447; the legend that it means ship hell has been debunked, and...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Gennaro and Carmela Sbarro emigrated from Naples, Italy, in 1956 with their sons Joseph, Mario and Anthony, opening an Italian grocery in Brooklyn that became a restaurant selling New York style pizza by the slice. In 1970 they opened their first mall location at Brooklyn's Kings Plaza shopping...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1988 in Tarrytown, New York, by Leonard Schleifer, a former Weill Cornell professor of medicine, and George Yancopoulos, an MD and PhD student from Columbia; both came from Queens. The name comes from its first goal, regenerating neurons with neurotrophi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Procter & Gamble began in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837, when English candle maker William Procter and Irish soap maker James Gamble, who had married sisters Olivia and Elizabeth Norris, were pushed into partnership by their father-in-law Alexander Norris so they would stop competing for the sa...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System pairs a six-barrel 20mm M61 Vulcan cannon, firing 4,500 rounds a minute, or 75 a second, at over Mach 3, with two Ku-band radars under its white dome. It usually opens fire about one nautical mile out, leaving two to three seconds per engagement, and fires den...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1973 the U.S. Army set out to replace the Pershing 1A and its 400-kiloton warhead, and in 1975 Martin Marietta won the contract for the Pershing II, built for precision over raw yield. It carried the W85 warhead, adjustable from 5 to 80 kilotons; the earth-penetrating W86 was canceled in 198...