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Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Disney first went to sea in 1985 by licensing its characters to Premier Cruise Line, which ran the ships while Mickey walked the dining room. In 1993 Premier dropped Disney for Warner Bros. and the Looney Tunes. Talks with Carnival and Royal Caribbean broke down over control of brand standards,...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! When Denny's decided to close for Christmas in 1988 for the first time, managers found that many restaurants had no locks on the front doors, and others had lost the keys long before. The chain began in 1953 as Danny's Donuts in Lakewood, California, opened by Richard Jezak and Harold Butler. A...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Samuel Cunard, a Halifax ship owner with coal, whaling and timber interests, won a British Admiralty contract for transatlantic steam mail even though he missed the bid deadline and owned no steamships. His old acquaintance Admiral William Edward Parry, controller of steam machinery, brought hi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1953, on a Los Angeles to New York flight, American Airlines president C.R. Smith sat next to IBM salesman Blair Smith, no relation, and complained about a reservations system of index cards, chalkboards and phone calls. IBM was building SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment that track...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Code Red worm was released on July 13, 2001, and by July 19 it had hijacked about 359,000 computers running Microsoft's Internet Information Services, with heavy damage across North America, Europe, China and India. Researchers Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh at eEye Digital Security dissecte...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In January 2011, while U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing, China's Chengdu J-20 made its maiden flight, a test that seemed to surprise even President Hu Jintao when Gates raised it. Known in China as the Weilong, or Mighty Dragon, and to NATO as Fagin, the jet is over 69 feet lo...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Charter Communications traces back to a cable operation Charles H. Leonard set up in Barry County, Michigan in 1980. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought control in 1998 to pursue his Wired World vision of merging the PC and the TV, and Charter went on a debt-funded buying spree, including Ma...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Carnival Cruise Line was started in 1972 by Ted Arison and Meshulam Riklis, and by 1974 it was so deep in debt that Riklis sold his stake to Arison for $1. Arison restructured, and in the early 1980s the company commissioned its first new ship, the Tropicale, followed by the Holiday, Jubilee an...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1872 Andrew Carnegie began building the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and by 1874 it was turning out railroad rails at a 40 percent return on investment. The method was cost accounting brought over from railroading: he weighed coal, measured limestone and tracked labor...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Canon began in 1933 as the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, founded by Takeshi Mitarai, Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. It could build focal plane shutters but not optical glass, so its first commercial camera used lenses from Nippon Kogaku, the company now known as Nikon....

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 by Alexander Nix, Nigel Oakes and Alexander Oakes as a spinoff of SCL Group, a British defense contractor that described itself as a global election management agency and had worked on psychological operations. Backed by a reported $50 million or more fro...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the 1890s, Benjamin Holt watched his steam tractors, which weighed 1,000 pounds for every unit of horsepower, sink into the peaty soil of California's San Joaquin Valley Delta near Stockton. He tried seven-and-a-half-foot wheels, a 46-foot-wide machine and crews laying wooden plank roads bef...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On March 7, 2010, Cablevision customers in the New York area tuned to ABC for the 82nd Academy Awards and got a black screen during a fee dispute with Disney. The company traces to Charles Dolan, who built Sterling Manhattan Cable, launched Home Box Office, sold both to Time Life and founded Ca...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On Christmas Eve 1858, former Navy surgeon Edward Robinson Squibb watched his new Brooklyn laboratory burn, and local doctors raised $2,100 to rebuild it. Obsessed with purity, Squibb published his own standards manual when the American Medical Association moved slowly, and supplied the Union A...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Jay S. Walker founded Priceline.com in 1996 in Stamford, Connecticut, around its trademarked name-your-own-price model: customers entered a destination, dates and a price, handed over a credit card and waited to see if an airline or hotel accepted. Suppliers could unload perishable seats and ro...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Bell Labs traces back to the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs that France awarded Alexander Graham Bell in 1880, which funded his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric formed Bell Telephone Laboratories at 463 West Street in New York City with 3,600 staff. AT&a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! GSK's family tree starts with Joseph Nathan, who founded a trading company in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1873 and by 1904 was drying surplus milk from Bunnythorpe dairy farms into baby food sold as Glaxo, with the slogan "Glaxo builds bonny babies." John K. Smith opened a Philadelphia pharmacy...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Avis Budget Group was spun out of the Cendant conglomerate in 2006 and grew into one of the big three U.S. car rental companies, with a 26 percent market share by 2021 behind Hertz and Enterprise. From Parsippany, New Jersey, it runs about 600,000 vehicles at 10,000 locations with roughly 25,00...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Arby's stands for the initials of Forrest and Leroy Raffel, restaurant equipment suppliers who saw the burger market saturating and opened a roast beef restaurant in Boardman, Ohio, in July 1964. They wanted the name Big Tex, but an Akron businessman held it. With upscale interiors and a neon c...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Amgen started in 1980 in Thousand Oaks, California, as Applied Molecular Genetics, backed by venture capitalists betting on recombinant DNA, with George Rathmann as CEO. In 1983 a team led by Fu-Kuen Lin cloned the erythropoietin gene by hand, without automated sequencers, work that became the...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1956, MIT engineer Amar Bose bought the audio system with the best published specifications and hated how it sounded. He concluded that frequency response and distortion figures ignored the room and the human ear, since most of what a concert audience hears is reflected sound. With backing f...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Wally Byam started out building heavy masonite trailers in his Los Angeles backyard in the late 1920s. In 1936 he introduced the aluminum Airstream Clipper, largely a rebadged Bowlus Road Chief, with one key change: he moved the door from the front to the side, smoothing the nose and cutting dr...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, but businessman Theodore Vail built the empire, creating the long-distance subsidiary American Telephone and Telegraph in 1885 and buying up local operators. Facing antitrust action in 1913, AT&T accepted the Kingsbury Commitment, lettin...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The AIM-120 AMRAAM grew out of a lethal problem exposed in the ACEVAL-AIMVAL evaluations at Nellis Air Force Base from 1974 to 1978. F-14s and F-15s firing AIM-7 Sparrows had to keep their radars on the target, flying straight while F-5E aggressors with all-aspect Sidewinders closed in, produci...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Archer Daniels Midland began in 1902 when John W. Daniels started a linseed crushing business in Minneapolis, joined the next year by George A. Archer; the company incorporated in 1923. In 1934, its Chicago plant opened ADM's first continuous solvent extraction plant for soybeans, using hexane...