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The T-72 began as an act of defiance. In the 1960s Alexander Morozov's Kharkiv bureau built the T-64, with an autoloader and a fragile 5TDF opposed-piston two-stroke diesel that took about twice as long to build as a V-shaped engine. The GABTU, the Soviet Main Agency of Armored Forces, ordered Leonid Kartsev's bureau in Nizhny Tagil to refit the T-64 with a V-12 diesel as a cheap mobilization mode...

Prudential Financial began in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875, when John F. Dryden founded the Widows and Orphans Friendly Society, soon renamed the Prudential Friendly Society. Its one product was industrial burial insurance for the urban working class at three cents a week, collected door to door by agents. Relative to the death benefit, those premiums cost more than ordinary life insurance, and whe...

The M1 Abrams grew out of the failure of the MBT-70, a U.S. and West German project launched in 1963 with an autoloader, a driver seated in the turret, adjustable hydropneumatic suspension and a gun that fired guided missiles. By 1969 its estimated unit price had reached $1 million, and Congress canceled it. The 1972 XM1 program capped the cost at $507,790 per tank and required competing contracto...

The Churchill tank grew from the A-20, an infantry tank designed for the trench warfare British planners expected in a second European war. After France fell and the army left much of its equipment at Dunkirk, director of tank design Dr. H.E. Merritt revised it into the A-22, and Vauxhall Motors was told to put it into production within one year. The first Churchills rolled out in June 1941 with a...

The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the DDG-1000, began as the DD-21 program after Congress required the Navy to replace the shore bombardment capability lost when the Iowa-class battleships retired. The result displaces over 15,000 tons, about 40 percent more than a standard destroyer, yet looks like a fishing boat on radar thanks to a wave-piercing tumblehome hull that slopes inward, a shape often comp...

State Farm was founded in 1922 in Bloomington, Illinois, by retired farmer George J. Mecherle as a mutual automobile insurer for farmers, who drove less and crashed less than city motorists but paid the same premiums. As a mutual, it is owned by its policyholders. It grew into the largest U.S. property, casualty and auto insurer, with $104.2 billion in 2023 revenue, a $6.3 billion net loss that ye...

The Los Angeles class, known as the 688 class after lead boat SSN-688, grew from late-1960s alarm over fast Soviet submarines armed with anti-ship cruise missiles. The existing Sturgeon class could not keep pace with a carrier battle group at full speed, so the new design was about 50 percent larger to hold the S6G pressurized water reactor, with machinery on shock-absorbing rafts to keep noise ou...

The Seawolf-class attack submarine began design work in 1983, when the U.S. Navy wanted a successor to the Los Angeles class that could hunt quiet Soviet submarines, the Typhoon ballistic missile boats and the Akula attack boats, in the deep ocean. The plan called for 29 boats over 10 years. Then the Cold War ended. By 1995 the projected cost of just 12 boats was $33.6 billion, almost $3 billion e...

Rolls-Royce Holdings traces back to 1904, when engineer Henry Royce, who made dynamos and electric cranes, built a car that Charles Rolls wanted to sell; the pair incorporated in 1906. In 1971 runaway development costs on the RB211 jet engine pushed the company into voluntary liquidation, and Edward Heath's government nationalized it. The car division was split off in 1973, and the aerospace busin...

Marvel began in 1939 as Timely Publications, an offshoot of pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. Its first comic, cover dated October 1939, introduced an android Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner and sold nearly 900,000 copies, and Captain America followed in 1941. Goodman hired a 16-year-old office assistant who became Stan Lee. After the war, as Atlas Comics, the company dropped superhero...

Lockheed Martin formed in 1995 from a $10 billion merger of the Lockheed Corporation, maker of the U-2 and SR-71, and Martin Marietta, builder of Titan rockets and manager of Sandia National Laboratories. The post-Cold War Pentagon encouraged defense consolidation and covered merger costs, including an $8.2 million bonus for Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine. By 2024, 73 percent of revenue came...

HMS Queen Elizabeth, pennant number R08, is the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, christened on July 4, 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II with a bottle of Islay single malt from Bowmore rather than champagne. Defence Secretary Des Browne ordered her and sister ship Prince of Wales in July 2007 for about £4.085 billion. After the 2008 financial crisis the build was slowed, and costs rose to £...

BNSF Railway runs about 33,400 miles of track across 28 states and three Canadian provinces with 36,000 employees and more than 8,000 locomotives. Its roots reach back to the 12-mile Aurora Branch in Illinois in 1849, but the modern company formed after Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe announced their merger in 1994 and outlasted a Union Pacific bidding war in early 1995....

The Waldorf Astoria began as two rival hotels on Fifth Avenue, where the Empire State Building now stands. In the 1890s William Waldorf Astor, feuding with his aunt, built the 13-story Waldorf beside her mansion, and her son John Jacob Astor IV answered with the taller Astoria next door. The hotels were joined by Peacock Alley, the 300-foot corridor that gave the name its hyphen; the hyphen was dr...

USS Nimitz, CVN-68, was commissioned in 1975 by President Gerald Ford and is the only carrier of its class named by surname alone. It is now the oldest serving aircraft carrier in the world. Its first crises came fast: in 1979 it deployed to the Indian Ocean during the Iran hostage crisis, and in 1980 it served as the staging platform for the failed rescue attempt that ended with a helicopter cras...

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed in 1903 when the American Federation of Labor merged two rival groups of wagon drivers, who controlled the final mile between rail depots and businesses. First president Cornelius Shea fell after the failed 1905 Chicago strike, when 25,000 Teamsters backed locked-out tailors at Montgomery Ward and the press reported Shea living in a brothel and thr...

When the Plaza Hotel opened on October 1, 1907, about 90 percent of its occupants lived there full time. It replaced an earlier Plaza built between 1883 and 1890 and plagued by financial troubles and shoddy work. In 1902 a syndicate led by builder Harry S. Black and financier Bernhard Beinecke paid $3 million in cash for the site at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, then the largest all-cash de...

The Panzer IV began in 1934 under the cover name Begleitwagen, or escort vehicle, because the Treaty of Versailles banned German tanks. In Heinz Guderian's plan it was a support tank, firing a short low-velocity 75mm gun at infantry, anti-tank guns and bunkers while the Panzer III fought enemy armor. Krupp rejected a proposed torsion bar suspension in favor of leaf springs on eight road wheels per...

The Panzer III was built by Daimler-Benz to the doctrine Heinz Guderian pushed in 1934: a dedicated tank killer working alongside Krupp's Panzer IV, which carried a short 7.5cm gun for bunkers and infantry. Its biggest edge was a three-man turret that left the commander free to watch the battlefield from a cupola ringed with vision blocks, while the French SOMUA S35 had a one-man turret and early...

The Leopard 2 rose from the collapse of the MBT-70, a joint US and West German tank that died by 1969 over costs, imperial versus metric measurements and design disputes such as seating the driver in the rotating turret. West Germany salvaged its technology for new prototypes named Keiler and Eber, and project officer Paul-Werner Krapke oversaw testing of 17 turrets: ten with 105mm guns and seven...

The KV heavy tank replaced the five-turret T-35, a land battleship whose thin armor the Spanish Civil War showed could not survive modern anti-tank guns. Designer Joseph Kotin turned away from the twin-turret SMK concept, built a single-turret design and put the saved weight into thick frontal armor, naming the result for defense commissar Kliment Voroshilov. Tested in the 1939 Winter War against...

The Irvine Company's 120,000-acre holdings trace to the drought of 1864, which killed the cattle of ranchero Jose Antonio Sepulveda and forced the sale of Rancho San Joaquin. Gold Rush merchant James Irvine I bought it with Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Llewellyn Bixby, then added the hilly Rancho Lomas de Santiago from William Wolfskill in 1866 for sheep grazing, creating a 185-square-mile ranch....

The IS-2, named for Joseph Stalin, grew out of the failing KV-1 program. By early 1943 the KV-1 was slow, prone to transmission failure and armed no better than the T-34, and Soviet command considered ending heavy tank production and closing Joseph Kotin's design bureau. The capture of a German Tiger I in January 1943 reversed that. Stopgaps followed: the lighter KV-1S, then the KV-85, which neede...

John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company of Ohio held about 4 percent of US refining in the early 1870s. Rockefeller saw refining, not drilling, as the bottleneck of a boom-and-bust Pennsylvania oil trade, and used his shipping volume to win secret railroad rebates. He showed rival Cleveland refiners his account books and offered them Standard Oil stock or ruin; by early 1872 he controlled about...

The M48 Patton began in 1950 as the T48 project, launched in a panic as the Korean War broke out and US planners feared Soviet heavy tanks like the IS-3 massing in Europe. With the M26 Pershing and M46 judged inadequate, the Army chose to test and mass-produce the tank at the same time. The design moved to a four-man crew, put the driver in the center of the hull and dropped the bow machine gunner...