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Lawrence Dale Bell founded Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York in July 1935, building the XFM-1 Airacuda, the P-39 Airacobra, the P-59 Airacomet, America's first jet fighter, and the X-1 that Chuck Yeager flew past the sound barrier. To escape the feast or famine cycle of military contracts, Bell in 1941 hired inventor Arthur M. Young, who had built tethered helicopter models in a Penns...

BAE Systems descends from A.V. Roe, de Havilland, Supermarine, maker of the Spitfire, and Vickers, which built the Royal Navy's first submarines. After the Cold War, US mergers such as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1997 left European firms outmatched, and British Aerospace held talks with Germany's DASA. In November 1999 it walked away and instead bought Marconi Electronic Systems, GEC's defense...

Arm was founded in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, VLSI Technology and Apple. Apple needed a low-power processor for its Newton handheld and invested $3 million, with executive Larry Tesler helping recruit CEO Robin Saxby. Acorn contributed 12 engineers and its Acorn RISC Machine design, and VLSI supplied chip design tools. Apple refused to have a competitor's name on its processor, so...

Work on Apple Pay began in January 2013, when Apple brought Visa, Mastercard and American Express into a joint effort under heavy secrecy. JPMorgan set up a windowless war room where only about 100 of 300 staff knew the partner was Apple, and Visa had 750 people working on anonymized tokens for a year. Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay on September 9, 2014 at the iPhone 6 event, calling the magnetic str...

Apollo Global Management was founded in 1990 after the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert by Drexel's former head of mergers and acquisitions, Leon Black, with Josh Harris, Marc Rowan and Tony Ressler. With buyout financing frozen, they raised about $400 million and pioneered a distressed-to-control strategy: buying the cheap debt of struggling companies and converting it into controlling equity d...

Allstate began as a name for Sears car tires. A 1925 contest drew over 2.2 million entries from nearly a million people, and Hans Simonsen of Bismarck, North Dakota won $5,000 for suggesting Allstate, which appeared on tires in 1927. In 1931 insurance broker Carl L. Odell pitched his neighbor, Sears executive Robert E. Wood, on selling auto insurance by mail, and Allstate Insurance Company opened...

Alipay began in 2004 as a payment tool for Taobao, the e-commerce site Jack Ma's Alibaba Group launched while fighting eBay for the Chinese market. Without widespread credit card protections, buyers did not trust strangers online, so Alipay held each payment in escrow until the buyer confirmed receipt, a step that helped Taobao outcompete eBay in China. When the People's Bank of China issued payme...

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, but its tight bond with oxygen in bauxite resisted fire smelting, and in the 19th century Napoleon III served honored guests with aluminum utensils while others got gold. In 1886 Oberlin College graduate Charles Martin Hall, and independently Frenchman Paul Héroult, found that running electric current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolit...

Affirm was founded in 2012 out of the HVF startup studio, led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who became CEO, with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampel. Its premise was an anti-credit card: unsecured installment loans at checkout with no late fees and no compound interest, so the interest agreed at purchase is the most a customer will owe. To make that work, Affirm used machine learni...

ASML was born in 1984 when Philips, under financial pressure, spun its lithography research into a joint venture with ASM International called Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography. Its first product, the PAS 2000, used oil pressure to move wafers and leaked hydraulic fluid, a serious flaw in clean rooms engineered to hold fewer than 10 particles per cubic meter. Without the money of vertic...

Advanced Micro Devices was founded in 1969 when marketing executive Jerry Sanders and colleagues left Fairchild Semiconductor and rented a Sunnyvale headquarters. AMD began as a second-source supplier, building chips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and set itself apart by guaranteeing every chip met US Military Standard 883. Profits funded its own designs, including a 1970 logic...

American International Group began on December 19, 1919, when American Cornelius Vander Starr opened American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai. By the late 1920s it had branches across the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and as war loomed in Asia Starr moved into Latin America, opening offices in places like Havana. He moved headquarters to New York in 1939, insured American militar...

An automated clearing house, or ACH, is a computer-based electronic network that processes domestic, low-value payments between participating financial institutions. It replaced a paper system that by the 1960s moved millions of checks a day by armored car, with bank staff sorting paper late into the night. The first ACH was BACS in the United Kingdom, which began processing payments in April 1968...

In 1880 mining entrepreneur and future US senator George Hearst bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner, and in 1887 he handed it to his 23-year-old son, William Randolph Hearst. The younger Hearst became editor and publisher and championed yellow journalism: giant headlines, sensational scandals, exaggerated crime stories and lavish illustrations. He bought papers in Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Los...

General Dynamics traces its lineage to 1899, when businessman Isaac Leopold Rice bought John Philip Holland's struggling torpedo boat company and renamed it the Electric Boat Company. Its first sale, the USS Holland of 1900, cost about $150,000 and became the US Navy's first submarine. Electric Boat built 85 submarines in World War I and 74 submarines plus 398 PT boats in World War II, growing to...

GEICO, the Government Employees Insurance Company, has never been a government agency. Leo Goodwin Sr. had worked at USAA since 1925 but hit a ceiling as a civilian, so in 1936 in San Antonio he and his wife Lillian put up $25,000 and Fort Worth banker Cleaves Rhea added $75,000. They sold auto insurance by mail directly to federal employees, a stable, low-risk group, cutting out agent commissions...

Block began with a lost sale in 2009, when St. Louis glass artist Jim McKelvey could not take a credit card for a $2,000 set of glass faucets. He and Jack Dorsey, then also building Twitter, created Square, a small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack. The real innovation was the software behind it: Square acted as merchant of record, absorbing risk, compliance and fraud detection so...

Hughes Aircraft Company was founded in 1934 in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company so Howard Hughes could build his H-1 racer and set speed records. In World War II it grew from four full-time employees to 80,000 in Culver City, making B-25 struts and machine gun feed chutes, but Hughes's own prototypes, the D-2, the XF-11 and the H-4 Hercules mocked as the Spruce Goose,...

This episode starts from an unusual source: a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Admiral Kuznetsov, a short list of four links. The first is the man behind the name, Nikolai Kuznetsov, a military officer who lived from 1904 to 1974 and rose to Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy. His lifespan covered a shift from coal-fired engines and early dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines, ballistic...

J. Willard Marriott first felt Washington, D.C.'s summer heat while serving a mission for the LDS Church in the 1920s. After earning his degree at the University of Utah, he returned in 1927 and bought the franchise rights to an A&W root beer stand in Columbia Heights, run with his wife Alice and a business partner. Winter killed root beer sales, so they added hot food and renamed it the Hot S...

In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into a shallow inlet in Southern California and named it the Bay of Smokes. San Pedro Bay was a soft mudflat, and in 1834 Richard Henry Dana Jr. described ships anchoring miles out or running aground on purpose. Phineas Banning built the area's first railroad to Los Angeles in 1868 and in 1871 dredged a 10-foot channel to Wilmington. In the 1890s Free Harbor...

In 1929, when Keystone Aircraft bought Loening Aircraft and moved operations to Bristol, Pennsylvania, Leroy Grumman and colleagues including William Schwendler stayed in New York and started their own company. In January 1930 they opened in an abandoned factory in Baldwin, Long Island, welding aluminum tubing to repair truck frames while pitching designs to the Navy. Their retractable landing gea...

The Carlyle Group was founded in 1987 by five partners including David Rubenstein, William E. Conway Jr. and Daniel A. D'Aniello, named for the Carlyle Hotel in New York but run from Washington, D.C., with $5 million from backers such as T. Rowe Price and the Richard King Mellon family. Rubenstein, a former Carter administration lawyer, understood federal procurement, and the firm bought defense b...

RTX began in 1922 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Vannevar Bush, Laurence K. Marshall and Charles G. Smith founded the American Appliance Company. Smith's study of the star Zeta Puppis led to a gaseous helium rectifier that let radios run from wall current instead of leaky acid batteries. The tube was called the Raytheon, and in 1925 the business became the Raytheon Manufacturing Company. In Wor...

Nvidia was sketched out in late 1992 in a Denny's on Berryessa Road in East San Jose by Jensen Huang, a director at LSI Logic who had designed microprocessors at AMD, and two frustrated Sun Microsystems engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Their spouses wanted all three to commit, so Priem resigned on New Year's Eve 1992 and Huang quit on February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday. They starte...