pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John MacFarlane earned electrical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, in 1990, UC Santa Barbara. In the 1990s he built an enterprise messaging business, Software.com, with longtime collaborator Craig Shelburne, sold its systems to customers such as AT&T, and merge...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! International Harvester traced its roots to Cyrus Hall McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper of the 1830s. In 1902 banker J.P. Morgan and negotiator George W. Perkins merged McCormick's company with its rival, the Deering Harvester Company, and three smaller competitors into a $150 million...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The International House of Pancakes began in Burbank, California in the late 1950s, founded by brothers Jerry and Al Lapin with commercial artist Albert Kallis, whose wife Trudy reportedly came up with the name. Its steep A-frame buildings with bright blue roofs, built through the late 1970s, w...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with about 21,000 yuan, roughly $5,000. The name came from a wall slogan meaning roughly "China has achievements," and the company later ran a campaign teaching foreigners to pronounce it rather than re...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Hitachi began in 1910 in Ibaraki Prefecture, where electrical engineer Namihei Odaira, working at the Kuhara mining operation, built water power stations inside a copper mine and a 4-kilowatt induction motor as his first product. The venture spun off in 1911 under a name joining the characters...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Herbert Henry Dow founded his chemical company in Midland, Michigan in 1897 to extract bromine from the brine deposits beneath the town. In place of boiling brine over wood or coal fires, he ran an electric current through it to release bromine as a gas and blew air through to capture it. By 19...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! London Heathrow opened as a small airfield in 1930, became London Airport in 1946 and took the Heathrow name in 1966. In the 1950s it had six short runways in three intersecting pairs, a hexagram that let tail-dragger propeller planes always land close to into the wind and avoid ground loops. J...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Tokyo's Haneda Airport opened on August 25, 1931, when the Postal Ministry turned a 53-hectare plot of reclaimed land beside a fishing town on Tokyo Bay into an airfield with a 300-meter strip. Its first flight carried live insects to Dairen in the Kwantung Leased Territory. Aviators had been l...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The M142 HIMARS is a three-person crew cab and a single rocket pod mounted on the Army's standard five-ton FMTV truck chassis. The requirement for a lightweight multiple rocket launcher came from the 9th Infantry Division in 1982, but Cold War planners focused on armored battles in Europe prefe...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1895 traveling salesman King Camp Gillette took advice from William Painter, inventor of the crown cork bottle cap, to invent something people use once and throw away. Six years of failure ended when MIT chemistry graduate William Emery Nickerson worked out how to temper and sharpen thin she...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1976 venture capitalist Robert Swanson, 28, cold-called biochemist Herbert Boyer, and over beers they put in $500 each to found Genentech. Boyer and Stanley Cohen had shown in 1973 that restriction enzymes could cut DNA fragments for insertion into another organism via plasmids; Cohen stayed...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! London Gatwick in Crawley, West Sussex, handles over 43 million passengers a year, the second-busiest airport in the UK and tenth in Europe, on one active runway. It began as a grass aerodrome in the late 1920s, started commercial flights in 1933, and served as RAF Gatwick in World War II. Afte...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 2023 the U.S. Space Force gave over 6,000 smartwatches to its Guardians to test whether wearable data could replace fitness tests, choosing Garmin models because their GPS could be disabled. Gary Burrell recruited engineer Min Kao from a defense contractor in 1983, and in 1989 they founded P...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Fuji Photo Film Company was founded in 1934 as a subsidiary of chemical maker Daicel to produce film in Japan, mastering silver halide crystals suspended in gelatin. In the 1980s it pushed into Kodak's home market by taking the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics sponsorship after Kodak hesitated, forcin...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 2026 a malaria outbreak at Frankfurt Airport sickened six workers and killed two, traced to an infected mosquito that arrived on a flight; a smaller incident occurred in 2023. Frankfurt has the most direct routes of any airport, 330 destinations on five continents, moved over 61 million pass...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the summer of 2010 a French Rafale landed on the USS Harry S. Truman, and American crews swapped its engine at sea. The jet exists because France left the European fighter project with the UK, West Germany, Italy and Spain in 1985: the others wanted a heavy interceptor, while France needed a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Flame, also called Flamer or Skywiper, surfaced in 2012 while Iran's Maher Center, Kaspersky Lab and the CrySyS Lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics were hunting a different virus wiping files at Iran's oil ministry at the United Nations' request. CrySyS called it arguably...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 2018 a 91-year-old man told San Jose detectives that his stepdaughter Karen Navarra was fine when he left her home, but her Fitbit recorded a heart rate spike and then a stop at 3:28 p.m., when his car was on camera in her driveway. Fitbit began in March 2007 when James Park and Eric Friedma...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Expedia launched inside Microsoft on October 22, 1996, under Rich Barton, its name blending exploration and speed. A low-margin travel agency did not fit a software company, so Microsoft spun it off in 1999. Barry Diller's IAC took a controlling interest in 2001, bought the rest in 2003, and sp...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The 2017 Equifax breach exposed names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and driver's license numbers of 147.9 million Americans, 15.2 million Britons and tens of thousands of Canadians. A 2015 internal audit had already found security backlogs, missing patches, no IT asset tracki...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Jack C. Taylor founded Executive Leasing Company in St. Louis in 1957 and renamed it Enterprise in 1969 after the USS Enterprise, the aircraft carrier he served on in World War II. His rule, take care of customers and employees first and profits will follow, became a promote-from-within system...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Red Lobster opened in Lakeland, Florida, in 1968, founded by Bill Darden and Charlie Woodsby to bring affordable seafood inland. By 1970 it had five Southern locations, and General Mills bought it and expanded it through the 1980s, including into Canada via former Ponderosa steakhouses. Garlic...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In October 2006 NBC's Heroes showed cheerleader Claire Bennet regenerating a hand mangled in a garbage disposal, and Emerson Electric, then parent of InSinkErator, sued the network, settling by early 2007. The company began in St. Louis in 1890, when Civil War Union veteran John Wesley Emerson...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist and Union artillery officer in the Civil War, went through failed partnerships with James W. Binford in Paris, Illinois, and John F. Johnston in Indianapolis before opening Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis in 1876 under a sign that read simply "E...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Novartis grew from three Basel dye makers: Alexander Clavel, who produced the purple-red dye fuchsine for silk in the 1850s, Johann Rudolf Geigy's dyewood mill, and the Kern and Sandoz chemistry firm, founded around 1886. Mastering coal tar chemistry for fabric led them into medicine. Sandoz ma...