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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...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In the late 1970s, James Dyson, who ran a company making a ball-wheeled wheelbarrow noticed his home vacuum losing suction because fine dust clogged the pores of its paper bag. A late-night visit to a sawmill showed him industrial centrifugal separators that spun dust out of the air with no fil...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1902, five businessmen in Two Harbors, Minnesota, set out to mine corundum for grinding wheels and dug up anorthosite instead, a rock too soft to be useful. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company moved to Duluth, switched to sandpaper and did not pay a dividend until 1916. Under exec...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In January 2003, a worm called SQL Slammer, just 376 bytes long, compromised 75,000 database servers in exactly 10 minutes. It exploited a buffer overflow in Microsoft's SQL Server and its desktop engine, MSDE, arriving on UDP port 1434, the SQL Server Resolution Service. Slammer never wrote it...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Schwerer Gustav, or Heavy Gustav, was an 80-centimeter German railway gun, the largest caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat and the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built, at 1,350 tons. It was conceived in the mid-1930s to break the French Maginot Line, whose forts were protected...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Global Crossing was founded in March 1997 by Gary Winnick, a former bond manager at Drexel Burnham Lambert, with colleagues from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. It started with a $35 million investment, was legally based in Bermuda while operating from New Jersey, and set out to be a Ti...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1987 Michael Riordan, a 29-year-old venture capitalist with a Johns Hopkins medical degree and a Harvard MBA, caught dengue fever overseas and came home determined to fight viruses. With $2 million from his firm he started a company called Oligogen, then paid a California nonprofit $1,000 fo...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Pfizer was founded in 1849 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, whose first hit was santonin, a bitter treatment for intestinal worms flavored with almond toffee and shaped into a candy cone. By the 1880s its main business was citric acid for...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John Deere was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1804 and built a reputation as a skilled blacksmith before debt drove him west in 1836 to Grand Detour, Illinois. Settlers there were stopping every few yards to scrape sticky prairie soil off cast iron plows. In 1837 Deere polished a broken steel saw...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Civil aviation in Dubai began in 1937, when Imperial Airways rented a base for its Empire flying boats on the Horseshoe Route between Britain, Karachi, South Africa and Australia, for about 440 rupees a month including guards' wages. In 1959 Sheikh Rashid ordered a land airport, which opened in...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Los Angeles International Airport began in 1928, when the city leased 640 acres of wheat, barley and lima bean fields in Westchester known as Mines Field. Dirt strips opened that October, Hangar No. 1 went up in 1929 and still stands on the National Register of Historic Places, and the field wa...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Robert Tappan Morris was born in 1965 and grew up in Millington, New Jersey, the son of Robert Morris Sr., a Bell Labs researcher who helped design Multics and Unix and later became chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, part of the NSA. As a high schooler at the Delbarton Sc...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Winnebago Industries grew out of a 1958 rescue effort in Forest City, Iowa, in a county named for the Ho-Chunk people, where businessman John K. Hanson and civic leaders persuaded California's Modernistic Industries to open a travel trailer factory. Five local investors including Hanson bought...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Tripadvisor began in 2000 when Stephen Kaufer, frustrated while planning a family vacation, raised $2 million to build a site where travelers could review hotels for each other. By 2004 it drew 5 million unique visitors a month, was bought by IAC, spun off under Expedia, and later went public....

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! DuPont began in 1802 when French chemist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, fleeing the French Revolution, built a gunpowder mill on Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware, with imported French machinery. It supplied between a third and half of the Union Army's gunpowder in the Civil War, added dyna...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Cracker Barrel started in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, where Shell Oil representative Dan Evans designed a country store with gas pumps to sell more gasoline to highway travelers. The 1970s oil crisis forced the company to drop the pumps and live entirely on food and retail. Its decor is run fro...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Chicago Midway began in 1923 as Chicago Air Park, a 320-acre field with one cinder runway used mostly for airmail. The city leased it in 1926, renamed it Chicago Municipal Airport in 1927, and by 1928 had 12 hangars, four runways and night lighting. A 1930 hangar fire destroyed 27 aircraft, inc...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Cargill began in 1865 in Conover, Iowa, where William Wallace Cargill and his brothers built grain flat houses, the storage bottleneck every farmer had to pass through. When he died in 1909 the company was drowning in debt and issued $2.25 million in gold notes due in 1917. World War I sent gra...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Bayer began in 1863 in Barmen, Germany, when dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott started making synthetic dyes from coal tar chemistry. The same aniline compounds pointed the company toward medicine. In 1899 it launched aspirin, officially credited to chemist F...