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Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Time Warner Cable grew from American Television and Communications, founded in 1968, and Warner Cable, founded in 1973. In 1977 Warner Cable began making its own channels, Pinwheel and Star Channel, which became Nickelodeon and The Movie Channel, and in 1981 it launched MTV. Time Inc. and Warne...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Russia's Sukhoi Su-57, called the Felon by NATO, drew mockery at the Zhuhai Air Show in China when visitors photographed ordinary visible screws on its panels. The jet began with the PAK FA program in 1999, when Russia could afford only one fifth-generation fighter to replace aging MiG-29s and...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport began in 1966 as Aéroport de Paris Nord, planned on open farmland 23 kilometers northeast of central Paris so it could grow without the suburban fights that boxed in Orly and Heathrow. It covers 32.38 square kilometers, about a third of the size of Paris, and spa...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In September 1982 the Danish Navy accidentally fired a live Harpoon anti-ship missile into Lumsås, a quiet vacation housing area, an incident remembered in Denmark as the Hovsa or "Oops" missile. The weapon itself grew out of panic. In October 1967 an Egyptian missile boat sank the Israeli dest...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Tomahawk cruise missile traces its guidance to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the 1970s, when engineers needed a low-flying subsonic missile that could slip under Soviet radar long before GPS was fully operational in the mid-1990s. Their answer was TERCOM, terrain contour m...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Krispy Kreme's yeast-raised recipe came from Joseph LeBeau, an Ohio River barge cook, by way of Ishmael Armstrong's general store in Paducah, Kentucky, where nephew Vernon Rudolph worked in 1933. They moved to Nashville in 1934, and in 1937 Rudolph chose Winston-Salem, North Carolina, because i...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Waffle House opened on Labor Day weekend 1955 in Avondale Estates, Georgia, with a 16-item menu, an open kitchen and 24-hour service. Founders Joe Rogers Sr., a former Toddle House short-order cook and regional manager, and Tom Forkner, the real estate agent who sold him a house, named it for i...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Dairy Queen's soft serve contains 5 percent butterfat, half the 10 percent minimum to be legally called ice cream. J.F. McCullough and his son Alex created the formula, and in 1938 friend Sherb Noble tested it at his Kankakee, Illinois store, selling over 1,600 servings in two hours. The first...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Chicago O'Hare's ORD code comes from Orchard Place, a German-American farming community that became a 2 million square foot Douglas plant during World War II. It built 655 C-54 Skymasters, more than half of all produced, and its test airfield was known as Orchard Field. In 1949 the city renamed...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor was conceived in 1981 to survive Soviet missiles and fighters such as the Su-27 and MiG-29 over a European battlefield, combining stealth, supercruise near Mach 1.5 without afterburners, and dogfighting agility. In the 1990 flyoff, Northrop's YF-23 was faster and...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On September 23, 2019, Thomas Cook, founded in 1841, went into compulsory liquidation, stranding about 600,000 travelers and ending 21,000 jobs. Its decline started with the June 2007 merger with MyTravel Group, pitched as saving over 75 million pounds a year, followed by purchases including Ho...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! This episode walks through a single Wikipedia disambiguation page for the letters RCA and finds them attached to music, medicine, mathematics, sports and warfare. The best known is the Radio Corporation of America, whose trademark has been owned by Talisman Brands since 2022. Its legacy include...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Club Med began in 1950 as a low-cost summer tent colony run by Belgian entrepreneur Gerard Blitz, first on Majorca and then in Djerba, Tunisia, built around sports, nature and social equality. Blitz charged too little to cover his costs and was bankrupt by 1953. His main creditor, tent supplier...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Little Caesars began on May 8, 1959, when Mike and Marian Ilitch opened Little Caesar's Pizza Treat in a Garden City, Michigan strip mall, selling hot dogs, chicken, subs, shrimp and fish alongside pizza. The first franchise opened in Warren in 1962. In 1979 the Pizza Pizza campaign offered two...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Hertz began in Chicago in 1918, when 22-year-old Walter L. Jacobs rented out a dozen Ford Model Ts. John D. Hertz, a salesman stuck with traded-in cars at a dealership, painted them yellow as a taxi fleet and bought Jacobs' business in 1923. General Motors bought the brand in 1927, and Hertz in...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, nicknamed Fat Amy and the Battle Penguin by pilots, grew out of the post-Cold War Joint Strike Fighter program, which aimed to replace the F-16, F/A-18, A-10 and Harrier with one design whose three variants shared 70 percent of their parts. Lockheed's X-35...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey traces back to April 1980 and Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue 53 Americans held in Tehran. At the Desert One rendezvous, helicopters hit a haboob sandstorm and broke down, and one collided with a C-130 in the dark, killing eight service members. Th...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Boston Airport opened in September 1923 at Jeffries Point in East Boston, started scheduled flights to New York in 1927, and was named in 1943 for General Edward Lawrence Logan. Hemmed in by water, it grew by filling in 1,800 acres of Boston Harbor, absorbing Noddle's Island, Apple Island and G...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! AstraZeneca was formed in 1999 by merging Sweden's Astra AB, founded in 1913 by doctors and apothecaries, with Britain's Zeneca, spun out of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1993. From 2013 CEO Pascal Soriot cut jobs and focused research on three hubs, Cambridge, Gothenburg and Gaithersburg, Mar...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1888 Dr. Wallace C. Abbott, a 30-year-old University of Michigan graduate practicing in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, tackled the unreliable strength of liquid plant extracts. He isolated active alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, quinine and strychnine and pressed them into small, she...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On a 2002 surf trip to Australia, Nick Woodman wanted footage of himself on waves, something only sponsored pros with camera crews could get. He named his company GoPro after that goal and his cameras Hero. Funded by $230,000 from his parents and $20 bead and shell belts sold from his Volkswage...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Charlie Ergen, Candy Ergen and Jim DeFranco founded EchoStar Communications in 1980 to sell 10-foot C-band satellite dishes in rural America. In 1987 they applied to the FCC for a direct broadcast license, won the 119 degrees west orbital slot in 1992, launched EchoStar 1 in late 1995 and turne...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! DirecTV traces back to 1985, when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors for $5.1 billion, creating Hughes Electronics. Hughes teamed with Stanley E. Hubbard's United States Satellite Broadcasting and with Thomson Consumer Electronics, and in 1994 DirecTV lau...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Augustus Wolle founded the Saucona Iron Company in Pennsylvania in 1857; it became the Bethlehem Iron Company in 1861 and rolled its first rails in 1863. When the rail market saturated in the 1880s, Navy Lieutenant William Jaques, back from touring European arms makers including Joseph Whitwort...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The E-3 Sentry, the Airborne Warning and Control System, grew out of the look-down problem: the 1960s Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star could not pick low-flying jets out of ground clutter. Westinghouse beat favored Hughes Aircraft with a digital radar that used an 18-bit programmable computer and a...