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Spend 100 pounds on a Hoover appliance and receive two round trip tickets to the United States worth about 600 pounds. In 1992 the British arm of an 84 year old brand made that offer in earnest. This episode explains why. Hoover had held half its market for almost 40 years, but recession, rivals such as Dyson, and flops like a talking vacuum cleaner had cut profits from 147 million dollars to 74 m...

Gregor MacGregor was buried with full state honors in a national cathedral in 1845. He had also invented a country, sold its bonds and land in London, and sent hundreds of settlers to a jungle where more than half of them died. This episode asks how one man could be both. Born in 1786 into a Scottish clan whose very surname had once been banned, he bought an army commission at 16, married an heire...

Joan Anderson pitched the idea and the name for one of the best selling toys in history, sealed it with a handshake, and watched 100 million units sell without receiving a dime. This episode tells her story. On a trip back to her native Australia in the 1950s she saw schoolchildren twirling bamboo rings around their waists, a craze so strong that Sydney teachers used the hoops in physical educatio...

The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo is remembered through a music hall hit, a 1935 film, and a stage musical. The real Charles Deville Wells was a serial fraudster. Born in Hertfordshire in 1841 and raised in France, he grew up fluent in two cultures and able to vanish across the Channel whenever one country grew too hot. He was also a real engineer: in 1868 he invented a device to regulate...

In 1902 a Paris court forced open the iron safe that had backed twenty years of bank loans. Creditors expected the Crawford millions in bearer bonds. They found old newspapers, a trouser button, and an Italian coin. This episode tells how Therese Humbert, born Therese Daurignac to a peasant family in 1856, built that illusion. She learned from a father who waved dubious parchments to claim noble b...

In 1983 Bernard Ebbers and three partners sketched a company in a motel coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Fifteen years later it completed what was then the largest corporate merger in United States history. This episode traces how Long Distance Discount Services became WorldCom by buying more than 60 telecommunications firms, outbidding AT&T and Sprint for Advanced Telecommunications i...

Charles Van Doren was a Columbia University English professor from a family of Pulitzer Prize winning writers. In November 1959 he sat before Congress on national television and confessed to being the face of the biggest fraud in early broadcasting. This episode explains how he got there. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling let networks hand out large cash prizes, and NBC launched Twenty-One in September...

A banknote with a face value of 100 quintillion, a one followed by 20 zeros, could buy about 20 US cents of goods. That was the Hungarian pengo in 1946, the most extreme hyperinflation on record. This episode follows the currency from birth to death. It was introduced on January 1, 1927 with a League of Nations loan, replacing the ruined korona at 12,500 to one, and its name was chosen to evoke th...

The email from a foreign prince offering 20 million dollars looks like a joke, yet advance fee fraud takes in billions every year. This episode traces its lineage to the Spanish Prisoner letters of the late 18th century and the Letter from Jerusalem documented by Vidocq in the 1830s, then to Nigeria in the 1980s and 90s, where an oil price crash, youth unemployment, and cyber cafes produced the Ya...

Charles Ingram admitted on national television that he did not know what a googol was, chose it anyway, and won one million pounds on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. No champagne followed, only a criminal investigation. This episode looks at the man in the hot seat: born in Derbyshire in 1963, son of an RAF wing commander, a Sandhurst graduate who became a major in the Royal Engineers and served a...

In the summer of 1897 the ships Excelsior and Portland docked with holds full of raw gold, and Seattle's streetcar drivers, policemen, and even its mayor walked off the job. This episode separates the romantic myth of the Klondike from what the journey really demanded. The find itself came on August 16, 1896 at Rabbit Creek, made by George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charley, with the claim f...

J. Paul Getty was the wealthiest private citizen on the planet, and he installed a coin-operated payphone in the hallway of his 72-room English mansion so guests could not run up his bill. This episode tries to reconcile the two men. It starts in Minneapolis in 1892 with strict Methodist parents, follows him to Berkeley and Oxford, and lands on the wound that shaped him: when his father died in 19...

We expect a trillion dollar disaster to have a trillion dollar villain. The Flash Crash of May 6, 2010 had Navinder Singh Sarao, a point and click trader in a messy childhood bedroom in Hounslow. This episode follows the mechanics closely. High frequency firms had spent billions on straight line fiber and co-located servers to win a race measured in microseconds. Sarao could not win that race from...

On May 6, 2010, the Dow fell nearly a thousand points and a trillion dollars in market value disappeared in 36 minutes. Five years later, authorities pointed to Navinder Singh Sarao, a 36 year old trading in sweatpants from his parents' stucco house in West London. This episode explains how he got there: Regulation NMS linked the exchanges, high frequency firms exploited the milliseconds between t...

A boiler room is an outbound call center built to push questionable investments through dishonest, high pressure sales. The name is literal: operators once set up folding tables in the cheapest basements they could rent and packed in brokers who were punished for straying from the script. This episode takes the scam apart like a magic trick, showing how three verifiable facts soften a target for t...

In 1911 the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil broken into 39 companies, a punishment meant to end the most notorious monopoly in American history. Instead it doubled John D. Rockefeller's fortune and left him the wealthiest person on earth. This episode traces how that happened, beginning in the chaotic oil boom of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Rockefeller ignored the gamble of drilling and focuse...

In 1975 Stanford students voted to name their sports teams the Robber Barons. The administration vetoed the choice as disrespectful to founder Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate and one of the very men the phrase was made famous to describe. The term itself is far older. It comes from the German Raubritter, feudal lords who built castles above the Rhine and charged illegal tolls on passing mercha...

The name on your jeans belongs to a man who did not invent them. Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in February 1829, and came to New York at 18 with his mother and two sisters. His brothers Jonas and Louis ran a wholesale dry goods business on Liberty Street, and he began as a peddler, carrying kettles, blankets, and sewing supplies door to door. It was hard labor, and it...

In 1869 the public supply of gold in New York was only about $15 to $20 million, while the country ran on paper greenbacks that could not be exchanged for it. Railroad baron Jay Gould saw that a man with enough money could buy the whole supply and set the price. Only one thing stood in the way: the Treasury held roughly $100 million in gold, and Secretary George S. Boutwell was selling a few milli...

Jack Tramiel started in a Bronx typewriter repair shop in the early 1950s and ended up selling the best selling computer of the 1980s. Along the way his company, Commodore, was nearly destroyed twice by people it depended on: first when its financier Atlantic Acceptance collapsed in a fraud scandal in 1965, then when Texas Instruments began selling finished calculators for less than it charged Com...

The gold standard is remembered as the model of financial discipline, yet no one designed it. In 1717 Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, fixed one gold guinea at 21 silver shillings. The ratio overvalued gold compared with mainland Europe, so merchants brought gold into Britain, bought silver cheaply, and shipped it abroad for profit. Silver drained out of the country, and Britain ended up on...

Isaac Newton's most dangerous opponent was not a rival mathematician. He was William Chaloner, born around 1650 to a poor weaver in Warwickshire and apprenticed to a nail maker in Birmingham, a town notorious for forged groats. Chaloner walked to London in the 1680s, found the guilds closed to him, and worked his way up through the underworld: selling tin watches with hidden sex toys, posing as a...

Savings and loan associations were built to be boring. Neighbors pooled their deposits, and the thrift lent the money back out as 30 year fixed rate mortgages. Then the inflation of the late 1970s arrived, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, and depositors fled to money market funds paying 12 or 13 percent. Thrifts earning 5 or 6 percent on old mortgages were barred by Regulation Q from rai...

After fire burned his wooden Newport house to the ground in 1892, Cornelius Vanderbilt II told architect Richard Morris Hunt to build something that could not burn. The result was The Breakers: five stories of masonry and steel trusses, 70 rooms, almost no structural wood, and a boiler buried in a cavern under the front lawn so that no flame came near the family. Cornelius suffered a stroke in 189...

In the mid 1800s, a stock price traveled only as fast as a runner could carry a slip of paper down Wall Street. Traders in Philadelphia or Boston made do with a single summary once the trading day had closed, which meant acting on prices that had already expired. Then Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company put stock quotes on a dedicated telegraph wire, unveiling his system in New Yor...