bsnsHistory

There are product failures, and then there are founder failures. This week's bsnsBloopers has both. On November 5, 2013, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson sat down for a live television interview with Bloomberg TV's Trish Regan and, in the middle of a brand recovery that was actually working, blamed see-through yoga pants on women's bodies. The company had already pulled 17 percent of its inventory, p...

Two words almost didn't make it into a routine reply on an internet newsgroup, and the internet as we know it might not exist without them. On August 6, 1991, physicist Tim Berners-Lee posted a message to a newsgroup called alt.hypertext, publicly announcing the World Wide Web project for the first time and inviting outside developers to build on what he'd spent two years creating alone at CERN, t...

Four failed attempts and a near bankruptcy didn't stop him. A fifth try, and one soaked, sleepless night, finally did the job. On August 4, 1858, the Niagara reached Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and the next morning, August 5, the Agamemnon landed the shore end of the cable at Valentia Island, Ireland, completing the first transatlantic telegraph connection. American merchant Cyrus Field had driven...

A signature that didn't stamp anything "rejected" turned out to matter more than most people realized at the time. On June 19, 1987, President Reagan vetoed a bill that would have permanently written the Fairness Doctrine into law, and six weeks later, on August 4, 1987, the Federal Communications Commission voted 4 to 0 to abolish the doctrine outright, ending a 38 year old rule that had required...

A town got its name by accident in 1856, and it took almost ninety years before anyone realized what that name was actually worth. On August 3, 1946, retired industrialist Louis Koch opened Santa Claus Land in Santa Claus, Indiana, the world's first theme park, built specifically so that children visiting the town wouldn't leave disappointed the way his own kids once had. Nine years before Disneyl...

Some business failures are about bad ideas. This one is about a great idea that took thirteen years to build while the world it was designed for disappeared around it. On November 1, 1998, Iridium LLC launched commercial satellite phone service after thirteen years of development and five billion dollars in investment, offering the first truly global two-way voice communication system requiring no...

The Virginia Company of London did not create the first elected legislature in the Americas out of idealism. They created it because colonists kept dying and leaving, and they needed a reason for people to stay. On July 30, 1619, twenty-two elected delegates gathered in a timber church in Jamestown, Virginia for the first meeting of the Virginia General Assembly. The heat inside was severe enough...

When Donald Wollheim called J.R.R. Tolkien in 1964 to ask permission to publish a paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien told him he would never allow his great work to appear in so degenerate a form as a paperback. Wollheim, offended and stubborn, went looking for a legal loophole instead. He found one. On July 29, 1954, George Allen and Unwin had published The Fellowship of the Ring...

At any hour of the day or night during the mid-1970s, the Fairbanks McDonald's was packed with exhausted pipeline workers who had turned it into the second busiest location in the entire chain in the world. On July 28, 1977, the reason for all of it arrived at the marine terminal in Valdez, Alaska: the first barrel of crude oil to complete the full 800-mile journey through the Trans-Alaska Pipelin...

In 1930, Warner Bros. contracted with Leon Schlesinger to produce animated shorts for one reason: Walt Disney was making money with Mickey Mouse, and Warner Bros. wanted the same thing. On July 27, 1940, A Wild Hare introduced Bugs Bunny in his definitive form: cool, Brooklyn-accented, carrot-chewing, and entirely unimpressed by the hunter trying to catch him, the product of a decade of work insid...

This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard Thursday's episode, start there. When Grant and Ward collapsed in May 1884, Ulysses S. Grant was left with roughly $210 in cash and a cancer diagnosis months away. What followed was one of the most remarkable final acts in American history. Grant agreed to write his military memoirs through Mark Twain's publishing company, Charles L. Webst...

This is Part 1 of a two-part episode. Part 2 airs July 24. On July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died in a borrowed cottage at Mount McGregor, New York, at the age of sixty-three. He had been broke for just over a year, ruined by Ferdinand Ward, whose brokerage firm Grant and Ward turned out to be one of the earliest Ponzi schemes in American history. The collapse in May 1884 left Grant and his wife...

In the summer of 2005, a nature documentary about emperor penguins quietly opened on a handful of art house screens and proceeded to rewrite the business model for documentary filmmaking. On July 22, 2005, Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films expanded March of the Penguins into a wider theatrical release, building on a limited opening that had already generated some of...

Davis Tutt thought he had the leverage. On July 21, 1865, the former Confederate soldier walked into the town square of Springfield, Missouri, wearing a gold pocket watch that didn't belong to him, collected the night before as collateral on a gambling debt the other man disputed. In a frontier economy with no credit bureau, no collection agency, and no court two gamblers were going to trust, publ...

Sometimes the most important business lesson inside a historic moment isn't the achievement itself - it's what happens the morning after. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to step onto the surface of the Moon, watched by more than 530 million people in the largest television audience in history to that point. The goal President Kennedy had set before Congress in 1961 -...

Sometimes the idea is right and everything else is wrong. On April 6, 2020, Quibi launched as the most well-funded streaming debut in history, backed by $1.75 billion from Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Sony, MGM, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, with original programming from Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, and Chrissy Teigen among others. Founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairm...

The parking problem in downtown Oklahoma City in the early 1930s was not what anyone thought it was. On July 16, 1935, Carl Magee's solution went into the ground: 175 coin-operated parking meters along 14 blocks of downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the first in the world. Magee had identified the real problem as turnover rather than congestion, and his Park-O-Meter gave drivers one hour for a nick...

Few objects in history have done more business work than a broken slab of rock pulled from a demolition site. On July 15, 1799, French engineer Pierre-François Bouchard uncovered the Rosetta Stone while tearing down a fort wall near the Egyptian port town of Rosetta during Napoleon's campaign to disrupt British trade routes to India. The stone carried the same government decree in three scripts, h...

The First Amendment was seven years old when Congress contradicted it. On July 14, 1798, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous, or malicious writing about the United States government, and the law was used almost exclusively against newspaper editors and pamphlet publishers who supported the opposing Democratic-Republican p...

Nobody in Montevideo in 1930 was building a $7 billion media property. They were just trying to get thirteen teams to show up. On July 13, 1930, the first two matches in FIFA World Cup history were played simultaneously in Uruguay's capital city, with France defeating Mexico 4-1 and the United States defeating Belgium 3-0 in front of a crowd of 4,444 people. Most of Europe had declined to make the...

Not every business failure is the story of a bad idea. Sometimes it's the story of a great idea that got used against its own inventor. On February 5, 1982, Laker Airways, the British budget airline that had carried over a million transatlantic passengers in its first year of operation, collapsed with debts of £270 million after a four-hour board meeting at London Gatwick Airport. Founder Sir Fred...

Not every turning point looks like one at the time. On July 9, 1962, a largely unknown artist named Andy Warhol opened his first solo painting exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood, California, displaying thirty-two canvases of Campbell's Soup cans on a shelf designed to mimic a supermarket aisle. A neighboring gallery owner stacked actual soup cans in his window and offered them cheap...

Some turning points arrive as negotiations. This one arrived as four warships. On July 8, 1853, U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay in Japan, deliberately ignoring Japanese orders to proceed to Nagasaki, the only port where foreign vessels were permitted, and anchored within sight of the capital. Japan had maintained a strict isolation policy since 1639, and Perry's steam-powered...

Some turning points arrive with fanfare. This one arrived with a confirmation vote of 99 to nothing. On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor to the United States Supreme Court, making her the first woman in the Court's 191-year history to be seated as a justice. O'Connor had graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School and still could not get a single law firm...

Before television and the internet, the circus coming to town was one of the biggest live events a community would see all year. On July 6, 1944, roughly seven thousand people packed into the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus big top in Hartford, Connecticut for an afternoon matinee. A small flame near the sidewall spread through the waterproofed canvas in minutes, and the fire killed 16...