Business History

Before there was Canada, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company. HBC had its own laws and its own currency, and at one point controlled trade routes from the Arctic to Hawaii. It started cities like Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Victoria. It also fought an actual war with a rival business over pemmican, a traditional indigenous snack made of dried buffalo meat, fat and berries.  Business History&...

Before Reuters was a global news giant, it was a man and 45 homing pigeons. Julius Reuter saw that the telegraph would change how information moved, and he used that to his advantage. He didn’t have to get news out immediately — he just had to be first. Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith follow Reuter from Germany to England, where he scoops The Times of London with news that Europe was...

Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith talk with Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea .  Companies are some of the most powerful institutions in the modern world – right up there with the nation-state. Where did the modern corporation come from? And what do AI and Chinese state-owned firms mean for the future of the company? Connect with us: Fol...

In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business titan. He was a puppeteer on the geopolitical stage, bankrolling a revolution in Honduras and pushing the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected leader.  For decades, Zemurray batt...

We're here with a preview of Blockers, a new audiobook from Michael Lewis, the author of Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and more. In Blockers, Lewis tells the story of a handful of people who dedicated their careers to public service—until the Department of Government Efficiency decided they were a problem. These were people who believed they had a calling—people who kept Americ...

Business History is off this week, so we wanted to keep you entertained with a rerun, in case you missed our Beetle episode the first time around. (You can help us win a Signal Award for this episode by voting here .) The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in N...

Wayne Huizenga came from a long line of trash collectors. It was a rough, fragmented, mom-and-pops business which notoriously attracted mobsters. But Huizenga set out to buy his small competitors - to roll them up - to form the biggest waste management firm in the world.  Huizenga bought up rival companies at a furious pace - several per week - and when he tired of the trash business he looke...

With the news of Warren Buffett stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, we are revisiting an episode from our two-part series on Buffet. Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers and hoarding bottle caps. As a young man, Buffett turn...

Herman Petty was a Chicago barber and bus driver who dreamed of running his own business. When his local McDonald's restaurant was abandoned in 1968, Herman approached the company and said he should be the first black American to be given a hamburger franchise.  Herman and other black pioneers faced unique problems running McDonald's in America's inner cities - but their businesses soon flour...

Concluding our story of Andrew Carnegie's effort to break the unions at his Homestead steel factory, we look at how the plant boss Henry Clay Frick enlisted a private army of Pinkerton detectives to confront the steel workers. Gunfire erupts and there are deaths on both sides.    The so-called battle of "Fort Frick" seems to go the way of the unions - until a young anarchist comes to tow...

In the first of two shows about the fight between the richest man and the unions at his Homestead steel plant - we look at why Andrew Carnegie decided that his workforce deserved a smaller share of his profits and the lengths he went to to cut their wages.     Carnegie grew up in poverty and publicly proclaimed that rich moguls such as he had a duty to aid the poor - but that didn't...

When America’s first president set off to tour his new country, he had no idea where to stay. George Washington slept in some taverns he described as dirty and grim, but also stayed at some delightful inns. In the 1790s, there was no way for travellers to share tips on the nice places to sleep and those to avoid.  Fast forward to today and the rise of peer-to-peer services where we book...

This is a special crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford .  John DeLorean was a top car executive - but he was too maverick to fit into the oppressive corporate culture of GM. He wanted to make a new and exciting sports car - a futuristic stainless steel marvel with distinctive gull-wing doors (which found fame in  Back to the Future) . He just needed someone to give hi...

Momofuku Ando told the world he invented instant ramen noodles in a shed in his backyard. In Japan, there's not one, but two museums celebrating this breakthrough. Only Ando wasn't the first person to flash-fry noodles to preserve them - but he was willing to sue any rival ramen maker.   Ando had suffered repeated business failures and even been jailed for tax fraud - but he created an o...

President Jimmy Carter had a brother, and this brother LOVED beer. Billy Carter was a big 1970s celebrity and a struggling brewery decided to bet on him to revive its fortunes. Together they created  Billy Beer and launched a huge ad campaign. The beverage was a global sensation... except nobody including Billy liked the taste. Billy Beer was a flop.   Billy Beer was emblematic of A...

Before 1450, books were written out by hand. It was slow and expensive. But Johannes Gutenberg borrowed a ton of money to create a printing press that could crank out Bibles and pamphlets and documents in huge numbers. Science, politics and philosophy were all up-ended.  For example, the Catholic Church seized on the invention to sell special certificates absolving people of their sins - a mo...

Jay Gould became hugely rich without ever really making a product or offering a service to benefit his customers. Other "Robber Barons" in the 19th century forged steel or pumped oil to make money - but Gould preferred to manipulate the stock market or bribe judges and politicians to generate a profit.  Even when he was fired from the railway company he mismanaged, he used this inside informa...

Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales. A giant chemical plant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to toothbrushes to electronics. When a reactor vessel fails, the engineers improvise a...

John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage - the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another.  When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. Th...

Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfair and stressful - and made shoppers distrustful that they were getting a good deal. John Wanamaker changed all that.  Wanamaker thought about being a preacher before setting up as a clothes merc...

Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to explore these David versus Goliath battles - and came up with a theory to explain why seemingly solid businesses suddenly lose market share... disruptive innovation.   In his hit book, The...

At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how John D Rockefeller and his company Standard Oil bought or bullied independent firms. Ida's neighbors and even her own father were in Rockefeller's sights.      In adulthood, Ida joined a n...

Benjamin Franklin had a full life - he was a scientist, statesman, and a Founding Father. But we're looking at the huge impact he had as a writer of best-selling business books. Franklin first picked up the pen as a poor, downtrodden teenager to write satire, but as he became richer and more successful he instead shared his entrepreneurial insights with the public.    His sayings about t...

Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago George Washington was fighting the Revolutionary War against the British, but Robert Morris doing something just as vital. He was raising money for the fighting and buying the gunpowder, tents, food and uniforms Washington's army needed.  Morris had been a merchant before the revolution, so didn't see why he shouldn't personally profit from his work supplying t...

Frederic Tudor could get ice any time he wanted. He lived in chilly Boston and his family had a lake that froze over in the winter. Harvesting ice and storing it was a normal thing in New England in the 1800s, but Frederic decided he'd make a fortune if he could ship ice to the warmest places on earth. And  everyone thought this was the dumbest business idea of all time! No one would back Fre...