bsnsHistory

A financial gamble that nearly cost a company its independence ended up producing one of the most enduring aircraft in aviation history. On September 21, 1961, the helicopter that became the CH-47 Chinook took its first flight, the product of Vertol Aircraft Corporation's high-risk bet on two simultaneous, self-funded helicopter programs, a decision that led directly to Boeing acquiring the compan...

Some empires don't collapse from a bad product. They collapse from a rule nobody read closely enough. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ray Loewen built The Loewen Group into the second largest funeral home company in North America, buying up small, family-owned funeral homes across the United States and Canada while deliberately keeping their local names on the door. In 1995, a contract dis...

NASA wanted to name its first space shuttle Constitution. A woman who'd already saved a canceled TV show with 116,000 letters got a phone call asking her to do it again. On September 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first Space Shuttle orbiter, Enterprise, at Rockwell International's facility in Palmdale, California, with the original Star Trek cast in attendance. The name change came after Bjo Trimb...

A man who once said he wouldn't give a hundred dollars for every car in the country ended up building the company that would define the automobile industry for the next century. On September 16, 1908, William Crapo Durant filed paperwork in Trenton, New Jersey, incorporating General Motors for a modest $2,000, less than two weeks later, the new company had raised more than $12 million in stock and...

Seven months after losing his title in one of boxing's biggest upsets, Muhammad Ali stepped back into the ring against the man who beat him, and the broadcast deal built around that rematch said everything about who the real draw was. On September 15, 1978, Ali faced reigning heavyweight champion Leon Spinks at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, in a rematch ABC paid a record $5.3 million to...

A diplomat's personal irritation with mismatched dates on his own letters ended up rewriting an entire nation's calendar. On September 14, 1752, Britain completed its switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, a change championed in Parliament by Lord Chesterfield, whose smoother public performance won him credit for work that actually belonged to the mathematician George Parker, Earl of Ma...

Some product launches fail quietly. This one sent people into the desert. On September 19, 2012, Apple released iOS 6, replacing Google Maps with its own mapping app across every iPhone. Within days, the new app was riddled with errors, mislabeled landmarks, warped roads, entire towns missing from the map. By December, the glitch had turned dangerous, with Victoria Police in Australia rescuing mul...

Fourteen years before the city opened its own subway, a company's decision to keep trains running during a labor strike led to the deadliest crash in New York City subway history. On November 1, 1918, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company pressed an untrained dispatcher named Edward Luciano into service after its motormen walked out on strike, and his train derailed in a Brooklyn tunnel, killing at l...

Everybody knows the story: Grace Hopper found a moth in a computer, taped it into a logbook, and invented the word "bug." On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer really did find a moth jammed in a relay, and it really did get taped into the machine's logbook with the note "first actual case of bug being found." What doesn't hold up is the rest of the legend. The word...

It started with a napkin, a dinner date, and a stubborn film critic who wouldn't let a good deal slide. On September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show launched in national syndication, two years after Oprah Winfrey had already beaten Phil Donahue in his own hometown market of Chicago. The national launch repeated the pattern almost immediately, but the real fortune didn't come from the syndication d...

Armed robbers demanded he open the safe. He told them it was locked. It wasn't, and that lie cost him his life. On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger Gang attempted to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, and acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the bank's actually-unlocked safe, falsely claiming it was on a time lock. Armed townspeople converged on the scene, killi...

There are brands built around a product. And then there are brands built around a feeling. Krispy Kreme was always the second kind. On April 5, 2000, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts went public on the NASDAQ under CEO Scott Livengood, launching one of the most anticipated food IPOs in American history. The stock hit $50 a share and split twice. What followed was an aggressive expansion from 95 stores in 11...

Swedish voters rejected this idea outright, 83% against. Twelve years later, the government did it anyway, in a single morning. On September 3, 1967, Sweden executed Dagen H, switching the entire country from driving on the left side of the road to the right, after years of planning by a dedicated government commission and a public information campaign reaching every household. The change addresse...

A frustrated executive stood in a slow-moving bank line in Texas and imagined a machine that could do the job instead. It took 26 years to officially settle who actually deserved the credit. On September 2, 1969, the first ATM in the United States debuted at a Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre, New York, promising customers a bank that would "open at 9 a.m. and never close again." Inventor...

Alexander Hamilton stood before New York's legislature and passionately defended a plan to save a grieving city. He had no idea what was actually hiding inside it. On September 1, 1799, the Bank of the Manhattan Company opened for business at 40 Wall Street, born from a charter Aaron Burr had written months earlier under the banner of bringing clean water to New York City after a deadly yellow fev...

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical case involving violent murder.) A ten-year-old detective department, still recovering from its own corruption scandal, was handed a killer nobody had the tools to catch. On August 31, 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in Whitechapel, London, the first confirmed victim of the killer known as Jack the Ripper. With no fingerprint system, no c...

Some business mistakes happen fast. This one took about fifty years to finish playing out. On June 27, 2026, Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona, Wisconsin sold the last Schlitz ever made, eighty barrels brewed from a 1948 recipe, available only in person, only while supplies lasted. It was a proper sendoff for a brand that had once been the largest brewery in the world. The story of how it got th...

He'd never managed a band before. He built the entire commercial machine behind the biggest one in the world anyway. Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1961, negotiated their first recording contract, redesigned their public image, and secured their breakthrough American television appearances, all before dying of an accidental overdose on August 27, 1967, at age 32...

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical natural disaster with significant loss of life.) A volcano in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth produced the loudest sound ever scientifically documented, heard 3,000 miles away and felt on barometers worldwide. On August 27, 1883, four explosions destroyed most of the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia's Sunda Strait, killing...

A man who'd just lost nearly everything spent a year alone in a backyard shed solving a problem nobody else had managed to crack. On August 25, 1958, in Ikeda, Osaka, Japan, Momofuku Ando launched Chikin Ramen, the world's first instant noodle product, after a year of solitary experimentation following the collapse of a credit union that had wiped out his fortune. Inspired by watching his wife fry...

Those startup sounds probably still mean something to you. Here's the story of the day they first played for the world. On August 24, 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95 with a roughly $300 million promotional campaign, licensing the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" for its commercials, lighting the Empire State Building in the software's logo colors, and giving away 1.5 million free copies of The Lo...

Not every business failure is about a bad idea. Sometimes the idea is exactly right, and everything else is wrong. On May 18, 2000, boo.com shut down at midnight after investors declined a final request for $20 million to keep the company operating. Founded in 1998 by Swedish entrepreneurs Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander, and Patrik Hedelin, boo.com had raised $135 million from backers including Gol...

Four broke football teams met in a car dealership to stop themselves from competing each other into bankruptcy. A month later, the car brand hosting it all didn't survive nearly as well as the league did. On August 20, 1920, representatives from the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Dayton Triangles, and Cleveland's club met at Ralph Hay's Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, agreeing to a salary cap...

A woman built one of the largest fortunes in Gold Rush-era California, and almost nobody around her realized it was happening. Born around August 19, 1814, in a story she herself told differently depending on who was asking, Mary Ellen Pleasant spent decades working publicly as a cook and housekeeper in the homes of San Francisco's wealthiest men, quietly absorbing the financial intelligence they...

A wheel with no memory convinced an entire room it owed them something, and it cost them millions to find out otherwise. On the evening of August 18, 1913, a roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte Carlo landed on black 26 consecutive times, and as the streak grew, gamblers bet increasingly large sums on red, certain the streak was overdue to break. It finally did, on the 27th spin, by which point t...