Business History
Business History
It’s the history of business. How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the guy who invented the movies? Former Planet Money hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of businesses big and small and find out what you can learn from those who founded them.Social links:
The DeLorean Saga: Fraud, Drug Deals and Marty McFly's Car
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 gu…
47:59
The Tangled Story of Instant Ramen
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 …
42:04
Billy Beer: When American Beer Hit Bottom, Then Bounced Back
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 inc…
41:13
The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and Sin
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 …
46:11
The Robberiest Robber Baron: The Villainy of Jay Gould
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 pro…
47:11
The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)
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…
38:19
The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy
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. …
47:35
A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag
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 chang…
40:26
The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption
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 so…
40:42
Ida Tarbell: The "Muckraker" Who Beat John D Rockefeller and Big Oil
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 a…
46:26