The Insurers Who ALWAYS Paid Out: The Lloyds of London Story Part I

Edward Lloyd opened a coffee shop near the River Thames in the 1680s - it became a place where ship owners and money men rubbed shoulders and a trade in marine insurance sprang up.  The coffee-drinking insurers eventually decided to form an association and agree on a set of rules - and so Lloyd's …

Betting on Taylor Swift or Who'll Be Made Pope: The Past and Present of Prediction Markets

A live mash-up between Business History and Bloomberg's Everybody's Business. On platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket you can bet on just about anything - from Taylor Swift's album sales to whether President Trump will say a certain word in a speech. Many people worry about these new prediction ma…

Bowie, McCartney & Michael Jackson: How Songwriters Learned to Play Hardball

Once if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert halls, cafes and nightclubs to claim back royalties. Seemed fair... except ASCAP started a war when it …

How GM Beat Ford

Ford was the pre-eminent American car maker and Henry Ford was the king of modern manufacturing, until a Michigan cigar salesman decided to consolidate a bunch of small auto companies into a single firm to defeat the Colossus of Detroit.  General Motors united the likes of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadil…

Henry Ford Invented the Modern World... Then Got Left Behind

Farm boy Henry Ford hated toil. If only someone could invent ways to work more efficiently, as well as cheap, reliable machines to take some of the strain. Ford was a tinkerer and a lover of the newly invented automobile - so he started building cars in a new, streamlined way that made them afforda…

War, Exploration and Beer: How the Tin Can Changed the World

Old-fashioned ways of preserving food made for salty, vinegary or chewy meals - but it was often a choice between that or starving. Soldiers, explorers and ordinary people alike faced malnutrition and food poisoning - but then came a French revolution... in a can!  First invented in Napoleonic Fra…

The War on The A&P: When America Decided Cheap Groceries Were "Evil"

Mom and Pops grocery stores were charming, but inefficient. They contributed to Americans either spending a lot on their food or having to go hungry. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company changed the entire model. The A&P established a chain of stores selling branded goods at the lowest prices…

When E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Tanked Atari

Nolan Bushnell loved weed, hot tubs and games... especially games. He took computer games out of the laboratory and put them in bars. His arcade game Pong was a monster hit, so he set up Atari to build a home games console which became the must-have Christmas present of 1975.  Atari was the name o…

How a Bad Boss Kickstarted Silicon Valley

William Shockley was an electronics genius - he even won a Nobel Prize - but he was an awful boss. Shockley was a cruel, paranoid micromanager. And this annoyed the staff of brilliant young engineers he'd assembled in a quiet town in Northern California. In fact, they quit and set up a company of t…

Sears: Cocaine Wine, Shotguns, and the World’s Tallest Tower

Richard Warren Sears started off selling pocket watches - then published a catalog full of hundreds and hundreds of products from shotguns to cocaine wine. Sears & Roebuck offered even Americans living on remote farms the chance to shop like city dwellers. The catalog became an American institution…