Business History

Hello Business History listeners! We'd like to share an episode from a show you might enjoy. SNAFU with Ed Helms, now in its fourth season, dives into the world’s greatest blunders, the jaw-dropping fiascos and “you can’t make this up” moments that somehow steered history off course.

In this episode: Adam Grant joins Ed to uncover a certain financial fraud deployment that has haunted unsuspecting victims...

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 markets, but the concept is far older than some critics might think. 

We go back centuries to Papal conclaves; hear about how cou...

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 demanded radio stations turn over 10% of their revenues.    

ASCAP's monopoly on music rights was broken, but they'd made...

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, Cadillac and decided to live by "the laws of Paris dressmakers" to make cars that were more stylish and fashionable than the austere, bla...

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 affordable to many more Americans.       

Thanks to Ford’s production line techniques, the Model T became the biggest...

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 France, the humble can would feed armies; sustain bold exploration; and give poor people access to wholesome food all year round. We do...

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.  

The A&P kept its profit margins slim and allowed Americans to buy more food for less - but this wasn't celebrated ...

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 on every kid's lips... but then investors came onboard to help the company expand. Bushnell and his engineers were sidelined, and Ata...

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 their own inventing silicon chips.   

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the rest of "The Traitorous Eight" transformed comput...

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 - the Amazon of the 1890s - but as the nation changed, Sears adapted too and built a vast chain of physical stores. 

Sears fel...

It's 1945. The Volkswagen factory has been bombed and members of the staff have been arrested as war criminals. So how did the company turn around in just a few years and begin making Beetle cars that became a global sensation?

Big political and economic moves helped - but a British Army officer, Walt Disney and a New York ad agency also played pivotal roles in turning a car that Hitler had championed into the favourite ride of sur...

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 Nazism. The Volkswagen - the People's Car - was an obsession of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to transform Germany into a land of drivers - and needed an affordable, but reliable automobile.   

Germany's private auto manufacturers knew the project wa...

Jim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunities in the financial markets. 

Simons and his fierce nerds bought up all the data sets they could find - reports, books, magnetic tapes - and built machine learning algorithms to hunt for tiny market discrepancies they could exploit...

Young Warren Buffett became rich in anonymity - but in the 1980s he became a global star. During the excesses of 1980s Wall Street the middle-aged investor was reluctantly drawn into the spotlight to save troubled companies. And then came tech - which suited Buffett's style even less.  

Warren Buffett couldn't even use a computer - but everyone was telling him to buy tech stocks. How did Buffett navigate the dot com ...

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 turned his focus on scouring business accounts to find companies that had hidden value no one else could spot.

We tell the story of young Warren Buffett as he quietly worked building up...

The stock market was once a Wild West free-for-all. There were few rules or regulations. Investors were more or less gambling, or manipulating stocks to make a profit. This is the world Jesse Livermore came to dominate. He would often bet against the market, making money when businesses failed. 

By 1929, Livermore was rich and famous. And then the Wall Street stock bubble burst. Share prices went through the floor, fortunes di...

Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game's highest payed players. He helped the St Louis Cardinals reach the 1968 World Series... but then got traded. The rules said he had no say in the decision. He either could go to Philly, or quit the sport. So Curt decided to sue.       

Curt argued that Major League Baseball should act like any other business and let workers sell their labor t...

The man who invented the movie camera got on a train in France in 1890 and was never seen again. The wife of Louis Le Prince thought she knew who’d ordered her husband’s disappearance and presumed murder - Thomas Alva Edison.

Many people were simultaneously racing to develop moving pictures - so had Edison decided to bump off his closest rival so he could win? The story of who deserves the credit for the movies is a mur...

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, but he created something more important: the grid. Edison's system of power plants and wires brought lightbulbs to homes and offices and revolutionized modern life.

Edison was adamant that direct current (DC) should power America, and attacked competitors who said that alternating current (AC) was better. This sparked a bitter war between Edison and his rivals - and prompted Edison t...