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 fi...
11 Mar 36min
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...
4 Mar 50min
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...
25 Feb 57min
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...
18 Feb 48min
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 buil...
11 Feb 49min
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 ...
4 Feb 47min
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 livin...
28 Jan 43min
De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part II
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...
21 Jan 42min
