How Nobel laureates nearly broke Wall Street
How did a room containing two Nobel laureates in risk management build a money machine that nearly destroyed the global financial system? Long-Term Capital Management launched in 1994 with a billion d...
10 Jun 23min
How Mount Pelée Erased Saint-Pierre
On a May morning in 1902, the "Paris of the Caribbean" was wiped out in minutes. Saint-Pierre, Martinique, a sophisticated harbor city of up to 30,000 people, was annihilated by Mount Pelee in the dea...
10 Jun 21min
How Mansa Musa crashed the gold market
In 1324, a king went on a road trip and spent so much gold along the way that he crashed the economy of a neighboring world power for over a decade. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage is one of the most thorough...
10 Jun 23min
How Jerome Kerviel Nearly Broke SocGen
No cigars, no conspiracy, no stolen cent. Jerome Kerviel, son of a blacksmith and a hairdresser from Brittany, an average student with a degree designed for back-office paperwork, sat at a standard-is...
10 Jun 20min
How James Watt hacked the steam engine
The boiling kettle story is a myth, likely manufactured by his own son as a 19th-century PR campaign. James Watt did not invent the steam engine and was never struck by kitchen-table lightning. What h...
10 Jun 22min
How Hairspray and Styrofoam Robbed Antwerp
Two floors beneath Antwerp's diamond district sat a vault straight out of a billionaire's security fantasy: infrared heat detectors, seismic sensors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field on the door, and a...
10 Jun 23min
How Gunpowder Destroyed the Songhai Empire
In 1591, at the Battle of Tondibi, one of the largest and wealthiest empires in African history deployed its trump card: thousands of trained cattle stampeding toward a vastly outnumbered Moroccan for...
10 Jun 20min
How Ethiopia Defeated Italy at Adwa
In 1896, at the height of the Scramble for Africa, a fully equipped European army marched into the Ethiopian highlands expecting a routine colonial conquest. Instead it was annihilated. Emperor Meneli...
10 Jun 24min
