bsnsHistory

A man who once said he wouldn't give a hundred dollars for every car in the country ended up building the company that would define the automobile industry for the next century. On September 16, 1908, William Crapo Durant filed paperwork in Trenton, New Jersey, incorporating General Motors for a modest $2,000, less than two weeks later, the new company had raised more than $12 million in stock and begun absorbing rival automakers one after another. Durant, who'd made his first fortune in horse-drawn carriages, applied the same playbook to cars: buy up the competition rather than out-invent it. The episode follows that strategy from its fast start through the bankers who forced Durant out in 1910, his comeback through Chevrolet, and the empire that outlasted him.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Seven months after losing his title in one of boxing's biggest upsets, Muhammad Ali stepped back into the ring against the man who beat him, and the broadcast deal built around that rematch said everything about who the real draw was. On September 15, 1978, Ali faced reigning heavyweight champion Leon Spinks at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, in a rematch ABC paid a record $5.3 million to broadcast live. Ali won a unanimous decision after fifteen rounds, becoming the first fighter in history to win the heavyweight title three times, while the broadcast itself drew an estimated 90 million viewers across roughly 80 countries. The episode traces how the media deal around the fight treated Ali, not the defending champion, as the true commercial center of the event.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A diplomat's personal irritation with mismatched dates on his own letters ended up rewriting an entire nation's calendar. On September 14, 1752, Britain completed its switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, a change championed in Parliament by Lord Chesterfield, whose smoother public performance won him credit for work that actually belonged to the mathematician George Parker, Earl of Macclesfield. Wednesday, September 2, was followed directly by Thursday, September 14, deleting eleven calendar days overnight and forcing Parliament to quickly pass a second law protecting wages, rents, and interest payments from the gap. The famous stories of angry mobs rioting in the streets don't hold up, that legend traces back to a satirical painting of an unrelated election two years later, but the disruption to everyday financial life was real, and it's part of why the UK's tax year still starts on April 6 today. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Some product launches fail quietly. This one sent people into the desert.On September 19, 2012, Apple released iOS 6, replacing Google Maps with its own mapping app across every iPhone. Within days, the new app was riddled with errors, mislabeled landmarks, warped roads, entire towns missing from the map. By December, the glitch had turned dangerous, with Victoria Police in Australia rescuing multiple drivers who had been directed into a remote national park while trying to reach a town forty three miles away. CEO Tim Cook issued a public apology on September 28, an almost unheard of move for Apple, and the company spent years rebuilding its mapping data from scratch.From bsnsBasics, this is bsnsBloopers, the weekly podcast that unpacks the business decisions that sounded smart, until they weren't.Hosted by Ron Trucks. New episodes every Friday.Another lesson from bsnsBloopers, the podcast that proves even smart ideas can blow up.Visit us at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Fourteen years before the city opened its own subway, a company's decision to keep trains running during a labor strike led to the deadliest crash in New York City subway history. On November 1, 1918, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company pressed an untrained dispatcher named Edward Luciano into service after its motormen walked out on strike, and his train derailed in a Brooklyn tunnel, killing at least ninety three people. The wreck became the political origin point for Mayor John Hylan's crusade against privately run transit, and on September 10, 1932, the city opened the first line of its own Independent Subway System, built and operated without the private companies whose decisions had proven so costly. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Everybody knows the story: Grace Hopper found a moth in a computer, taped it into a logbook, and invented the word "bug." On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer really did find a moth jammed in a relay, and it really did get taped into the machine's logbook with the note "first actual case of bug being found." What doesn't hold up is the rest of the legend. The word "bug" had been used by engineers for decades before that afternoon, including by Thomas Edison in 1878, and the logbook entry itself was likely written by someone other than Hopper. What actually happened is that she told the story for the next 45 years until it became permanently attached to her name, a small case study in how a good story from a credible source can outrun the facts. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

It started with a napkin, a dinner date, and a stubborn film critic who wouldn't let a good deal slide. On September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show launched in national syndication, two years after Oprah Winfrey had already beaten Phil Donahue in his own hometown market of Chicago. The national launch repeated the pattern almost immediately, but the real fortune didn't come from the syndication deal itself. It came two years later, when Winfrey formed Harpo Productions and took ownership of the show that had made her famous, becoming the first woman in television history to own the production company behind her own nationally syndicated talk show. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Armed robbers demanded he open the safe. He told them it was locked. It wasn't, and that lie cost him his life.On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger Gang attempted to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, and acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the bank's actually-unlocked safe, falsely claiming it was on a time lock. Armed townspeople converged on the scene, killing two gang members and effectively ending the gang's criminal career for good, though Heywood was shot and killed as the robbers fled. More than 450 banks across the country later contributed to a fund honoring his sacrifice, a moment this episode also uses to examine how far modern bank policy and business insurance have moved from what Heywood chose to do that day.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

There are brands built around a product. And then there are brands built around a feeling. Krispy Kreme was always the second kind.On April 5, 2000, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts went public on the NASDAQ under CEO Scott Livengood, launching one of the most anticipated food IPOs in American history. The stock hit $50 a share and split twice. What followed was an aggressive expansion from 95 stores in 11 states to 367 stores in 38 states, plus international markets, combined with a push into gas stations, supermarkets, and convenience stores that stripped the brand of the scarcity that had made it magnetic for sixty years. By 2005 the stock had collapsed to under $5, the company had filed for bankruptcy protection, and the SEC had opened an investigation into accounting irregularities that eventually resulted in settlements with three former top executives. The brand that had been built on the promise of a warm doughnut you had to seek out had become just another product on a shelf.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.Find more at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Swedish voters rejected this idea outright, 83% against. Twelve years later, the government did it anyway, in a single morning.On September 3, 1967, Sweden executed Dagen H, switching the entire country from driving on the left side of the road to the right, after years of planning by a dedicated government commission and a public information campaign reaching every household. The change addressed a dangerous mismatch, since roughly 90% of Swedish cars were already built for right-hand traffic, and aligned the country with its only two land neighbors, Norway and Finland. Accident rates dropped sharply in the immediate aftermath before gradually returning close to pre-switch levels within two years, a genuinely mixed but historically significant outcome.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A frustrated executive stood in a slow-moving bank line in Texas and imagined a machine that could do the job instead. It took 26 years to officially settle who actually deserved the credit.On September 2, 1969, the first ATM in the United States debuted at a Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre, New York, promising customers a bank that would "open at 9 a.m. and never close again." Inventor Don Wetzel's magnetic card and PIN system removed the need for a human teller from a transaction for the first time, a shift that grew into more than 1.8 million machines nationwide within a few decades. Credit for the invention stayed contested for years, until the Smithsonian formally recognized Wetzel in 1995, presenting him with an ATM card bearing his own name and a number that had never belonged to anyone else.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Alexander Hamilton stood before New York's legislature and passionately defended a plan to save a grieving city. He had no idea what was actually hiding inside it.On September 1, 1799, the Bank of the Manhattan Company opened for business at 40 Wall Street, born from a charter Aaron Burr had written months earlier under the banner of bringing clean water to New York City after a deadly yellow fever epidemic. Buried inside that charter, and championed unknowingly by his own rival, was a clause allowing surplus capital to be used for banking, breaking Hamilton's Federalist party's grip on the city's finances. The rivalry it deepened outlived them both, and decades later, both men's banking institutions merged into the same modern company, JPMorgan Chase.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical case involving violent murder.)A ten-year-old detective department, still recovering from its own corruption scandal, was handed a killer nobody had the tools to catch.On August 31, 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in Whitechapel, London, the first confirmed victim of the killer known as Jack the Ripper. With no fingerprint system, no crime lab, and no established protocol for the crimes they faced, Scotland Yard's detectives improvised under enormous public pressure, producing the first documented criminal profile, early crime scene photography, and a stalled decision over funding bloodhound tracking dogs that proved they worked. The killer was never caught, but the methods invented under that pressure quietly became the foundation of modern criminal investigation.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Some business mistakes happen fast. This one took about fifty years to finish playing out.On June 27, 2026, Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona, Wisconsin sold the last Schlitz ever made, eighty barrels brewed from a 1948 recipe, available only in person, only while supplies lasted. It was a proper sendoff for a brand that had once been the largest brewery in the world. The story of how it got there runs through a series of decisions made in the early 1970s, when Schlitz CEO Robert Uihlein Jr. authorized accelerated batch fermentation, cheaper ingredients, and cost-cutting shortcuts that the company assumed its customers would never detect. They detected them immediately. A 1976 recall of more than 10 million cans and bottles, a 1977 ad campaign so aggressive it was nicknamed "Drink Schlitz or I'll Kill You," and a collapse in market share that ended with the sale of the company to Stroh Brewing in 1982 followed in sequence. When Pabst attempted a revival in 2008, the original recipe had to be reconstructed from scratch because it no longer existed anywhere in the company's records.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

He'd never managed a band before. He built the entire commercial machine behind the biggest one in the world anyway.Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1961, negotiated their first recording contract, redesigned their public image, and secured their breakthrough American television appearances, all before dying of an accidental overdose on August 27, 1967, at age 32. His assistant Peter Brown became the last person to speak with him and the first to deliver the news to the band, in Bangor, Wales, on the same day. What followed, failed self-management, the creation of Apple Corps, and a bitter fight over new management, revealed exactly how much of the Beatles' business Epstein had been quietly holding together all along.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical natural disaster with significant loss of life.)A volcano in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth produced the loudest sound ever scientifically documented, heard 3,000 miles away and felt on barometers worldwide.On August 27, 1883, four explosions destroyed most of the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia's Sunda Strait, killing more than 36,000 people, mostly through the tsunamis that followed, and sending a pressure wave around the globe three and a half times. This episode traces the warnings that preceded the disaster, the global reach of its aftermath, and what got rebuilt quickly versus what never did, before closing on the legal concept of force majeure and why planning for the unplannable matters at any scale, not just a catastrophic one.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A man who'd just lost nearly everything spent a year alone in a backyard shed solving a problem nobody else had managed to crack.On August 25, 1958, in Ikeda, Osaka, Japan, Momofuku Ando launched Chikin Ramen, the world's first instant noodle product, after a year of solitary experimentation following the collapse of a credit union that had wiped out his fortune. Inspired by watching his wife fry tempura, Ando developed a flash-frying technique that let noodles be stored indefinitely and prepared in minutes with nothing but hot water. Wholesalers initially refused to stock it at six times the price of fresh noodles, but Ando built demand directly with consumers, and the product he invented, along with 1971's Cup Noodles, grew into a global industry now serving over 100 billion servings a year.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Those startup sounds probably still mean something to you. Here's the story of the day they first played for the world.On August 24, 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95 with a roughly $300 million promotional campaign, licensing the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" for its commercials, lighting the Empire State Building in the software's logo colors, and giving away 1.5 million free copies of The London Times, the paper's first free issue in 307 years. Seven million copies sold in the first five weeks. What the celebration didn't show was that Bill Gates had already warned his own executives, three months earlier, that the internet was about to change everything, and Microsoft's flagship product still couldn't fully act on that warning in time.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Not every business failure is about a bad idea. Sometimes the idea is exactly right, and everything else is wrong.On May 18, 2000, boo.com shut down at midnight after investors declined a final request for $20 million to keep the company operating. Founded in 1998 by Swedish entrepreneurs Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander, and Patrik Hedelin, boo.com had raised $135 million from backers including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Bernard Arnault of LVMH, and launched simultaneously across 18 countries in November 1999 with 3D product views, a virtual shopping assistant named Miss Boo, and a multi-currency checkout system in seven languages. The problem was that most home internet users in 1999 were on dial-up connections that couldn't load the site. The company was burning roughly $1 million per week with no financial controller and no plan to slow down. Over 400 employees lost their jobs the day the site went dark. The domain name was eventually sold to a travel company and repurposed as a hostel booking website.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Four broke football teams met in a car dealership to stop themselves from competing each other into bankruptcy. A month later, the car brand hosting it all didn't survive nearly as well as the league did.On August 20, 1920, representatives from the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Dayton Triangles, and Cleveland's club met at Ralph Hay's Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, agreeing to a salary cap and shared rules meant to stop escalating costs and player poaching from destroying every team involved. A follow-up meeting on September 17 expanded the group, renamed it the American Professional Football Association, and elected Olympic champion Jim Thorpe as its first president for his fame alone. The league eventually became the NFL, now worth tens of billions of dollars, while the Hupmobile car brand that hosted its birth collapsed entirely by 1940.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A woman built one of the largest fortunes in Gold Rush-era California, and almost nobody around her realized it was happening.Born around August 19, 1814, in a story she herself told differently depending on who was asking, Mary Ellen Pleasant spent decades working publicly as a cook and housekeeper in the homes of San Francisco's wealthiest men, quietly absorbing the financial intelligence they never thought to hide from her. She used it to build restaurants, boarding houses, and a money lending operation that made her one of the richest people in the city, sued successfully to end streetcar segregation in San Francisco in 1866, and told a federal census taker in 1890 that her profession was simply "capitalist."This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A wheel with no memory convinced an entire room it owed them something, and it cost them millions to find out otherwise.On the evening of August 18, 1913, a roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte Carlo landed on black 26 consecutive times, and as the streak grew, gamblers bet increasingly large sums on red, certain the streak was overdue to break. It finally did, on the 27th spin, by which point the casino had collected a fortune from a false belief now known as the gambler's fallacy. This episode traces the event itself, introduces the related sunk cost fallacy, and draws a direct line from a 1913 casino floor to the same reasoning errors still driving bad investment and business decisions today.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Four men set out to fund a recording studio. What they actually built was a financial disaster that became one of the most famous events in American history.Woodstock ran from August 15 to 18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, drawing an estimated 400,000 people against an original expectation of 50,000, and forcing organizers to abandon paid admission entirely once ticket enforcement became impossible. The festival itself lost well over a million dollars, but a documentary film financed through a risky, internally controversial deal with Warner Bros. recouped the losses, won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and helped keep the studio financially afloat at a moment it genuinely needed the win.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Sometimes the product works exactly as advertised, and that is precisely the problem.On January 24, 1996, the FDA approved olestra (oh-LES-trah), a synthetic fat substitute developed by Procter & Gamble researchers Fred Mattson and Robert Volpenhein, who had originally stumbled onto the molecule in 1968 while researching fats for premature infants. By February 1998, Frito-Lay had licensed the ingredient and launched WOW chips nationally, a fat-free line spanning Lay's, Ruffles, Doritos, and Tostitos. First year sales hit $347 million, making WOW the best-selling new food product in the United States that year. But every bag carried an FDA-mandated warning label that mentioned abdominal cramping and loose stools, late night comedy did the rest, and consumer complaints eventually topped 20,000. Sales dropped by half between 1998 and 2000. The WOW brand was quietly retired in 2004. Olestra eventually found its way into eco-friendly deck stains and industrial lubricants.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A phrase gets repeated every election cycle that almost nobody can actually define. This episode traces it back to where it started.On August 13, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act at his California ranch, cutting the top income tax rate from 70% to 50% and reducing capital gains and corporate taxes, the centerpiece of what became known as supply-side or trickle-down economics. The episode explains how the underlying theory actually works, walks through what his own budget director later admitted about the gap between its public explanation and private goals, and lays out the competing evidence, rising capital gains revenue and falling unemployment on one side, record peacetime deficits on the other, that economists still argue over more than four decades later.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A broke mechanic built a better machine in eleven days. It took his lawyer five more years to figure out how anyone could actually buy one.On August 12, 1851, Isaac Singer was granted U.S. Patent No. 8,294 for an improved sewing machine, a design reliable enough to win the patent war that followed and become the foundation of the largest sewing machine company in the world. The machine alone wasn't enough. It took Singer's business partner, lawyer Edward Clark, and his 1856 installment payment plan to make a $100 machine affordable to families earning a fraction of that a year, a financial model that went on to shape how Americans buy cars, appliances, and nearly everything else on credit today.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

The world called her the most beautiful woman alive. It took fifty-five years for anyone to call her an inventor.On August 11, 1942, actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil were granted U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for a frequency-hopping "Secret Communication System," designed to keep Allied radio-guided torpedoes from being jammed by the enemy. The Navy rejected the invention and classified it for the remainder of the war, and the patent expired before either inventor ever saw a cent from it, even after the military quietly adopted a version of the same principle in 1962. The underlying idea eventually became foundational to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, technology billions of people now use every day without knowing where it started.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A man who was never allowed to use his own father's name decided, quietly and without explanation, exactly whose name would be remembered instead.On August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution Act into law, formally establishing an institution funded entirely by a stranger. British scientist James Smithson, who died in 1829 having never once visited the United States, left his fortune to America with a single vague condition attached and no stated reason why, and Congress spent eight years, and nearly lost the money entirely to bad investments, figuring out what to build with it. What resulted is now the largest museum and research complex on earth, free to enter since the day it opened.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

There are product failures, and then there are founder failures. This week's bsnsBloopers has both.On November 5, 2013, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson sat down for a live television interview with Bloomberg TV's Trish Regan and, in the middle of a brand recovery that was actually working, blamed see-through yoga pants on women's bodies. The company had already pulled 17 percent of its inventory, projected $40 to $50 million in lost revenue, and was rebuilding customer trust under CEO Christine Day. Wilson's interview undid months of careful work in a single sentence, and within six months, Day was gone, Wilson had resigned from the board, and Lululemon was rebuilding its entire leadership team.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Two words almost didn't make it into a routine reply on an internet newsgroup, and the internet as we know it might not exist without them.On August 6, 1991, physicist Tim Berners-Lee posted a message to a newsgroup called alt.hypertext, publicly announcing the World Wide Web project for the first time and inviting outside developers to build on what he'd spent two years creating alone at CERN, the European research lab outside Geneva, Switzerland. The decision to open the project rather than protect it, later formalized when CERN placed the Web's code in the public domain in 1993 with no patent attached, cleared the path for the commercial internet that followed within just a few years.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Four failed attempts and a near bankruptcy didn't stop him. A fifth try, and one soaked, sleepless night, finally did the job.On August 4, 1858, the Niagara reached Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and the next morning, August 5, the Agamemnon landed the shore end of the cable at Valentia Island, Ireland, completing the first transatlantic telegraph connection. American merchant Cyrus Field had driven the twelve year project through repeated failures and his own company's financial crisis before this attempt finally held, shrinking transatlantic communication from roughly two weeks down to minutes, at least for the few weeks the cable survived before a wiring mistake burned it out for good.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A signature that didn't stamp anything "rejected" turned out to matter more than most people realized at the time.On June 19, 1987, President Reagan vetoed a bill that would have permanently written the Fairness Doctrine into law, and six weeks later, on August 4, 1987, the Federal Communications Commission voted 4 to 0 to abolish the doctrine outright, ending a 38 year old rule that had required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. Less than a year later, Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated radio show launched, and a business built entirely on unfiltered opinion took off, eventually growing into a talk radio and cable news economy worth billions of dollars.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

A town got its name by accident in 1856, and it took almost ninety years before anyone realized what that name was actually worth.On August 3, 1946, retired industrialist Louis Koch opened Santa Claus Land in Santa Claus, Indiana, the world's first theme park, built specifically so that children visiting the town wouldn't leave disappointed the way his own kids once had. Nine years before Disneyland, and eighty years before today, the park his family still owns and operates started as one man's answer to a promise a town's name had been making for free since 1856.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Some business failures are about bad ideas. This one is about a great idea that took thirteen years to build while the world it was designed for disappeared around it.On November 1, 1998, Iridium LLC launched commercial satellite phone service after thirteen years of development and five billion dollars in investment, offering the first truly global two-way voice communication system requiring no ground-based infrastructure. The handset cost $3,000 and calls ran three to eight dollars per minute at a time when pocket-sized cell phones cost $200 and calls were roughly ten cents a minute. By August 1999 Iridium had filed for bankruptcy with approximately 10,000 subscribers against a projection of 500,000. Motorola uploaded deorbit software to the satellite constellation and prepared to burn it up in the atmosphere. In November 2000 a team of investors led by retired Pan American World Airways CEO Dan Colussy purchased the entire constellation for $25 million. Today Iridium is a publicly traded company worth roughly $3 billion, providing critical communications for the US military, maritime operators, and researchers in the most remote locations on earth.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.Find more at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

The Virginia Company of London did not create the first elected legislature in the Americas out of idealism. They created it because colonists kept dying and leaving, and they needed a reason for people to stay.On July 30, 1619, twenty-two elected delegates gathered in a timber church in Jamestown, Virginia for the first meeting of the Virginia General Assembly. The heat inside was severe enough that one delegate, Walter Shelley, died on the third day. The session passed tobacco quality standards and trade regulations. The same year, an English privateer ship sold a group of captive Africans to Jamestown settlers. Both facts belong to 1619 Virginia.The institution the Company built to solve a staffing problem kept meeting after the Company lost its charter in 1624, kept meeting after Virginia became a royal colony, and eventually produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. A business retention tool with a 157-year return on investment became the template for American democracy.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

When Donald Wollheim called J.R.R. Tolkien in 1964 to ask permission to publish a paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien told him he would never allow his great work to appear in so degenerate a form as a paperback. Wollheim, offended and stubborn, went looking for a legal loophole instead. He found one.On July 29, 1954, George Allen and Unwin had published The Fellowship of the Ring in London, England, printing only 3,500 copies to limit financial risk. All sold within six weeks. For the next decade the book remained available only in hardcover, out of reach for most American readers. In 1965 Ace Books published all three volumes without Tolkien's authorization at 75 cents each, sold over 100,000 copies, and accidentally handed the book to a counterculture audience that turned it into a global institution.Tolkien died in 1973, wealthy in his final years specifically because the format he had called degenerate made his work accessible to the audience his authorized publishers had spent a decade failing to reach.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

At any hour of the day or night during the mid-1970s, the Fairbanks McDonald's was packed with exhausted pipeline workers who had turned it into the second busiest location in the entire chain in the world.On July 28, 1977, the reason for all of it arrived at the marine terminal in Valdez, Alaska: the first barrel of crude oil to complete the full 800-mile journey through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay. The pipeline had cost $8 billion, employed more than 70,000 workers across the full project, and required three years of construction after five years of legal battles, its existence tracing directly to the October 1973 Arab oil embargo, which quadrupled the price of imported oil and turned a previously unviable Arctic oil field into the largest private construction project in American history. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established the year before oil began flowing, captured a portion of the windfall for long-term investment, and every Alaskan resident has received an annual dividend from it ever since. A geopolitical crisis aimed at the United States accidentally built a sovereign wealth fund for the people of Alaska.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

In 1930, Warner Bros. contracted with Leon Schlesinger to produce animated shorts for one reason: Walt Disney was making money with Mickey Mouse, and Warner Bros. wanted the same thing.On July 27, 1940, A Wild Hare introduced Bugs Bunny in his definitive form: cool, Brooklyn-accented, carrot-chewing, and entirely unimpressed by the hunter trying to catch him, the product of a decade of work inside a cramped, bug-infested Warner Bros. bungalow the staff called Termite Terrace. His name came from a mislabeled model sheet, and his catchphrase came from a Texas expression director Tex Avery considered so unremarkable he gave it almost no thought. Within a few years Bugs was the most profitable cartoon character in America, appearing in wartime propaganda alongside Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, and went on to rival Mickey Mouse as the most popular cartoon character of all time. Britannica puts it plainly: only Mickey rivals Bugs for that title, and they got there by going in opposite directions.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard Thursday's episode, start there.When Grant and Ward collapsed in May 1884, Ulysses S. Grant was left with roughly $210 in cash and a cancer diagnosis months away. What followed was one of the most remarkable final acts in American history. Grant agreed to write his military memoirs through Mark Twain's publishing company, Charles L. Webster and Company, at a 70 percent royalty rate - far above the 10 percent Century Magazine had offered.Working five to seven hours a day through terminal throat cancer, communicating increasingly by written notes when he could no longer speak, Grant completed a 285,000-word manuscript on July 18, 1885, five days before his death.Twain deployed 10,000 subscription agents across the northern United States, many of them Union veterans in uniform, selling a two-volume set to a nation mourning the general who had saved it. About 350,000 sets were sold. Julia Grant received approximately $450,000 in royalties. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have never gone out of print.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

This is Part 1 of a two-part episode. Part 2 airs July 24.On July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died in a borrowed cottage at Mount McGregor, New York, at the age of sixty-three. He had been broke for just over a year, ruined by Ferdinand Ward, whose brokerage firm Grant and Ward turned out to be one of the earliest Ponzi schemes in American history. The collapse in May 1884 left Grant and his wife Julia with roughly $210 in cash and nothing else. The cancer diagnosis arrived months later.What Grant did in the time he had left - and what it produced - is the subject of tomorrow's episode. Today's episode covers the fall: the pre-war business failures, the post-presidential financial vulnerability, the Ponzi scheme, and the moment Grant walked into his Wall Street office and found out that the most trusted name in America had been worth exactly nothing in the wrong hands.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

In the summer of 2005, a nature documentary about emperor penguins quietly opened on a handful of art house screens and proceeded to rewrite the business model for documentary filmmaking.On July 22, 2005, Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films expanded March of the Penguins into a wider theatrical release, building on a limited opening that had already generated some of the highest per-screen averages of any film playing that week. The American distributors had repositioned the French science documentary, filmed over 13 months in Antarctica, as an emotional story about family and survival, brought in Morgan Freeman to narrate, and aimed the release at a specific art house audience first. That audience told everyone they knew, and the film expanded from a handful of screens to over 2,500, grossed $127 million worldwide on an $8 million budget, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The platform release strategy triggered a wave of nature documentary theatrical releases that permanently changed how the genre gets funded and distributed.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Davis Tutt thought he had the leverage.On July 21, 1865, the former Confederate soldier walked into the town square of Springfield, Missouri, wearing a gold pocket watch that didn't belong to him, collected the night before as collateral on a gambling debt the other man disputed. In a frontier economy with no credit bureau, no collection agency, and no court two gamblers were going to trust, public humiliation was the only enforcement tool available. Tutt miscalculated.Wild Bill Hickok crossed the square to meet him, and a single shot ended the confrontation that historians now consider the first recorded quick-draw gunfight in American history. The jury acquitted Hickok on the grounds that wearing a man's watch in public was justifiable provocation. A Harper's Magazine correspondent arrived a few weeks later, and the myth of the American West was born.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Sometimes the most important business lesson inside a historic moment isn't the achievement itself - it's what happens the morning after.On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to step onto the surface of the Moon, watched by more than 530 million people in the largest television audience in history to that point. The goal President Kennedy had set before Congress in 1961 - landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade - was complete.Within months, public interest had dropped sharply, budget cuts had begun, and three planned Apollo missions had been cancelled. By 1973, NASA's own budget submission stated simply that the program's objectives had been accomplished and no further funding was required. The race was over. The engine that had powered it had nothing left to run on.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Sometimes the idea is right and everything else is wrong.On April 6, 2020, Quibi launched as the most well-funded streaming debut in history, backed by $1.75 billion from Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Sony, MGM, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, with original programming from Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, and Chrissy Teigen among others. Founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, and led by CEO Meg Whitman, the platform offered premium short-form video in episodes of five to ten minutes built exclusively for mobile phones. It projected seven million subscribers in its first year. It reached approximately 500,000. On October 21, 2020, six months and fifteen days after launch, Katzenberg called investors to say Quibi was shutting down. The content library was later sold to Roku for less than $100 million.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.Find more at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

The parking problem in downtown Oklahoma City in the early 1930s was not what anyone thought it was.On July 16, 1935, Carl Magee's solution went into the ground: 175 coin-operated parking meters along 14 blocks of downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the first in the world. Magee had identified the real problem as turnover rather than congestion, and his Park-O-Meter gave drivers one hour for a nickel with a $20 fine for anyone who overstayed. Half the city filed lawsuits, at least one man rode a horse into downtown in protest, and downtown merchants immediately demanded more. By the early 1940s, more than 140,000 meters were operating across the United States, and the mechanism Magee built in 1932 is still running today, just without the coin.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Few objects in history have done more business work than a broken slab of rock pulled from a demolition site.On July 15, 1799, French engineer Pierre-François Bouchard uncovered the Rosetta Stone while tearing down a fort wall near the Egyptian port town of Rosetta during Napoleon's campaign to disrupt British trade routes to India. The stone carried the same government decree in three scripts, hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Greek, issued in 196 BCE to confirm the divine rule of King Ptolemy V. It took more than two decades and two rival scholars, England's Thomas Young and France's Jean-François Champollion, before hieroglyphics could be read again, and when Champollion announced his breakthrough in 1822, an entire civilization's worth of tax records, property disputes, and trade agreements became readable for the first time in over a thousand years.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

The First Amendment was seven years old when Congress contradicted it.On July 14, 1798, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous, or malicious writing about the United States government, and the law was used almost exclusively against newspaper editors and pamphlet publishers who supported the opposing Democratic-Republican party. At least 17 people were indicted, including Matthew Lyon, a sitting congressman from Vermont who was convicted for criticizing President John Adams and sentenced to four months in a jail cell shared with felons. Lyon ran his re-election campaign from that cell and won by a landslide, and the prosecuted editors became folk heroes whose treatment helped sweep the Federalists from power in the election of 1800, ending them as a major national political force. The legal question the Act raised outlived it by more than a century, resurfacing in a new Sedition Act in 1918 and in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's evolving opinions on free speech, before the modern framework for press freedom was finally established in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, 166 years after the original law passed.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Nobody in Montevideo in 1930 was building a $7 billion media property. They were just trying to get thirteen teams to show up.On July 13, 1930, the first two matches in FIFA World Cup history were played simultaneously in Uruguay's capital city, with France defeating Mexico 4-1 and the United States defeating Belgium 3-0 in front of a crowd of 4,444 people. Most of Europe had declined to make the three-week sea voyage, and Uruguay had secured hosting rights by offering to pay every team's travel and accommodation costs, a commercial investment rather than generosity, timed to a country celebrating both a constitutional centenary and back-to-back Olympic gold medals in soccer. The commercial model FIFA stumbled into that summer, one event every four years with the winner taking everything, became one of the most powerful structures ever built around a sport, compounding through television rights and sponsorship deals until the tournament generated more than $7 billion per cycle. The governance failures followed the money, culminating in a 2015 U.S. Department of Justice indictment of 14 FIFA officials over a 24-year bribery scheme worth more than $150 million.From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Not every business failure is the story of a bad idea. Sometimes it's the story of a great idea that got used against its own inventor.On February 5, 1982, Laker Airways, the British budget airline that had carried over a million transatlantic passengers in its first year of operation, collapsed with debts of £270 million after a four-hour board meeting at London Gatwick Airport. Founder Sir Freddie Laker, who had spent six years fighting governments on both sides of the Atlantic to launch his revolutionary Skytrain service, watched his airline fold while 2,500 employees lost their jobs and 6,000 passengers were stranded mid-trip. A court later confirmed that major carriers including British Airways, Pan Am, and TWA had engaged in illegal cartel behavior and coordinated predatory pricing specifically designed to drive Laker out of business. The subsequent antitrust settlement totaled roughly $85 million. The airline never returned.bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks.Find more at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

Not every turning point looks like one at the time.On July 9, 1962, a largely unknown artist named Andy Warhol opened his first solo painting exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood, California, displaying thirty-two canvases of Campbell's Soup cans on a shelf designed to mimic a supermarket aisle. A neighboring gallery owner stacked actual soup cans in his window and offered them cheaper, and critics dismissed the show outright. Ferus co-owner Irving Blum sold six of the thirty-two paintings before calling the buyers back, returning their money, and acquiring the entire series himself for $1,000 paid in installments because he believed the collection needed to stay together. By the end of 1962 the art world had reversed its verdict, and a symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art formally validated Pop Art as a legitimate artistic movement. The Campbell's Soup Cans paintings were transferred to the Museum of Modern Art in 1996 in a transaction valued at $15 million, and the framework Warhol built on that shelf still shapes how brands and serious artists collaborate today.This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast where we find the turning points behind the headlines.Produced by bsnsBasics. Hosted by Ron Trucks. New episodes every Monday through Thursday.www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com