The Runners Up Club

The naturalist whose contemporaneous insights into “the transmutation of species” may have shared top billing with Darwin had he not gone off - script, refusing to boot god entirely from his theory of evolution.

The post-war era found most Americans turning to the famously well-trusted "Uncle" Walter Cronkite on CBS for their eyes on the world, while the gloriously opinionated Howard K. Smith, his ratings rival, was Edward R. Murrow's truer heir, and progenitor of today's primetime news anchors.

The likable Australian golfer's frequent appearances in the runner-up slot raises questions about the perils of catastrophic thinking and self fulfilling prophecies in sports. But also lessons in flipping the script in life.

A Rhode Island aristocrat who became a widowed plantation owner in the Reconstruction Era South may have been more instrumental to the invention of the cotton gin than Eli Whitney.

A long-standing Mohawk Valley food company forfeited any chance to upend rival Gerber’s at the top of the baby food market in a case of spectacularly wrong-headed and unethical management.

This pioneering escapologist captivated audiences in her brief but brilliant time under the Vaudeville lights. She aroused Harry Houdini’s ire when she stole his signature trick. Did he retaliate by trying to blind her?

Louis Pasteur’s bitter rival staked everything on a discredited theory of the role that germs play in the body. If his theories regain a measure of respectability, as many believe they already have, will statues of Antoine Bechamp appear beside those of Pasteur?

In Gangland Chicago, Al Capone emerged as Public Enemy Number 1. Despite being massively outgunned, particularly on one particular Valentine's Day, his rival Adelard Cunin, known to history as Bugs Moran, gave him a hard run for his dirty money.

Did a lepidopteran girl-monster like Mothra ever have a chance against a reptilian guy-monster like Godzilla? In the skies over Tokyo, absolutely. In the teenage brains of testosterone-addled mid-century monster movie fans. Not so much.

In a cautionary tale for all of today’s artisanal food-makers, a small bakery sees its innovative new cookie concept copied by a much larger rival. Losing market share is bad enough but being transformed in the public imagination from original to knockoff may sting even more.

In the 1920’s, Harold Lloyd’s silent film stardom outshone Charlie Chaplin's. Today, we remember The Little Tramp while The Glasses Character is a cinephile’s trivia question answer.

In the world of playing card design, there’s the classic Bicycle deck and then there’s everything else. Is it any wonder a fox-hunting dandy didn’t emerge as the nation’s most popular? Probably not.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia was the sort of place where more than one “holy man” had a legitimate claim to the title The Mad Monk. Rasputin won.

In an early standards war played out across the fields of Industrial England, an engineering genius loses out to a more widely adopted, though possibly inferior, system.

Few artists create a style so distinct that it is recognizable to an untrained eye. Johannes Vermeer is one. Meet the now-obscure artist who Vermeer displaced from the pantheon of Dutch Masters.

Jesse Owens’ greatest rival might have claimed a share of the sprinter’s four gold medals and a place beside him in history exposing the idiocy of Hitler’s Aryan racism… but for a common muscle pull.

A short intro to The Runners Up Club podcast, a series about second- and third-bests, from near misses to no chancers. It's an idiosyncratic series produced by, one hopes, people who are not idiots.