bsnsHistory

11:08

The Company That Bought Its Own Parent

bsnsHistory ·

2026/10/05

A Washington courtroom forced the largest company in the world to break itself into pieces, and one of the smallest pieces eventually bought the parent back.On October 5, 1983, Southwestern Bell Corporation was incorporated as the new holding company for a regional telephone carrier caught up in the court-ordered breakup of AT&T, following Judge Harold Greene's August 1982 ruling that dismantled the Bell System's century-old monopoly. What started as one of the smallest, least remarkable pieces

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12:04

Business Blooper: Ten Seconds That Cost Him Everything

bsnsHistory ·

2026/10/02

Some companies collapse over years. This one started collapsing in the middle of a laugh.On April 23, 1991, Gerald Ratner, CEO of the world's largest jewellery retailer, told a room of six thousand business leaders and journalists at the Institute of Directors' conference that his own products were "total crap," joking that one of his earring sets wouldn't outlast a supermarket sandwich. The remark went national overnight. Customers stopped buying, roughly £500 million was wiped off the company's

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10:23

Coffee Growers Finally Got a Day

bsnsHistory ·

2026/10/01

Coffee is one of the most valuable traded commodities on earth, and for most of its modern history, almost none of that value made it back to the people growing it.On October 1, 2015, the International Coffee Organization launched the first International Coffee Day at Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy, a coordinated effort across dozens of countries to shift the industry's focus from consumers to the smallholder farmers who supply it. The first year saw roughly seventy events across thirty-five countries,

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10:32

Eighty Years to the Last Booth

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/30

A sheet metal shop that started out making window frames in Oakland, California ended up building more than 600,000 of the phone booths that once lined nearly every American street corner. On September 30, 2005, Benner-Nawman, Inc. assembled its last telephone booth at its manufacturing plant in Wickenburg, Arizona, closing out a business that began in 1950 when Pacific Telephone and Telegraph first asked the company to design a sturdier aluminum-and-glass replacement for the old wooden booths. The

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10:25

The Bottle That Changed Every Bottle

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/29

(Content note: this episode discusses a historical event involving the death of a child and other family members.)A 12-year-old girl took one Tylenol capsule for a sore throat. She was dead within hours, and six more people would die the same way that week.On September 29, 1982, cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules killed seven people across the Chicago area, including Mary Kellerman and three members of the Janus family, who unknowingly took pills from the same tainted bottle while

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09:58

A Mess That Became Medicine

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/28

Alexander Fleming almost threw the dish away. On September 28, 1928, the London bacteriologist returned from a two week vacation to find a stray mold had wiped out the staph bacteria in one forgotten petri dish, the accidental discovery that would eventually become penicillin, the world's first antibiotic. Fleming published his findings the next year to almost no attention, and the discovery sat mostly dormant for a decade until Oxford researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified it into

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12:46

Business Blooper: The Machine That Was Supposed to...

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/25

Some inventions fail loudly. This one just quietly disappeared into tour groups and mall cops.On December 3, 2001, inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the Segway on Good Morning America after months of secretive hype that had tech titans like Steve Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr predicting it would reshape transportation itself. A five thousand dollar price tag, two major safety recalls, a very public presidential tumble, and city bans across the country kept it from ever reaching that promise. The

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09:33

Eighteen Thousand Dollars in a Hotel Room

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/24

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler had already turned down a bond salesman's strange proposals more than once by the time the man showed up at his hotel room with cash in hand. On September 24, 1933, Gerald MacGuire visited Butler in Newark, New Jersey, during a National Guard reunion, and threw $18,000 in thousand dollar bills onto the bed, the latest in a series of approaches that would eventually grow into an alleged plan backed by wealthy industrialists to install Butler as a

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10:51

The Speech That Rewrote Political Crisis Management

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/23

Minutes before he walked on set, his own party's staff told him it wouldn't matter how well he did. He went on television anyway.On September 23, 1952, at 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Senator Richard Nixon delivered a live, unscripted half hour broadcast from the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, defending himself against allegations of a secret $18,000 campaign fund and famously refusing to give up his family's cocker spaniel, Checkers. The speech reached tens of millions of Americans directly,

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10:00

The Coffee Shop That Built the American Business...

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/22

Some of the most lasting institutions start with the smallest possible meeting.On September 22, 1949, Kansas City businessman Hilary Bufton Jr. sat down in a downtown coffee shop with three working women, Shirley Cupp, Irma Beisel, and Frances Stuckey, and pitched an idea he couldn't stop thinking about: a professional organization open to women across every occupation, not just one trade. By the end of the conversation, the four of them had incorporated the American Business Women's Association

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12:16

The Gamble That Learned to Fly

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/21

A financial gamble that nearly cost a company its independence ended up producing one of the most enduring aircraft in aviation history. On September 21, 1961, the helicopter that became the CH-47 Chinook took its first flight, the product of Vertol Aircraft Corporation's high-risk bet on two simultaneous, self-funded helicopter programs, a decision that led directly to Boeing acquiring the company just a year earlier. Two decades later, a single Royal Air Force Chinook nicknamed Bravo November

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12:56

Business Blooper: Buried by a Bonding Rule

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/18

Some empires don't collapse from a bad product. They collapse from a rule nobody read closely enough.Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ray Loewen built The Loewen Group into the second largest funeral home company in North America, buying up small, family-owned funeral homes across the United States and Canada while deliberately keeping their local names on the door. In 1995, a contract dispute with Biloxi funeral home operator Jeremiah O'Keefe went to trial in Jackson, Mississippi, and a jury

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10:05

When Fans Renamed A Spacecraft

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/17

NASA wanted to name its first space shuttle Constitution. A woman who'd already saved a canceled TV show with 116,000 letters got a phone call asking her to do it again.On September 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first Space Shuttle orbiter, Enterprise, at Rockwell International's facility in Palmdale, California, with the original Star Trek cast in attendance. The name change came after Bjo Trimble, who had organized the 1968 letter-writing campaign that saved Star Trek from cancellation, led a

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10:06

Two Thousand Dollars and an Empire

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/16

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

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10:16

Spinks Kept the Belt. ABC Wanted Ali.

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/15

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

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10:29

The Eleven Days Parliament Had to Delete

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/14

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

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11:10

The Wreck That Built a Subway

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/10

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

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10:42

The Bug That Got the Credit Wrong

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/09

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,

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09:58

Beating Donahue, Then Buying Herself Back

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/08

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

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10:15

The Bank That Wouldn't Open The Safe

bsnsHistory ·

2026/09/07

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

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