Six Very Short Stories about Business History
Today we republish an excerpt from the book I wrote twenty-one years ago, including some short but sweet diverse business history stories. The original has been slightly edited and we have added a few more pictures. (The complete book, expanded but only available as...
Gimbel Brothers Department Stores: Dust to Dust
The retailing industry is a continuous story of the rise and fall of companies. No enterprise stays on top forever in this highly competitive field that touches our lives every day. Today we look at a company, now long forgotten, named Gimbel...
Father of Modern Sales: The Remarkable Mr. Patterson
In our article on the three greatest companies in American history, we listed both General Motors and IBM. Neither of those companies would have been the great successes they were without the contributions of proteges of John Henry Patterson, though he did not...
Two Billion Passengers a Day: The Otis Story
On this 4th of July, it is appropriate to honor the long history of one of America’s great companies. Elisha Otis perfected the first commercially successful elevators, both for freight and passengers, before the Civil War. The organization he founded, the...
Fast Food Before Fast Food: The Original Food Trucks
In the nineteenth century, restaurants were patronized by the wealthy and by travelers (at stagecoach stops, inns, and on trains and in train stations). Most workers brought their lunch from home. Over time, especially in cities, diners had more options....
America’s Largest Airlines 1950-2019 in Two Animated Charts
The United States airline system, one of the technological and business wonders of the twentieth century, evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. With early subsidies from the Post Office for carrying mail, airplanes began connecting US cities. With successive air...
Two Books: The American West and Business History
July 9 is the deadline for our high school essay contest, with $7500 in prizes, including $3000 for the best essay. PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! …. and, by the way, this is the 100th issue of our free weekly newsletter! Today we recommend two books for our fellow...
Gone with the Wind: Amazon Spends $8.45 Billion but Doesn’t Get the Best of M-G-M
In order to bolster their Amazon Prime Video streaming service, Amazon is buying the legendary M-G-M, probably the most famous of the great movie studios, for $8.45 billion. This will be the second biggest acquisition in Amazon’s history, exceeded only by its...
Ahmet Ertegun: America’s Greatest Music Man
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Ahmet Ertegun did as much as anyone to shape the popular music that serves as the soundtrack for our daily lives. As the founder and leader of Atlantic Records for almost sixty years,...
Business History on the Rise
On May 8, 2019, two years ago, four of us launched the American Business History Center. As enumerated below, we are pleased with the growth of our weekly newsletter and our website traffic (shown above). Your donations have helped us continue our work and will help...
Americans Vote with Their Feet
Last week, the Census Bureau published their annual estimates of population, as of July 1, 2020. Population trends underly all economic activity, so we study that data as soon as it is released. The fastest growing and shrinking cities and metropolitan areas...
Superwealth: A Historical Perspective
Few business subjects fascinate people as much as the very wealthy. Our obsession with celebrity goes back centuries but seems to have accelerated in recent decades. Forbes produced its first list of the richest Americans in 1982 and later started publishing it...
Success Lost & Found: Sherwin-Williams
While most big companies disappear over time (as shown in our recent newsletter), some figure out how to survive and prosper decade after decade, even century after century. But is the journey from founding to long-term durability a straight path? Today...
Big Rich, Big News, & A Short Book
Big Rich Forbes magazine just released their annual list of the richest people in the world, topped by Jeff Bezos at $177 billion and Elon Musk at $151 billion. Computer scientist and founder of the incubator Y Combinator Paul Graham has written an excellent...
Bye Bye, New York
One of the most significant shifts in American business over the last several decades has been the shrinking number of big corporations headquartered in New York City. At first, some moved “upstate” to the New York suburbs and to Connecticut. But more...
What Became of That Railroad?
On March 21, 2021, the Canadian Pacific Railroad announced that it was buying the Kansas City Southern Railroad for $25 billion. To understand the strategic and geographic implications of this very important business deal, we must first go back in time. ...
Giant Companies Rarely Survive
A careful study of this week’s list will show you the huge American industries which once dominated stock markets, employment, and community life, but which are not as important in the age of Amazon and Google. Our readers know we love lists. There are few other...
Retailing Trends 1992 through 2020
The $6.3 trillion US retailing industry has evolved continuously since the end of the Civil War, when the first chain grocery stores and first department stores began to develop. This chart, based on data from the US Census, shows how the different types of...
From Milk Duds to Samsonite: The Beatrice Foods Saga
In setting the stage for this story, I interject myself, because “I was there.” Setting the Stage The year is 1975. I am two years out of college, a junior securities analyst for institutional investor Citibank in New York. My veteran analyst boss Pete...
Business History Podcast and Video
Friends of Business History, I have been doing a lot of podcasts and interviews recently. I always make plenty of historical references. But when they are primarily about the present and future, I put them up on my other website, https://hooversworld.com/ and...
Student Essay Contest $3,000 First Prize
The American Business History Center is proud to introduce our first annual Business History Essay Contest for High School Students. This is a chance for students to learn about businesses and how they are built, that they are human ventures and have human stories and...
Upcoming Event on Sun March 7 at 9 PM EST
Tune in to the History Channel on Sunday, March 7, at 9 PM Eastern time, to see my appearance in their series The Food That Made America in an episode about “the Cola Wars.” I will see it at the same time you do, so I make no predictions about how nice I will look or...
Forgotten Business Giant: Charles M. Schwab
We are all familiar with the visionary entrepreneur Charles R. Schwab who pioneered the discount stock brokerage industry in the 1970s. But almost no one remembers the unrelated Charles M. Schwab, one of the most important business leaders in American history....
American Business History Center On the History Channel
We at the American Business History Center are delighted to announce that we will soon make our first appearance on national television! Last year, the producers of the History Channel series “The Food that Built America” approached us for research on several stories...
Tech Wars: RCA and the Television Industry
From the telegraph to the modern age, high technology has seen continuous innovation, followed by the rise of numerous competitors, then consolidation into fewer companies, and finally decline. Here is one of our favorite stories. The advent of television rivals...
What Became of My Stockbroker?
Few industries have seen as many acquisitions, mergers, and name changes as the American stock brokerage and investment banking industries. Perhaps only the equally old railroad industry has seen more such activity. These firms have been called wire houses...
Malcolm McLean: Unsung Innovator Who Changed the World
Written before we founded the American Business History Center, this post is more relevant than ever. In 1937, 24-year old Malcolm McLean (later changed to Malcom) delivered a load from the south to the New Jersey docks for export. He had been in the trucking business...
From Hero to Hated: America’s Most Tragic Entrepreneur
This article was first published on the Archbridge Institute website. Few business leaders or entrepreneurs in American history have done more to enable progress and prosperity than Samuel Insull, a name little known today. Yet eighty years ago, he was one of the most...
Office Machines, Forerunners of the Computer
Welcome to 2021! In 2020, our first full calendar year of operation, these American Business History newsletters have been read over 90,000 times. The number of pages viewed on our website rose from 1,500 per month at the beginning of 2020 to 4-5,000 a...
Two Entrepreneurs Who Helped Create Florida
Every state has a fascinating history, including the role of business and entrepreneurship. The swamp that was much of Florida did not develop until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two men, both named Henry, were perhaps the most important in that...
Music for the Millions: The Wurlitzer Story
Rudolph Wurlitzer and his sons Howard and Farny Wurlitzer The Wurlitzer Company is one of the most interesting companies we have studied. At their peak, their slogan was “Music for the Millions.” Here is the story of this formerly great company, based on...
Giving Tuesday: Help Us Encourage the Next Generation
Today is Giving Tuesday, a national event to support non-profit organizations like ours. Many of America’s young people have had little or no exposure to free enterprise beyond buying things. High school students seldom know the real stories of...
Help Us Engage Young People!
It has never been a more important time to engage young people in the free enterprise system, for them to learn about businesses and how they are built, that they are human ventures and have human stories and attributes. Big businesses grow from small seeds. Even...
The Drugstore Shelf and the Stewardship of Brands
“Big pharma” and “biotech” are in the news these days. Politicians attack the industry and the price of drugs. At the same time, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and others hurry along to develop a COVID vaccine. These companies have been among the...
The Unsung 20th Century Technology That Disrupted an Industry
Business history is full of stories of “disruptors” and “disruption,” especially with regard to new technologies (as well as new ways of retailing, lodging, dining, transportation, journalism, and other fields). Many books have been written on innovation, how it...
Forgotten Giant: General Foods
For decades America’s largest food company, General Foods was one of the most highly regarded marketing companies in the world. Formed in the roaring twenties by consolidating companies that led the way in convenience foods, GF became an industry giant. ...
Billiards, Bowling, and Boating: 175 Years of Brunswick
A current buzzword is “pivoting,” which means changing your company’s strategy and direction, often into entirely new businesses. Pivots are frequent in young companies trying to find the best markets and a footing for future opportunities. Here we look at...
The Three Greatest American Companies of All Time
We wrote this five years ago, before the American Business History Center was founded, but we stand by our choices. For the last 52 years, I have been obsessed with understanding what makes a company great. What leads to success; what leads away. This led me to...
Three Fun Books on Business History
Some of us still have too much time alone and at home, so it is a good time to get some reading in. In a prior newsletter, we recommended Alfred Chandler’s Visible Hand as the single most important book to read on business history. Anyone who is literate about...
Battle of the Giant Watchmakers
Every industry tells a story of competition: the rise and fall of companies. Technological industries often see more “changing of the guard” than more stable businesses like food, soap, and beverages. One of the first high-tech industries in America...
The Biggest Companies in the World
Fifty-seven years ago, meatpacking giant Swift was the 15th largest public company in the world. Today that 15th spot is held by American health insurer UnitedHealth. Apple sits in the 12th position formerly held by Texaco, now part of Chevron. ...
What Became of My Bank?
No industry has seen more name changes and mergers and acquisitions than America’s banking industry. Many people don’t realize that BankAmerica, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo – all among the ten largest banks thirty years ago – were each absorbed...
Business Stories 90 Years Ago
Fortune Magazine, the Wonder of the 1930s In February 1930, the greatest American magazine publisher, Harry Luce, produced the first issue of Fortune magazine. His seven-year-old Time magazine had become a huge success. Luce and his company then created...
What If These Planned Mergers Had Happened?
Mergers and acquisitions have been common throughout business history. Three major waves were particularly important: the building of the trusts, trying to dominate each industry, in the 1890s; another round of industry consolidations in the roaring 1920s; and...20 Most Valuable Fortune 500 Companies 1995-2020
Most Valuable Companies: The Last 25 Years
An updated 2022 version of this chart can be seen here. On Market Capitalization as a Measure of Size or Success Your history reporter has been studying big business for fifty-seven years (I started subscribing to Fortune magazine in 1963, when I was twelve years...
Walt Disney: Entrepreneur without Peer
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Preface: A Most Controversial Man In this story, we address the life and work of Walter Elias Disney, one of the most famous men in the world. Telling this story brings...
How Chattanooga Brought Coca-Cola to the World
Here is an unsung but key part of the long and illustrious history of Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most successful and well-known brands. Few realize the links between the company and the patent medicine (quack) products of the 19th century, which connect it to...
America’s Highest Profit Companies 1994-2019
An updated 2022 version of this chart can be seen here. This week we present another of our animated charts based on Fortune magazine’s annual lists of the 500 largest US public companies (based on revenues). This time, our focus is on the companies which made...
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