Music for the Millions: The Wurlitzer Story
Originally published Dec 5, 2020. You can listen to the 18 minute audio version of this post here. 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...
Beyond Wall Street: Great Family Businesses
You can listen to the 9 minute audio version of this post here.Originally published June 2020. Updated for 2026. America has hundreds of thousands of privately-held, family-owned businesses. Thousands of them are large. The list of the largest ones is...
George Eastman: The Greatest Technology Entrepreneur in U.S. History?
You can listen to the 41 minute audio version of this post here. Originally published January 2018. The technologies of today are built upon those of the past, and the superstars of our era would be nothing without the great leaders of the past. We often discuss our...
The Unsung Story of the Greatest Industrial Designer
Originally published November 2019. Outside of the field of product and transportation design, too few people know who Raymond Loewy was. The best-known industrial designer, founder of the industrial design profession, and member of the pantheon of our greatest...
The American Bicycle Industry: A Short History
Originally published August 21 2021. There are an estimated one billion bicycles in the world today, almost half of them in China and another one hundred million in the United States. About one hundred million new ones are manufactured each year, over half in...
How Baking Powder Changed the World of Horse Racing and Auto Racing
Originally published on May 25, 2019. We have updated the content to April 2026. At the American Business History Center, we are always looking for ways to connect the present to the past. And hopefully learn some lessons along the way. May is a critical month...
Tech Wars: RCA and the Television Industry
Originally published Feb 5, 2021. 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...
Big Brands at the Grocery Store a Century Ago 1925
Today we take a stroll through a grocery or drug store in 1925, to see which brands and companies were strongest a century ago. Some companies and brands lasted through today, many did not! What were great-great-great grandpa and grandma’s favorite products,...
Forgotten Giant: General Foods
Originally published October 23, 2020. 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...
The Little Soft Drink That Could: The Pepsi Story
Originally published Feb 14, 2020. Happy Valentine’s Day! Here is a sweet story of candy and soda pop, and of incredible persistence which overcame failure and controversy. Caleb Bradham In 1893, young Caleb Bradham bought the drugstore at the corner of Middle...
The Tortuous Saga of the First Wonder Drug: Aspirin
Originally published Apr 3, 2020 Ancient Remedies The Mesopotamian Ur III tablet, dating from about 3500 BC, mentions the willow tree (Salix in Latin) as a medicinal remedy. Centuries later, additional references are found in Egyptian papyrus...
Who Makes Our Balls?
Originally published June 4, 2020 In these troubling times, it’s important to remember something called “fun.” Our weekly newsletters tend to cover big industries like retailing and automobiles. But we also find smaller, niche industries fascinating. Here is a...
New Beginnings in the Roaring Twenties
Originally published January 9, 2020 Here we go again – another decade of the “twenties” – hopefully these twenties roar in the good sense. This is a perfect time to look back at what was going on in business history one hundred years ago. 1920 was an...
How Chattanooga Brought Coca-Cola to the World
Originally published Aug 7, 2020 and updated September 2025. 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...
From Dog Dung to Plexiglas: the Rohm and Haas Story
Few industries are more important to modern life than the chemical industry. Almost everything we touch, the clothes we wear, and much of what we eat contains chemicals or was processed by chemicals. Yet the companies are usually out of sight of...
A Tale of Entrepreneurial Failure: TravelFest Austin Part Two
If you read Part One of this story, published in our last newsletter, you know that TravelFest was an immediate success with customers. The store was not big enough to handle the traffic, so we decided to build larger stores. The original 6,000 square foot...
A Tale of Entrepreneurial Failure: TravelFest Austin: Part One
Read the second part of this two-part story here. Two years ago, we started our “Share Your History” page on our website. We solicited contributions from our readers, telling us of their history with enterprises large or small. To start the page, we seeded...
Flexible Apparel Giant: VF Corporation
No industry touches us more frequently or intimately than the apparel industry. Yet few if any books document the history of this important industry. There are plentiful books about costume and fashion trends, but not about the enterprises which made the...
The Sordid Saga of Mr. Singer and his Sewing Machine
Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) had a dream: to become a great actor on the stage, performing Shakespeare to accolades. For almost the first forty years of his life, he failed to achieve any success in this pursuit. Continually tinkering with machines, he...
Recipe for Success: The Campbell’s Story
In this week’s newsletter, we publish one of the best essays from our high school essay contest, by one of our honorable mention winners. This excellent history of the Campbell Soup Company was written by Diya Patel of Woodland Park, New Jersey. Diya...
Kimberly-Clark: From Commodities to Powerhouse Brands
Early in the twentieth century, the Kimberly-Clark paper company pioneered “sanitary napkins” with their Kotex brand. Magazine publishers resisted running ads for the innovative but very private product and retailers hesitated to display Kotex. The company...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Milton Hershey: Chocolate King, Confectioner, and Creator
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1857, Milton Hershey attended seven different schools and never made it beyond the fourth grade. At fifteen, he found his passion in a...
A Century of Big Brands
We all grow up surrounded by brands. Being part of our daily lives, they often seem as if they have been around forever and will be around forever. Yet, like most everything else, brands have lifecycles. Only the lucky few survive for decade after...
Same Town, Same Family: The Smucker Saga
In 1752, Amish/Mennonite farmer Christian Schmucker migrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania. In 2016, his son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son, forty-six-year-old Mark Smucker, became Chief Executive of the J. M. Smucker Company of Orrville,...
Gail Borden: Texas Pioneer, Quirky Visionary
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Original Series. Born in upstate New York in 1801, Gail Borden was raised there and in Kentucky and Indiana. As a young man, he moved to Mississippi and then Texas in search of...
The Indiana Glass Company in the 1960s and 1970s: The W.C. Hoover story
I really appreciate the history of the Indiana Glass Company provided by The Museum of Glass in West Virginia (and Tom Felt, Monograph #69) and Craig Schenning in his great book about Indiana Glass from Schiffer Publishing. As well as the folks at...
Brand Man: The HJ Heinz Story
This article first appeared on July 5, 2018 in The Archbridge Institute’s ‘American Originals’ series. It’s December 1875. Thirty-one-year-old Henry John “HJ” Heinz is bedridden the entire month with deep depression. On some days, he...
Estée Lauder: From One Woman’s Passion to Cosmetics Empire
This article first appeared on February 12, 2018 in The Archbridge Institute’s ‘American Originals’ series. Today, the Estée Lauder Companies have become among the most important cosmetics companies in the world—against huge odds and...
Madam C. J. Walker: The Ultimate Self-Made Woman
This article first appeared on October 31, 2017 in The Archbridge Institute’s ‘American Originals’ series. Her Westchester County neighborhood was the home of Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Astors. Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller had assembled...
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