Business History

How GM Beat Ford

Ford was the pre-eminent American car maker and Henry Ford was the king of modern manufacturing, until a Michigan cigar salesman decided to consolidate a bunch of small auto companies into a single fi...

2026-03-11

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Henry Ford Invented the Modern World... Then Got Left Behind

Farm boy Henry Ford hated toil. If only someone could invent ways to work more efficiently, as well as cheap, reliable machines to take some of the strain. Ford was a tinkerer and a lover of the newly...

2026-03-04

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War, Exploration and Beer: How the Tin Can Changed the World

Old-fashioned ways of preserving food made for salty, vinegary or chewy meals - but it was often a choice between that or starving. Soldiers, explorers and ordinary people alike faced malnutrition and...

2026-02-25

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The War on The A&P: When America Decided Cheap Groceries Were "Evil"

Mom and Pops grocery stores were charming, but inefficient. They contributed to Americans either spending a lot on their food or having to go hungry. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company changed...

2026-02-18

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How To Dig a Train Tunnel Under the Hudson River (from HISTORY This Week)

For more historical deep dives just like these, check out HISTORY This Week wherever you get your podcasts! February 14, 1905. A stick of dynamite detonates under the Hudson River — ...

2026-02-16

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When E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Tanked Atari

Nolan Bushnell loved weed, hot tubs and games... especially games. He took computer games out of the laboratory and put them in bars. His arcade game Pong was a monster hit, so he set up Atari to buil...

2026-02-11

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How a Bad Boss Kickstarted Silicon Valley

William Shockley was an electronics genius - he even won a Nobel Prize - but he was an awful boss. Shockley was a cruel, paranoid micromanager. And this annoyed the staff of brilliant young engin...

2026-02-04

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Sears: Cocaine Wine, Shotguns, and the World’s Tallest Tower

Richard Warren Sears started off selling pocket watches - then published a catalog full of hundreds and hundreds of products from shotguns to cocaine wine. Sears & Roebuck offered even Americans l...

2026-01-28

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De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part II

It's 1945. The Volkswagen factory has been bombed and members of the staff have been arrested as war criminals. So how did the company turn around in just a few years and begin making Beetle cars that...

2026-01-21

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Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part I

The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The Volkswa...

2026-01-14

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How Jim Simons Built a Machine That Beat the Market

Jim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunitie...

2026-01-07

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Old Warren Buffett: "Never Invest in a Business You Cannot Understand"

Young Warren Buffett became rich in anonymity - but in the 1980s he became a global star. During the excesses of 1980s Wall Street the middle-aged investor was reluctantly drawn into the spotligh...

2025-12-24

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Young Warren Buffett: How to Find Value No One Else Can See

Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers ...

2025-12-17

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How to Make Billions When the Bubble Bursts: Lessons from 1929

The stock market was once a Wild West free-for-all. There were few rules or regulations. Investors were more or less gambling, or manipulating stocks to make a profit. This is the world Jesse Livermor...

2025-12-10

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The Man who Sued Major League Baseball (Rather than go to Philly)

Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game's highest payed players. He helped the St Louis Cardinals reach the 1968 World Series... but then got traded. The rules said he h...

2025-12-03

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Edison and the Movie Murder Mystery (The Edison Story Part 3)

The man who invented the movie camera got on a train in France in 1890 and was never seen again. The wife of Louis Le Prince thought she knew who’d ordered her husband’s disappearance and ...

2025-11-26

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Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair (The Edison Story Part 2)

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, but he created something more important: the grid. Edison's system of power plants and wires brought lightbulbs to homes and offices and revolutionized...

2025-11-19

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The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About (The Edison Story Part 1)

Thomas Alva Edison helped transform America and the world. He registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931 - and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technolo...

2025-11-12

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The Secret of Southwest's Success: Free Whisky, Hot Pants and Low, Low Fares

It's hard to make money running an airline - but Southwest was profitable every year for nearly five decades. How did it manage it? Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore how ...

2025-11-05

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Coming Soon: Business History with Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein

Was the world's most lovable car originally made just to please Hitler? And what links Thomas Edison and the electric chair? From Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith of Planet Money fame comes Business H...

2025-10-29

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Business History

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