Business History

The Robberiest Robber Baron: The Villainy of Jay Gould

Jay Gould became hugely rich without ever really making a product or offering service to benefit his customers. Other "Robber Barons" in the 19th century forged steel or pumped oil to make money - but...

2026-07-22

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The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)

Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales. A giant chemical plant near the small village of F...

2026-07-08

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The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy

John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage -...

2026-07-01

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A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag

Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfa...

2026-06-24

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The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption

Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to...

2026-06-17

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Ida Tarbell: The "Muckraker" Who Beat John D Rockefeller and Big Oil

At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how Joh...

2026-06-10

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"Time is Money": How Ben Franklin's Sayings Created American Capitalism and Grind Culture

Benjamin Franklin had a full life - he was a scientist, statesman, and a Founding Father. But we're looking at the huge impact he had as a writer of best-selling business books. Franklin first picked ...

2026-06-03

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The Founding Father Who Got Rich in the Revolution

Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago George Washington was fighting the Revolutionary War against the British, but Robert Morris doing something just as vital. He was raising money for the fighting and buy...

2026-05-27

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The Dumbest Business Ever... Shipping Melting Ice to Calcutta.

Frederic Tudor could get ice any time he wanted. He lived in chilly Boston and his family had a lake that froze over in the winter. Harvesting ice and storing it was a normal thing in New England in t...

2026-05-20

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The Match Maker Who Nearly Burned Down Wall Street

Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger built a fortune selling matches. He used this money to build a world famous financial empire that bankrolled whole countries. France borrowed from Kreuger. Germany bo...

2026-05-13

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Did "Neutron" Jack Welch Nuke GE?

In 1999, Jack Welch was named "Manager of the Century". As CEO of General Electric for 20 years, Welch transformed the conglomerate and made it the biggest company in the world. Nicknamed "Neutron Jac...

2026-05-06

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The Widow Who Ruled the Champagne World

Running a wine business in Napoleonic France wasn't easy. Constant wars meant naval blockades stopped you exporting your wares and invading armies might loot your cellars. But it was even harder for w...

2026-04-29

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The Business of Staying Young and Living Forever (with Kara Swisher)

Kings and emperors spent fortunes pursuing the secret of eternal youth - but now it's tech billionaires who want to live forever and are funding research into scientific (and not-so-scientific) ways t...

2026-04-22

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Sinking the Global Economy: The Lloyds of London Story Part II

In the 1980s, Lloyds of London insured satellites, rock singers' voices and the legs of sports stars. Everyone was having fun and making money - but disaster was just around the corner.  Lloyds...

2026-04-15

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The Insurers Who ALWAYS Paid Out: The Lloyds of London Story Part I

Edward Lloyd opened a coffee shop near the River Thames in the 1680s - it became a place where ship owners and money men rubbed shoulders and a trade in marine insurance sprang up.  The coffee-...

2026-04-08

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Betting on Taylor Swift or Who'll Be Made Pope: The Past and Present of Prediction Markets

A live mash-up between Business History and Bloomberg's Everybody's Business. On platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket you can bet on just about anything - from Taylor Swift's album sales to whe...

2026-03-25

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Bowie, McCartney & Michael Jackson: How Songwriters Learned to Play Hardball

Once if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert hall...

2026-03-18

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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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Business History

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