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Eighty Years to the Last Booth
Season 1 Episode 26273
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 lin…
2 hours ago
The Bottle That Changed Every Bottle
Season 1 Episode 26272
(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…
1 day, 2 hours ago
A Mess That Became Medicine
Season 1 Episode 26271
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…
2 days, 2 hours ago
Business Blooper: The Machine That Was Supposed to Replace the Car
Season 1 Episode 26268
Some inventions fail loudly. This one just quietly disappeared into tour groups and mall cops.
On December 3, 2001, inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the S…
5 days, 2 hours ago
Eighteen Thousand Dollars in a Hotel Room
Season 1 Episode 26267
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 show…
6 days, 2 hours ago
The Speech That Rewrote Political Crisis Management
Season 1 Episode 26266
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, 195…
1 week ago
The Coffee Shop That Built the American Business Women's Association
Season 1 Episode 26265
Some of the most lasting institutions start with the smallest possible meeting.
On September 22, 1949, Kansas City businessman Hilary Bufton Jr. sat d…
1 week, 1 day ago
The Gamble That Learned to Fly
Season 1 Episode 26264
A financial gamble that nearly cost a company its independence ended up producing one of the most enduring aircraft in aviation history. On September…
1 week, 2 days ago
Business Blooper: Buried by a Bonding Rule
Season 1 Episode 26261
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 Loew…
1 week, 5 days ago
When Fans Renamed A Spacecraft
Season 1 Episode 26260
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…
1 week, 6 days ago