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Miami International Airport began in 1928, when Pan American Airways bought a 116-acre plot on Northwest 36th Street. By 1929 it was Pan American Airport, the first mainland U.S. airport with international port of entry facilities, with a domed terminal by Delano and Aldrich built for Sikorsky amphibians and Fokker aircraft. Geography drove it: Pan Am began airmail to Havana in 1928, and by 1930 Pan Am and Eastern Air Transport made Miami the clearing point for a network running from Canada to the tip of South America. In the 1940s, National Airlines planes taxied across Lejeune Road while drivers waited at the light. On January 1, 1946, Pan Am handed the field to the Dade County Port Authority, which absorbed the 1,400-acre Miami Army Airfield and other land into a 2,500-acre Miami International Airport.

Eastern Airlines, once led by Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman and headquartered in Building 16, sank into labor unrest and bankruptcy by 1989. American Airlines under Robert Crandall bought Eastern's Latin American routes in the 1990 liquidation and grew from 34 daily Miami departures in 1989 to 301 in 1995. Its North Terminal, Concourse D, cost $2.85 billion; Miami-Dade County seized control of construction in 2005 and it was finished in 2011. In 2021 MIA passed JFK as the busiest U.S. gateway for international passengers and led the country in international cargo. In 2024 it handled nearly 56 million passengers and 3 million tons of freight, and a $5 billion plan running to 2035 targets 77 million passengers by 2040, with seven 2026 FIFA World Cup matches nearby at Hard Rock Stadium.

• The 20th Street Terminal opened in 1959 as the largest central airport terminal in the world, with five concourses and a 270-room hotel.
• British Airways flew the Concorde three times a week between Miami and London, via Washington, from 1984 to 1991.
• Iberia opened a sterile international-to-international transit hub at MIA in 1992 and abandoned it in 2004 after post-9/11 U.S. transit visa rules.
• United paid $135 million for Pan Am's remaining Latin American routes in 1991 but closed its Miami crew base in 2004.
• A new Amtrak platform at the Miami Intermodal Center sits closed because it was built too short for Amtrak trains.

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Medtronic was founded in 1949 by Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie as a Minneapolis medical equipment repair shop that mostly fixed centrifuges. On Halloween night 1957 a power outage across Minnesota and western Wisconsin cut power to a wall-plugged pacemaker, and a pediatric heart patient of surgeon C. Walton Lillehei died. Lillehei brought the problem to Bakken, who modified the circuit of a transistorized musical metronome into the first battery-powered wearable pacemaker, a four-inch box taped to the chest with wires through the skin. By 1960 Medtronic had a fully implantable pacemaker. Its plant in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, opened in 1997, makes one in five pacemakers implanted worldwide. The company expanded into diabetes by buying MiniMed in 2001, whose 2016 MiniMed 670G was the first hybrid closed-loop system for type 1 diabetes, into spine with Kyphon in 2007, and into neuromodulation for pain and Parkinson's disease.

Medtronic today has about $33 billion in annual revenue and 95,000 employees. In 2008 researchers showed in a lab that they could remotely control a Medtronic cardiac implant, and in 2011 Jay Radcliffe hacked a Medtronic insulin pump live at Black Hat; Medtronic said its devices were safe. In 2014 and 2015 it bought Ireland-based Covidien for $42.9 billion, the largest corporate tax inversion in history, which CEO Omar Ishrak defended as strategic. In March 2026 it took its diabetes unit public on the Nasdaq as MiniMed Group Inc. and opened an exchange offer for its remaining stake.

• Medtronic recalled its Sprint Fidelis defibrillator leads in 2007 after they fractured at unacceptable rates.
• A February 2020 recall of about 322,000 MiniMed insulin pumps over a faulty retainer ring was linked to about 2,000 injuries and one death, and in 2021 the FDA told doctors to stop new implants of the HVAD heart pump.
• In May 2008 the spine unit paid $75 million to settle a whistleblower suit alleging it pushed kyphoplasty as an inpatient procedure to raise Medicare billing.
• A 2012 Time magazine report found a 75.1 percent average profit margin on Medtronic's spine products.
• In March 2020 Medtronic publicly shared its portable ventilator design specifications so other manufacturers could build them during COVID-19.

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Magnavox, Latin for great or loud voice, grew out of a Napa, California lab, the Commercial Wireless and Development Company, run from 1911 by engineers Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen. In 1914 they patented the moving coil loudspeaker, U.S. patent 1,105,924, which used an electromagnetic coil to drive a cone, so volume depended on electrical power, not the size of a horn. In July 1917 the company merged with the Sonora Phonograph distributor to form Magnavox, with Frank Morgan Steers as first president. Jensen left in the late 1920s to found the Jensen Radio Manufacturing Company in Chicago, while Pridham stayed and Magnavox moved manufacturing to Fort Wayne, Indiana in the 1930s, building radio and phonograph cabinets and later television tubes. In the 1960s it built the first plasma displays for the military, and in 1972 it released the Odyssey, the first home video game console, followed by the microprocessor-based Odyssey 2 in 1978.

North American Philips took a majority stake in 1974 and full ownership in 1975. Philips sold CD players co-developed with Sony under the mass-market Magnavox name while Sony sold its CDP-101 in high-end audio shops. In 1981 Philips merged the Sylvania, Philco and Magnavox consumer divisions and centralized production in Greeneville, Tennessee. The Fort Wayne defense unit, Magnavox Electronic Systems, built satellite communications, artillery data systems and sonobuoys; it went to Hughes Electronics in 1995 and then Raytheon, whose sonobuoy unit was sold to Ultra Electronics in 1998. Today Magnavox survives as a licensed name on electronics made by other companies.

• A sonobuoy dropped by parachute from an aircraft lowers a hydrophone on a cable and radios submarine propeller sounds back to the plane.
• The Odyssey used analog logic circuits, not a microprocessor, to move glowing squares on the TV screen.
• Magnavox's name went on the 1985 VideoWriter word processor and on rebadged Philips personal computers in the early 1990s, and a combined Philips Magnavox brand confused shoppers before the names were separated again.
• A 2013 deal to sell Philips' audio and video business to Funai Electric for about 150 million euros collapsed, and an arbitration tribunal awarded Philips compensation in 2016.
• In January 2025 licensing firm Curtis International acquired the global rights to the Magnavox brand.

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John D. Goeken founded Microwave Communications, Inc. in October 1963 to run a microwave radio relay between Chicago and St. Louis, with towers about 30 miles apart, serving truck fleets and Illinois Waterway barges. The company soon targeted small and midsize businesses priced out of AT&T's Telpak private-line service, seeking status as a specialized common carrier. In 1968 New York investor William G. McGowan paid off MCI's debts and joined the board, the same year the FCC's Carterfone decision struck down AT&T's ban on attaching outside devices to its network. When Illinois Bell refused to connect an MCI interstate circuit to its local switches, MCI filed a federal antitrust suit against AT&T in January 1974. In 1980 a Chicago jury awarded MCI $1.8 billion, later cut on appeal to about $113 million, and the case, alongside a Justice Department investigation, led to AT&T's breakup.

In 1983 MCI raised $1.1 billion through a hybrid security arranged by Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the largest debt financing in corporate history at the time. In 1984 it became the first carrier to deploy single-mode optical fiber, made by a Siemens and Corning joint venture, between New York and Washington. MCI Mail launched in September 1983 with Vint Cerf, MCI joined IBM and Merit Network on NSFNET in 1987, and in 1994 it built the commercial backbone MCI.net. WorldCom bought MCI for $34.7 billion in stock, topping bids from BT Group and GTE, and the merger closed in 1998. After WorldCom's accounting fraud and 2002 bankruptcy, the company emerged in 2003 renamed MCI Inc.

• A 1982 ad by Ally & Gargano hired the actors from an AT&T commercial in which a mother cries at her son's call; in MCI's version she cries over her AT&T phone bill.
• Single-mode fiber carries light straight down a narrow core, moving more data farther with fewer repeaters than multi-mode cable.
• In 1989 MCI Mail became the first commercial email service allowed to interconnect with NSFNET.
• The 1991 Friends and Family plan discounted calls to up to 20 other MCI customers in a calling circle.
• The 1993 1-800-COLLECT campaign featured Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, Arsenio Hall and Alyssa Milano.

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New York's LaGuardia Airport traces back to a 1934 protest: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, holding a ticket to New York, refused to leave his plane in Newark and made the airline fly him to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The site he later chose in Queens had been Bowery Bay Beach, a resort the Steinway piano family opened in 1886 with bathing pavilions and the Gala Amusement Park, which faded under anti-German sentiment in World War I, Prohibition and industrial pollution. In 1929 New York Air Terminals built the small Glenn H. Curtiss Airport seaplane base there, and the city leased it for $1 a year because Queens offered quick access to Midtown. Works Progress Administration crews then pushed the shoreline into the bay with garbage and ash from Rikers Island, then the city dump, packed around steel piles driven to bedrock. The airport opened in December 1939.

Ten-cent observation deck turnstiles brought in nearly $300,000 in two years, and American Airlines opened the first private airline club, the Admirals Club, there in 1939. Heavier jets like the Boeing 707 forced runway decks out over Flushing Bay, and the FAA added hourly slot caps, a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew and, from 1984, a Port Authority perimeter rule barring most nonstops beyond 1,500 miles. The central terminal, built in the 1960s for about 8 million passengers a year, was handling more than 14 million by the 2010s. In 2014 Vice President Joe Biden compared it to a third world country, and an $8 billion rebuild announced in 2015 moved the terminals 600 feet toward the Grand Central Parkway, adding two miles of taxiways and bridges that planes taxi beneath.

• Steel buried under runway 13 distorts magnetic compasses, and signs warn pilots to cross-check their instruments.
• Airlines sometimes fly half-empty planes to keep their slots, which can trade for tens of millions of dollars.
• In 2023 the rebuilt airport won the Airport Service Quality Award for best midsize airport in North America.
• On March 22, 2026 Air Canada Express flight 8646 collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing both pilots and injuring dozens of passengers, and the NTSB investigation halted operations.
• Spirit Airlines filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in May 2026; its last LaGuardia flight left May 1, emptying Terminal A, the historic Marine Air Terminal.

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Kimberly-Clark began in Neenah, Wisconsin in 1872, when four men put $42,000 into paper mills. After the Atlas paper mill burned down in 1888, workers rebuilt it with more capacity in five months, and the company became the first firm west of Pennsylvania to adopt the sulfite pulp process for softer paper. In 1914 it developed Cellucotton, a wood-fiber cotton substitute the U.S. Army adopted for surgical dressings in World War I. Army nurses found the pads worked as sanitary napkins, which led to Kotex in 1920, the first disposable feminine hygiene product, and Kleenex in 1924 as a disposable handkerchief. The company went public in 1928 and spread to Mexico, West Germany, the UK and almost 20 foreign locations.

A corporate flight department formed in 1948 and the KC Aviation unit, started in 1969, became Midwest Express Airlines in 1984 after airline deregulation; the aviation arm was sold to Gulfstream Aerospace in 1998 for $250 million. CEO Darwin Smith, who led from 1971 to 1991, moved the company from business paper to consumer brands, and it bought Scott Paper for $9.4 billion in 1995. Pandemic panic buying lifted consumer tissue sales 13 percent in early 2020, followed in April 2021 by an 8 percent organic sales drop, its worst in at least a decade. In May 2025 it moved its listing to the Nasdaq, and in November 2025 agreed to buy Kenvue, maker of Tylenol, Band-Aid, Neutrogena, Listerine, Zyrtec and Benadryl, for $48.7 billion.

• In 1982 Kimberly-Clark and Cadbury pulled advertising from the TV show Lou Grant amid conservative campaigns against star Ed Asner.
• In 2019 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sued over Cottonelle flushable wipes; the Federal Court of Australia ruled for Kimberly-Clark, noting toilet paper also contributed to blockages.
• In October 2020 some Cottonelle flushable wipes were recalled over possible contamination with bacteria that could cause infections.
• After buying a majority stake in period underwear brand Thinx in 2022, the company faced a 2023 class action settlement over alleged PFAS and recorded a $658 million impairment charge tied to Thinx and another brand.
• In April 2026 an arson fire destroyed its distribution center in Ontario, California; the person who set it filmed the fire and said the company failed to pay a living wage.

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Kayak was founded in January 2004 by Paul M. English and Steve Hafner, a co-founder of Orbitz, under the name Travel Search Company Inc. It became Kayak Software Corporation in August 2004 and launched its site in February 2005. Unlike an online travel agency that handles bookings and customer service, Kayak set out to be a metasearch engine that pulls fares from other sites. In December 2007 it raised $196 million from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Oak Investment Partners and bought its rival SideStep. It then expanded in Europe, buying the German search site Swoodoo in 2010 and Austria's checkfelix in 2011, and in January 2011 shut SideStep down and redirected its traffic to kayak.com.

In December 2011 Kayak said it would not renew its advertising on the TLC reality show All-American Muslim after a campaign by the Florida Family Association; chief marketing officer Robert Birge said TLC had not been upfront about the nature of the show. Kayak went public on the Nasdaq on July 20, 2012 under the ticker KYAK, opening at $26 and closing its first day at $33.18. In May 2013 Priceline.com, now Booking Holdings, bought Kayak for $2.1 billion. Kayak now operates in 30 countries and about 20 languages.

• Under Booking Holdings, Kayak added Momondo, Cheapflights, HotelsCombined and the Brazilian company Mundi.
• Kayak launched voice search on Amazon Alexa in 2016.
• It released a ChatGPT plugin in 2023 and added AI recommendations and price checking in 2024.
• Southwest Airlines fares were added to Kayak in 2024.
• A chat-based Kayak.ai beta launched in April 2025, followed by a conversational AI mode built into the main platform in October 2026.

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In 1984 John Schnatter sold his 1971 Camaro Z28 for $1,600, bought used pizza equipment and set it up in a converted broom closet at the back of his father's tavern in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The bar's patrons were his first customers, and within a year he took over an adjoining space. A free cup of garlic dipping sauce with every order set Papa John's apart from older chains. The company went public on the NASDAQ in 1993 under the ticker PZZA, reached 500 stores by 1994 and 1,500 by 1997, and advertised better ingredients and better pizza. Pizza Hut sued for false advertising in 1997 and a federal court ordered the campaign pulled, but in 2000 an appeals court overturned the ruling, finding the slogan was puffery: subjective boasting, not a measurable claim.

Schnatter made himself the face of the brand, appearing in its commercials. In 2009 he offered a $250,000 reward to find his old Camaro and bought it back. In late 2017, with the company the NFL's official pizza sponsor, he blamed the league's handling of national anthem protests for weak franchisee sales on an earnings call; the sponsorship ended early and he stepped down as CEO on January 1, 2018, staying on as chairman. In July 2018 he confirmed reports that he had used a racial slur during a media training call and resigned as chairman the same day. In 2019 activist fund Starboard Value invested $200 million, its CEO became chairman, and Schnatter agreed to leave the board permanently and drop his lawsuits.

• Schnatter gave $5 million for naming rights to the University of Louisville football stadium and another $10 million for its expansion, with naming rights through 2040.
• The University of Louisville removed his name from the stadium after the July 2018 report.
• Starting in May 2019, he sold shares over 12 months until his stake was down to 4 percent.
• In November 2021 a rebrand redesigned the stores and logo and dropped the apostrophe from the company name.
• The chain has grown to more than 5,400 locations in 50 countries.

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John MacFarlane earned electrical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, in 1990, UC Santa Barbara. In the 1990s he built an enterprise messaging business, Software.com, with longtime collaborator Craig Shelburne, sold its systems to customers such as AT&T, and merged it with Phone.com to form Openwave in Redwood City, which failed after the dot-com crash. Wealth from Software.com let him self-fund his next venture. In August 2002 MacFarlane, Shelburne, Tom Cullen and Trung Mai founded Rincon Audio in Santa Barbara, renamed Sonos in May 2004, to stream synchronized music to multiple rooms at a time when home Wi-Fi was unreliable. Their answer was SonosNet, a proprietary encrypted peer-to-peer mesh network in which each speaker relays the signal to the next.

At a 2004 conference in Carlsbad, California, Steve Jobs told MacFarlane the scroll wheel on his prototype controller might violate Apple's iPod patents. Sonos aimed to ship the ZP100 ZonePlayer and CR100 controller for the 2004 holidays but missed the date, shipping between January and March 2005 rather than release unfinished hardware. In April 2005 it added the Rhapsody subscription service, later followed by SiriusXM, Spotify, QQ Music, Amazon Music and Apple Music. In March 2016 MacFarlane shifted Sonos away from local music files toward streaming and voice control, with layoffs, as the Amazon Echo upended the industry. In January 2017 he announced he was stepping down as CEO and leaving the board, handing the job to president Patrick Spence.

• SonosNet used AES encryption so that only Sonos speakers could talk to each other, protecting the network from interference.
• The ZP100 and CR100 system won Best of Audio at the 2005 CES Innovations Awards.
• Sonos took no outside funding at its founding, giving the founders control over their own engineering timeline.
• MacFarlane wrote that he had delayed his planned exit to steer Sonos through the Amazon Echo pivot.
• He said he was leaving because his wife was battling breast cancer, and that he would focus on science and math education and selective advisory roles.

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International Harvester traced its roots to Cyrus Hall McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper of the 1830s. In 1902 banker J.P. Morgan and negotiator George W. Perkins merged McCormick's company with its rival, the Deering Harvester Company, and three smaller competitors into a $150 million monopoly that owned timberlands, iron ore mines and steel mills. By 1908 it made 700,000 harvesters a year. Against Ford's Fordson, it launched the Farmall in 1924, a high-clearance row crop tractor that could work between growing corn and cotton. In the late 1930s industrial designer Raymond Loewy restyled the letter series tractors and standardized Harvester red, and the 1947 Farmall Cub, priced at $545, targeted the one-mule family farms of the South.

The company spread into consumer and military goods: the 1907 Auto Buggy, the 1961 four-door Travelall, an early six-passenger truck with a station wagon body, torpedo parts, more than 330,000 M1 rifles, and refrigerators and freezers sold through rural dealerships after the Rural Electrification Act. In 1958 it showed its 60 series tractors to more than 12,000 dealers at Hinsdale, Illinois, then recalled them within a year because new six-cylinder engines were bolted to final drives not significantly redesigned since 1939. John Deere's new generation won over many customers. CEO Archie McCardell pushed the United Auto Workers for concessions, and a strike beginning in November 1979 lasted six months and cost nearly $600 million.

• The appliance line was marketed through a fictional spokeswoman named Irma Harding.
• The Farmall Cub was pitched on cost: a mule eats every day, while the tractor uses fuel only when it runs.
• The strike's losses equal roughly $2.7 billion in modern dollars and drained the reserves built since 1902.
• In 1984 the agricultural division was sold to Tenneco and merged into what became Case IH, while the truck business continued as Navistar.
• Its 1954 Electrall system ran farm equipment from a tractor-mounted generator, and one proposed attachment was a field-sized bug zapper.