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The International House of Pancakes began in Burbank, California in the late 1950s, founded by brothers Jerry and Al Lapin with commercial artist Albert Kallis, whose wife Trudy reportedly came up with the name. Its steep A-frame buildings with bright blue roofs, built through the late 1970s, were designed to be recognized through a windshield as interstate car culture grew. In the early 1970s the company shortened its name to IHOP and used a cartoon kangaroo in commercials. The 1980s brought instability: parent company Wienerwald filed for Chapter 11 in 1982, and in 1983 IHOP was sold to a group with no restaurant experience. To compete with chains like Denny's, IHOP added burgers, sandwiches and steaks to become an all-day restaurant.

In the summer of 2007 IHOP agreed to buy Applebee's in an all-cash deal worth about $2.1 billion. With 99 percent of IHOP restaurants run by franchisees, corporate income from fees and rent was steady enough to borrow against, and the parent became DineEquity, now Dine Brands. In 2015 research showed customers read the logo as a frown, so the company added a red smile under the O and P. In June 2018 it announced it was flipping the P to a B, revealing that IHOb stood for burgers, and in 2019 it sold a burger with a pancake cooked into the patty. In late 2025 a mandatory December kids eat free promotion, created without consulting franchisees and paid for by them, set off an internal revolt.

• In 2010 IHOP sued the International House of Prayer in federal court over the IHOP acronym for trademark dilution; the case was resolved out of court by December.
• IHOP Express quick-service outlets have appeared since around 2011 on military bases, college campuses and in airports.
• A fast-casual concept called Flip'd, tested in 2019, sold pancake bowls to urban commuters.
• The first combined Applebee's and IHOP opened in downtown Detroit in 2018, and in 2024 corporate said it was exploring more dual-branded restaurants.
• The chain has more than 1,841 locations, with franchise partners across the Middle East and South America and a first El Salvador restaurant slated for 2026.

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Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with about 21,000 yuan, roughly $5,000. The name came from a wall slogan meaning roughly "China has achievements," and the company later ran a campaign teaching foreigners to pronounce it rather than rename itself. Early investors walked away while Huawei imported PBX telephone switches from Hong Kong, reverse engineered them and resold them. Shut out of big cities by Alcatel and Nortel in 1992, its sales teams worked rural villages, and in 1993 it built its own programmable switch. In 1994 Ren told Jiang Zemin that depending on foreign telecom equipment was like a nation lacking its own military; by 1996 the state was restricting foreign competition. Abroad, Huawei started in Africa and the Middle East, backed by a $30 billion China Development Bank credit line for vendor financing, and passed Ericsson in 2012 as the largest telecom equipment maker.

Western governments questioned its employee "virtual share" ownership and cited Chinese intelligence laws from 2014 and 2017 that can compel cooperation; Huawei has consistently denied spying. Between 2018 and 2020 the U.S. accused Huawei of violating Iran sanctions, CFO Meng Wanzhou, Ren's daughter, was detained in Canada at U.S. request, Five Eyes countries pulled Huawei from 5G networks, and the foreign direct product rule cut off chips made with U.S. tools along with Google's Android services. Huawei stockpiled parts and built replacements. The 2023 Mate 60 Pro carried a domestic processor made on older deep ultraviolet machines through multi-patterning, and first-quarter 2024 profit rose nearly sixfold.

• Huawei's Rural Star program used solar-powered cell stations to connect off-grid villages.
• State-backed financing let Huawei underbid rivals by up to 70 percent, and it supplies around 70 percent of Africa's 4G networks.
• Virtual shares pay employees dividends but carry no voting stock recorded in a public registry.
• After the bans, Huawei's international smartphone sales collapsed and analysts called its consumer business dead.
• By mid-2024 HarmonyOS ran on more than 900 million devices and had passed iOS as China's second most popular mobile operating system.

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Hitachi began in 1910 in Ibaraki Prefecture, where electrical engineer Namihei Odaira, working at the Kuhara mining operation, built water power stations inside a copper mine and a 4-kilowatt induction motor as his first product. The venture spun off in 1911 under a name joining the characters for sun and rise, and Odaira's circle monogram logo lasted until 1991. All 12 of the company's CEOs have been engineers, eight of them from the same University of Tokyo faculty. Hitachi moved its headquarters to Tokyo in 1918, finished Japan's first mainline electric locomotive in 1924 and was making elevators and refrigerators by 1932. After World War II its factories lay in ruins and the occupation forces purged Odaira; he was cleared in 1951 and died that year at 77. Hitachi listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949 and built its first power shovel that year.

For the 1964 Shinkansen it built Series 0 cars, automatic train control and the COMTRAC traffic control computer, after launching the MARS-1 seat reservation system in 1960. Its 1978 HM6147 CMOS memory chip matched Intel's speed using 87 percent less power, and by 1987 Hitachi led the world's semiconductor makers. Sprawl caught up with it: a $7.8 billion loss for fiscal 2008 was the largest in Japanese manufacturing history. Under Takashi Kawamura it cut listed group companies from 22 to four, sold hard drives, TVs, power tools, Hitachi Chemical and Hitachi Metals, and bought GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion in 2021 and 80 percent of ABB's power grid unit for $6.4 billion. By June 2024 its market value had grown eightfold since 2010.

• Since the 1970s Hitachi has used a 183-year-old monkeypod tree in Hawaii's Moanalua Gardens in its ads, reportedly spending about 50 million yen a year to maintain it.
• In 1977 it built Fugen, the world's first fully MOX-fueled nuclear power station, after completing its first experimental reactor in 1961.
• In 1989 Hitachi researchers used in-house electron holography microscopes to fire single electrons through a double slit and record the wave interference pattern building up dot by dot.
• Hitachi built the server-side system behind Tokyo's Suica transit card in 2001 and released the first 1-terabyte consumer hard drive in 2007.
• In 2024 Bosch agreed to buy Hitachi's HVAC joint venture with Johnson Controls, Bosch's largest acquisition ever.

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Herbert Henry Dow founded his chemical company in Midland, Michigan in 1897 to extract bromine from the brine deposits beneath the town. In place of boiling brine over wood or coal fires, he ran an electric current through it to release bromine as a gas and blew air through to capture it. By 1902 the plant made 72 tons of bleach a day, and British bleach makers answered by flooding the U.S. market at predatory prices. Dow matched them and lost $90,000 in income, which convinced him that a two-product company could be starved out and that diversification was his defense.

In 1905 the German bromide cartel, the Bromkonvention, dumped bromide in the U.S. at 15 cents a pound while charging 49 cents in Europe. Dow stopped making his own, had agents buy up the cheap German stock, repackaged it and sold it in Europe for 27 cents. He built a plant that turned byproducts into chlorine, phenol, dyes, agricultural chemicals and magnesium, and by 1918 about 90 percent of capacity served World War I. After the war, magnesium went into Dowmetal pistons, which powered the winner of the 1921 Indianapolis 500. Dow held more than 90 patents, received the Perkin Medal in January 1930, and died of cirrhosis on October 15, 1930 at the Mayo Clinic. His son Willard, 33, took control.

• Charles J. Strosacker joined the company in 1907 as it expanded.
• Wartime output included magnesium for flares, phenol for picric acid explosives, and bromine for tear gas and pharmaceuticals; the diamond logo dates from this period.
• Willard Dow was born in 1897, the year the company was founded, and was made to work through every department before becoming general manager in 1926.
• Under Willard the company kept investing in research during the Depression, commercializing ethyl cellulose in 1935 and mass-producing polystyrene in 1937.
• In eight months in 1940 and 1941 Dow built a Freeport, Texas plant that pulled magnesium from Gulf of Mexico seawater using dredged oyster shells, supplying metal for Allied aircraft in World War II.

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London Heathrow opened as a small airfield in 1930, became London Airport in 1946 and took the Heathrow name in 1966. In the 1950s it had six short runways in three intersecting pairs, a hexagram that let tail-dragger propeller planes always land close to into the wind and avoid ground loops. Jets with tricycle landing gear handled crosswinds better but needed far longer runways, so two east-west runways were extended and the rest of the star was folded into the taxiways, where its outline is still visible from the air. Today those two runways run at more than 98 percent capacity for about 83.9 million passengers a year. Arrivals queue in four holding stacks over London, stacked 1,000 feet apart, and land as close as 2.5 nautical miles apart, roughly one every 45 to 60 seconds.

Noise rules shape everything: continuous descent approaches keep engines near idle, the noisiest jets are banned between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., and on west-wind days the landing and takeoff runways swap at 3 p.m. to give residents a break. Terminal 5 took 19 years and £4.3 billion to build and opened in March 2008 with a baggage system meltdown that cancelled more than 500 flights in two weeks; by 2014 it was voted the world's best airport terminal. The Airports Commission backed a third runway to the northwest in 2015. In early 2020 the Court of Appeal blocked it for failing to account for the Paris Agreement, and in December 2020 the UK Supreme Court overturned that ruling.

• In 2008 the 40 percent scale Concorde model at the entrance tunnel was replaced by a model of an Emirates Airbus A380.
• The Fly Quiet and Green league table, launched in 2017, ranks airlines on relative rather than absolute improvement and does not publish how its scores are calculated.
• Theft by baggage handlers in the 1970s earned the airport the nickname Thief Row, and Scotland Yard took over policing; the Brink's-Mat gold bullion robbery followed in the 1980s.
• Nine centimeters of snow in December 2010 filled all 198 aircraft stands, cancelling 4,000 flights and leaving 9,500 people sleeping in terminals.
• In November 2024 Heathrow began testing an AI system that combines radar and ground video to predict touchdown times and keep taxiways clear.

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Tokyo's Haneda Airport opened on August 25, 1931, when the Postal Ministry turned a 53-hectare plot of reclaimed land beside a fishing town on Tokyo Bay into an airfield with a 300-meter strip. Its first flight carried live insects to Dairen in the Kwantung Leased Territory. Aviators had been landing on the bay's beaches at low tide because the main airfield, Tachikawa, was a military base about 35 kilometers from central Tokyo. In 1938 the city planned to replace Haneda with a 251-hectare island airport in Koto Ward, larger than Berlin's Tempelhof, but World War II halted the work and the site became a garbage landfill called Yumenoshima, Dream Island. After Japan's surrender, General Douglas MacArthur took over the field as Haneda Army Air Base and on September 21, 1945 gave more than 3,000 residents and the Anamori Inari Shrine 48 hours to leave so the runways could be lengthened to 1,650 and 2,100 meters.

Those runways suited the jet age. Part of the field returned to Japan in 1952 as Tokyo International Airport and the rest in 1958, and the 1964 Olympics brought the Tokyo Monorail. Narita opened in 1978 and Haneda became domestic only, with one exception: Taiwan's China Airlines stayed at Haneda while mainland Chinese carriers used Narita, keeping the two apart. A 1983 plan built new runways on landfill made from municipal garbage, and Terminal 1, nicknamed Big Bird, opened in 1993. In 2010 Terminal 3 and the D Runway opened, bringing round-the-clock operations and long-haul international flights back. Haneda handled 85.9 million passengers in 2024, third busiest in the world.

• Aircraft based at Haneda flew coal in the Berlin Airlift, and coal dust ruined many of their engines.
• During the Korean War, Haneda was the main regional hub for U.S. Navy flight nurses evacuating wounded troops.
• In the early 2000s Haneda ran daily "scheduled charters" to Gimpo in Seoul and later Hongqiao in Shanghai while regular international flights were still barred.
• Part of the D Runway sits on an elevated steel pier so the Tama River can flow underneath it and not flood upstream during typhoons.
• In 2022 an aviation analytics firm ranked Haneda the most on-time international airport in the world, at 90.3 percent, despite airspace boxed in by Yokota and Atsugi military zones, Narita traffic and central Tokyo.

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The M142 HIMARS is a three-person crew cab and a single rocket pod mounted on the Army's standard five-ton FMTV truck chassis. The requirement for a lightweight multiple rocket launcher came from the 9th Infantry Division in 1982, but Cold War planners focused on armored battles in Europe preferred the tracked M270 MLRS, which carried two pods. The 1991 Gulf War changed that: the heavy M270s ate up airlift capacity and missed the first wave of U.S. deployments. By April 1991 a wheeled prototype was being tested at White Sands Missile Range. HIMARS trades half the ammunition for speed, driving at up to 58 miles per hour so its crew can fire and leave before counter-battery radar traces the rockets back, and it fits inside a C-130 Hercules.

The pod holds six GPS-guided GMLRS rockets with a range of about 92 kilometers, or one ATACMS ballistic missile reaching 300 kilometers, with the Precision Strike Missile pushing toward 500. HIMARS entered service in 2005 and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. After Russia's 2022 invasion, Ukraine used it to hit command posts, fuel depots and ammunition dumps far behind the front, forcing Russian supply lines back. Russia answered with drones, loitering munitions and GPS jamming on the L1 and L2 frequencies, which pushes the rockets onto less precise inertial navigation. Lockheed Martin is doubling output at Camden, Arkansas from 48 to 96 launchers a year, and an uncrewed variant, the Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, drops the cab entirely.

• The M30A1 alternative warhead bursts about 10 meters above the ground and scatters 182,000 tungsten steel fragments over half a square mile, leaving no unexploded bomblets.
• A 2010 strike during Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan caused civilian casualties and led ISAF to suspend HIMARS use temporarily; investigations found the Taliban had used human shields.
• A 2018 strike on a building in Musa Qala killed 50 Taliban leaders at once.
• Ukrainian forces built wooden decoy launchers that drew Russian cruise missiles costing millions of dollars each.
• A launcher costs the U.S. military about $4.9 million, while export packages for Poland or Taiwan run $19 to $20 million each with training, spares and software integration; Australia is building a domestic GMLRS rocket factory.

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In 1895 traveling salesman King Camp Gillette took advice from William Painter, inventor of the crown cork bottle cap, to invent something people use once and throw away. Six years of failure ended when MIT chemistry graduate William Emery Nickerson worked out how to temper and sharpen thin sheet steel, and with investor John Joyce they formed the American Safety Razor Company in 1901. The first year on sale, 1903, brought just 51 razors and 168 blades, but an automated grinder in 1904 lifted sales above 90,000. When gas masks required clean-shaven faces in 1917, Gillette sold 1.1 million kits, and in 1918 the U.S. military issued them to all servicemen.

As the patent expired in 1921, Gillette sold its old design as the $1 Brownie beside the $5 New Improved, creating the razor and blades model. In the late 1920s, a buyout of rival AutoStrop exposed that Gillette had overstated sales and profits by $12 million over five years to boost executive bonuses, and AutoStrop owner Henry Gaisman took control in 1930. The Blue Blade of 1932 restored trust. In World War II Gillette made magnetized compass blades, hollow handles hiding escape maps, and counterfeit German blades for Allied agents.

• In 1962 Wilkinson Sword's coated stainless blade lasted three times longer, using a method Gillette had patented but held back.
• Research into the hysteresis effect, where the first blade tugs a whisker so the second can cut it lower, led to the Trac II twin blade in 1971.
• To counter Bic's 1974 disposable, Gillette sold the premium blue Prestobarba in Latin America alongside cheaper yellow decoy razors it advertised against.
• Warren Buffett's $600 million stake in 1989 helped fend off raiders such as Revlon, and the 1998 Mach3 launch cost $300 million in marketing.
• Procter & Gamble bought Gillette for over $50 billion in 2005, and the 2019 "We Believe" ad drew both praise and boycott calls.

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In 1976 venture capitalist Robert Swanson, 28, cold-called biochemist Herbert Boyer, and over beers they put in $500 each to found Genentech. Boyer and Stanley Cohen had shown in 1973 that restriction enzymes could cut DNA fragments for insertion into another organism via plasmids; Cohen stayed in academia, while Boyer chose commercialization. In 1977, working with the Beckman Research Institute, Genentech got bacteria to produce the human hormone somatostatin, the first human gene expressed in bacteria that way. In 1978 it made synthetic human insulin, approved in 1982 as Humulin and licensed to Eli Lilly, which had the manufacturing scale and regulatory experience Genentech lacked.

Genentech followed with Protropin growth hormone in 1985, the clot buster Activase in 1987, Rituxan for lymphomas, and in 1998 Herceptin, an antibody that blocks HER2 growth signals in some breast cancers. Avastin, launched in 2004 to cut off tumors' blood supply, lost its breast cancer approval in 2011 when larger studies showed no significant survival benefit. In 2013 Kadcyla attached chemotherapy to a targeting antibody. Roche took a majority stake in 1990 and bought the rest in 2009 for about $46.8 billion.

• In 1999 Genentech paid UCSF a $200 million settlement ending a nine-year suit claiming Protropin used university technology.
• Genentech bought Tanox in 2006 and Seragon in 2014 to feed its pipeline.
• A 2015 deal worth $60 million gave it access to 23andMe genetic data.
• In 2009 Representatives Joe Wilson and Blaine Luetkemeyer read talking points drafted by Genentech lobbyists on biosimilar exclusivity on the House floor.
• In 2024 Lonza bought Genentech's Vacaville, California, manufacturing site for $1.2 billion.

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London Gatwick in Crawley, West Sussex, handles over 43 million passengers a year, the second-busiest airport in the UK and tenth in Europe, on one active runway. It began as a grass aerodrome in the late 1920s, started commercial flights in 1933, and served as RAF Gatwick in World War II. After the circular 1935 Beehive terminal, architects Yorke Rosenberg Mardall led a 1955 to 1988 redevelopment whose South Terminal opened in May 1958 as one of the first enclosed pier-based terminals, letting passengers walk indoors to their planes. In 1983 it added the UK's first automated people mover, to a satellite pier.

The 1978 Bermuda II treaty let only a few airlines, including British Airways, Pan Am and TWA, fly to the U.S. from Heathrow, pushing other U.S. carriers to Gatwick. The 2008 EU-US Open Skies deal ended that, and after US Airways dropped Charlotte in 2013, Gatwick had no scheduled U.S. airline until JetBlue arrived in 2021. Ordered sold by the Competition Commission in 2009, it went to a consortium led by Global Infrastructure Partners for £1.51 billion, with Vinci later taking 50.01 percent. A plan to move the northern runway 12 meters so both can operate together was approved in September 2025 and upheld by the Court of Appeal in August 2026.

• The two runways sit 656 feet apart, too close for simultaneous use because of wake turbulence, so the northern one serves mainly as a taxiway.
• A 1979 agreement with West Sussex County Council barred a second runway for 40 years, and in 2015 the Airports Commission backed Heathrow instead.
• easyJet paid £20 million for 25 pairs of daily slots left by Flybe and now bases over 60 aircraft at Gatwick, its largest base.
• Drone sightings from December 19, 2018, shut the runway over three days, stranding or delaying 110,000 passengers; a local couple was arrested and released without charge.
• A 1959 Turkish Airlines crash in fog killed 14, and a 1969 Ariana Afghan Airlines crash into a house killed 50.