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Civil aviation in Dubai began in 1937, when Imperial Airways rented a base for its Empire flying boats on the Horseshoe Route between Britain, Karachi, South Africa and Australia, for about 440 rupees a month including guards' wages. In 1959 Sheikh Rashid ordered a land airport, which opened in 1960 with an 1,800-meter runway of compacted sand that received Douglas DC-3s. An asphalt runway followed in May 1965, letting jets land. Through the 1970s and 1980s Dubai International (DXB) thrived as a refueling stop because airliners lacked the range to fly Europe to Southeast Asia nonstop and Soviet airspace was largely closed to Western carriers. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and long-range aircraft like the Boeing 747-400, Airbus A340 and Boeing 777 could fly London to Singapore without stopping.

Dubai answered by building its own airlines, Emirates and later flydubai, to route traffic through the city. Terminal 2 opened in 1998 and Terminal 3, built exclusively for Emirates, fully opened in 2008 as the world's largest airport terminal and the fourth largest building on Earth by floor space. By 2014 the airport supported over 400,000 jobs and $26.7 billion, about 27 percent of Dubai's GDP. Traffic reached 92.3 million passengers in 2024 and 95.2 million in 2025. April 2024 floods submerged taxiways, and in late February 2026 Iranian airstrikes and drone attacks targeted Dubai, damaging the airport, injuring four people there, and suspending operations into March.

• Emirates handles about 51 percent of DXB passengers and 42 percent of aircraft movements.
• Dedicated A380 concourses let passengers board both decks at once, and baggage carousels run 90 meters long.
• Passenger traffic fell 31 percent in the second quarter of 2026 as the conflict disrupted Middle East air travel.
• DXB is hemmed in by the city and capped at about 115 million passengers a year.
• Dubai plans to close DXB and move operations to Al Maktoum International at Jebel Ali, open for cargo since 2010 and planned for 160 million passengers.

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Los Angeles International Airport began in 1928, when the city leased 640 acres of wheat, barley and lima bean fields in Westchester known as Mines Field. Dirt strips opened that October, Hangar No. 1 went up in 1929 and still stands on the National Register of Historic Places, and the field was dedicated as Los Angeles Municipal Airport in 1930. The airlines stayed at Burbank and Grand Central in Glendale until World War II, when the military took over the field in 1942 and aircraft factories ringed it. A $12.5 million bond passed in 1943, and in 1946 American, TWA and United moved in. The X in LAX means nothing: when airport codes went from two letters to three in 1947, LA simply got an X. The 1958 plan arranged terminals in a U-shape, and the Googie-style Theme Building, dedicated in 1961 with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson present, replaced a planned glass dome.

Since 1972 LAX has managed noise with a preferential runway policy. From 6:30 a.m. to midnight, departures use the inboard runways near the terminals and arrivals use the outboard runways; from midnight to 6:30 a.m., arrivals and departures both run over the ocean, unless Santa Ana winds force easterly operations over Inglewood and South LA. In 2019, 88 percent of passengers started or ended their trips in Los Angeles, which jams the terminal horseshoe. A $30 billion modernization adds the SkyLink people mover, scheduled for 2026, a Metro transit center, a consolidated rental car facility, and an increase from 146 to 182 gates. Facility fees near $50 per departing passenger led Allegiant to announce it would close its LAX crew base.

• The Theme Building's interior was redone by Walt Disney Imagineering in 1997.
• The 1984 Olympics brought the upper-level roadway and the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
• In 1986 Aeroméxico Flight 498 collided with a private Piper over Cerritos, killing all 67 people aboard both planes and 15 on the ground, and leading the FAA to require TCAS collision avoidance.
• In 1999 Ahmed Ressam was caught at the Canadian border with explosives meant for an LAX passenger area on New Year's Eve.
• In 2013 two employees removed dry ice from a cargo hold to protect a dog, sealed it in plastic bottles, and set off two blasts that shut terminals.

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Robert Tappan Morris was born in 1965 and grew up in Millington, New Jersey, the son of Robert Morris Sr., a Bell Labs researcher who helped design Multics and Unix and later became chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, part of the NSA. As a high schooler at the Delbarton School he was already cracking passwords. In 1988, as a first-year graduate student at Cornell, he released a self-spreading program from MIT's network to hide its origin. The worm used three weaknesses: the debug mode of Sendmail, a buffer overflow in the fingerd service, and trusted remote execution through rexec and rsh. Morris said he only wanted to measure the internet, but he coded the worm to copy itself 14 percent of the time even onto machines that reported being infected, and repeated infections froze systems across academic, military and research networks. Damage estimates ran as high as $10 million.

In 1989 Morris became the first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His 1990 sentence was three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a $10,050 fine, and the conviction was upheld on appeal. He earned a Harvard PhD in 1999 under H.T. Kung with a thesis on scalable TCP congestion control. In 1995 he and Paul Graham founded Viaweb, which generated online storefronts on the server using software written in Lisp; Yahoo bought it for $49 million in 1998 and renamed it Yahoo Store. Morris joined MIT's faculty in 1999 and received tenure in 2006. In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator with Graham, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell, which backed companies including Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.

• Y Combinator's batch model gave groups of startups about $20,000 each, three months of advice and a demo day.
• At MIT Morris co-authored Chord, a distributed hash table protocol that reroutes around failed nodes.
• Morris and Graham released Arc, a dialect of Lisp, in 2008, and Graham named the markup language RTML after Morris.
• Graham has called Morris a personal hero who is "never wrong."
• Morris won the Mark Weiser Award in 2010, became an ACM Fellow in 2014 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

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Winnebago Industries grew out of a 1958 rescue effort in Forest City, Iowa, in a county named for the Ho-Chunk people, where businessman John K. Hanson and civic leaders persuaded California's Modernistic Industries to open a travel trailer factory. Five local investors including Hanson bought it, and in 1960 it became Winnebago Industries. The company made its own furniture, cabinets and metal stampings and invented the Thermo-Panel, a wall of styrofoam bonded between aluminum and wood paneling. When its first motor homes appeared in 1966, they cost about half of what competitors charged, opening RV ownership to middle-class families and retirees. Professor James B. Twitchell compared a circle of Winnebagos to the covered wagons of the Old West, and the name became a generic word for any motorhome.

The 1970s energy crisis pushed Winnebago toward smaller vehicles: the 1973 Minnie Winnie on a Dodge van chassis, the pop-top Winnie Wagon, the Renault-based LeSharo, the Volkswagen-based Rialta, and an aluminum delivery van with a Cummins diesel. Around 1982 an Australian businessman began building RVs under the Winnebago name and a near-identical logo; he ignored a 1992 settlement and registered the trademark himself in 1997. Australia's Federal Court canceled that registration, but in 2013 ruled he could keep using the name with a disclaimer because he had sold the vehicles for 32 years and the U.S. company had known for 25. Under CEO Michael Happe, who took over in 2016, Winnebago moved its headquarters to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and bought Chris-Craft boats in 2018, Newmar in 2019 and Barletta pontoon boats for over $300 million in 2021.

• The Heli-Home, built with Orlando Helicopter Airways from surplus Sikorsky S-55 and S-58 helicopters, slept up to six; only six or seven were produced.
• German politician Guido Westerwelle campaigned in 2002 in a yellow and blue Winnebago nicknamed the Guidomobile.
• The character Gonzo lived in a Winnebago called the Titanic in the hospital lot on Trapper John, M.D.
• In 2014 the Australian company put the Winnebago name on premium models one month before the real Winnebago announced it was entering Australia.
• Winnebago opened a production center in Waverly, Iowa, in 2015 because of labor shortages in Forest City.

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Tripadvisor began in 2000 when Stephen Kaufer, frustrated while planning a family vacation, raised $2 million to build a site where travelers could review hotels for each other. By 2004 it drew 5 million unique visitors a month, was bought by IAC, spun off under Expedia, and later went public. It then bought its way into every part of a trip, including Cruise Critic, the vacation rental site FlipKey, the European restaurant booking system TheFork and the tour software company Bokun. The platform grew to roughly a billion reviews on about 8 million establishments, far beyond what human moderators could check. In 2017 journalist Oobah Butler registered his backyard shed as The Shed at Dulwich, had friends post timed glowing reviews, and pushed it to the top-ranked restaurant in London.

Moderation failures went beyond fake ratings. Women who posted warnings about sexual assaults at a Mexican resort had their reviews deleted, and an antisemitic review of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was approved until public outcry. Italy's antitrust authority fined the company half a million euros, and UK advertising regulators made it drop the slogan "reviews you can trust." British tourist Craig Barrett posted a warning after his wife was harassed at a Doha hotel; the hotel filed a criminal defamation complaint under Qatari cybercrime law, he was tried in absentia, and he was detained at an airport months later and deported. China banned the app in 2020. Then generative AI arrived, and Tripadvisor lost a third of its web traffic between 2024 and 2025.

• A user on its Chinese platform reviewed 51 Paris restaurants in one month while also reviewing 50 hotels in other countries.
• Australian hotel chain Meriton was fined $3 million for manipulating guest email lists to skew its ratings.
• A consumer survey of about a quarter million reviews found one in seven showed signs of being fabricated.
• CEO Matt Goldberg merged the main platform with subsidiary Viator to sell experiences, and the company made a $430 million acquisition of its own holding company.
• In late 2025 Tripadvisor launched a native app inside ChatGPT for planning trips through conversation.

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DuPont began in 1802 when French chemist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, fleeing the French Revolution, built a gunpowder mill on Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware, with imported French machinery. It supplied between a third and half of the Union Army's gunpowder in the Civil War, added dynamite and smokeless powder, and controlled nearly two-thirds of the U.S. explosives market until a 1912 Sherman Antitrust Act ruling spun off Hercules and Atlas Powder. The company then founded the DuPont Experimental Station, where chemist Wallace Carothers, hired in 1928, developed neoprene and in 1935 nylon. In World War II DuPont employed 37,000 workers, made 4.5 billion pounds of explosives, sent nylon to parachutes, and built and ran the Hanford plutonium site for the Manhattan Project, later building the Savannah River plant. Mylar, Lycra and Kevlar followed the war.

In 1930 DuPont and General Motors formed Kinetic Chemicals to make Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant, and by the 1980s DuPont was the largest CFC maker, with $600 million in annual sales. Despite a 1974 pledge to stop if CFCs proved harmful, in 1988 it called proposed regulations unwarranted, then, ten days after a March 1988 NASA study showed a 2.3 percent ozone decline, announced a phase-out and backed the Montreal Protocol. Teflon, invented in 1938, relied on PFOA, or C8. In 1999 lawyer Rob Bilott sued on behalf of a Parkersburg, West Virginia, cattle rancher, a case that grew into a class action over drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio, and internal documents showed DuPont scientists had known for decades of links to serious health effects. In 2015 DuPont spun off Chemours with liabilities for 171 sites, then merged with Dow and split into Corteva, Dow and a new DuPont.

• Before the U.S. entered World War II, company president Irénée du Pont was a financial supporter of Adolf Hitler; the Nazi government seized DuPont's German assets in 1943.
• DuPont won a 2003 National Medal of Technology for developing CFC replacements.
• A court-appointed C8 science panel found probable links to six conditions, including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease and ulcerative colitis.
• Settlements included $671 million for over 3,000 Parkersburg claims in 2017, $1.2 billion over PFAS in drinking water, and $2 billion for New Jersey sites.
• A 2014 methyl mercaptan leak in Texas killed four workers, and DuPont pleaded guilty to criminal negligence.

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Cracker Barrel started in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, where Shell Oil representative Dan Evans designed a country store with gas pumps to sell more gasoline to highway travelers. The 1970s oil crisis forced the company to drop the pumps and live entirely on food and retail. Its decor is run from a 90,000-item archive of genuine antiques at its Tennessee headquarters, built up for decades by the Singleton family: designers mock up each new dining room inside the warehouse, arrange real artifacts, photograph the layout and ship the pieces with a map. The chain went public in 1981, grew about 20 percent a year, and reached a $1 billion valuation by 1992. Fans Ray and Wilma Yoder drove over 5 million miles between 1977 and 2017 to visit 644 locations, but 1990s suburban carryout spots called Corner Market failed.

A 1991 internal memo told managers to fire employees who lacked "normal heterosexual values"; Evans called it a mistake and it was ended within months, but the New York City employees' retirement system pressed shareholder votes until 58 percent backed adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination policy in 2002. In 2004 the company settled NAACP-backed racial discrimination suits and a Justice Department case requiring an outside auditor. The pandemic brought DoorDash delivery and, in September 2020, alcohol. Kraft, which has sold Cracker Barrel cheese since the 1950s, won a trademark case that forced grocery products under the name CB Old Country Store. By May 2024, 16 percent of pre-2020 customers had not returned. An August 2025 logo that dropped Uncle Herschel lasted one week before the company scrapped it.

• Every location displays the same five items: a shotgun, a cast iron cook stove, a deer head, an antique telephone and a vintage traffic light.
• Activist investor Sardar Biglari tried five times over a decade to win board seats before a 2022 truce.
• After the logo reversal the company halted remodels tested in four locations and removed diversity and Pride pages from its website.
• In 2026 it cut its traditional New Year's Day black-eyed pea special.
• A January 2026 memo told corporate staff traveling for work to eat at Cracker Barrel whenever practical.

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Chicago Midway began in 1923 as Chicago Air Park, a 320-acre field with one cinder runway used mostly for airmail. The city leased it in 1926, renamed it Chicago Municipal Airport in 1927, and by 1928 had 12 hangars, four runways and night lighting. A 1930 hangar fire destroyed 27 aircraft, including 12 trimotor airliners, but by 1932 the airport handled more than 100,000 passengers on about 60,000 flights and claimed the title of world's busiest. A $1 million WPA grant filled out a full square mile, it passed LaGuardia in 1948 as the busiest U.S. airport, and in 1949 it was renamed for the Battle of Midway. By the late 1950s it handled about 10 million passengers a year, boxed in by 55th Street, 63rd Street, Cicero Avenue and Central Avenue in the Clearing and Garfield Ridge neighborhoods.

Jets like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 needed more than Midway's roughly 5,700-foot longest runway, and O'Hare's new terminal in 1962 drew the airlines away; from 1962 to 1964 the only scheduled carrier left was Chicago Helicopter. Shorter-field jets like the 727, DC-9 and 737 brought it back after a $10 million renovation in 1968. ATA Airlines made Midway its hub for over 16 years until its 2008 collapse, and Southwest, which arrived in 1985, now carries more than 90 percent of its passengers. Mayor Richard M. Daley's terminal program, then the largest public works project in Illinois history, put the terminal and concourses on opposite sides of Cicero Avenue, linked by a bridge over the traffic. A 99-year lease valued at $2.5 billion collapsed in 2009, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended a $2 billion privatization effort in 2013.

• Until 1982 the land belonged to the Chicago Board of Education; the city bought it for $16 million.
• The CTA Orange Line, completed in 1993, runs from the airport to the Loop in about 25 minutes.
• Displaced thresholds move the touchdown point hundreds of feet down the runway so landing jets clear homes and streetlights.
• In December 2005 Southwest Flight 1248 slid off the runway in snow into 55th Street and Central Avenue, killing a six-year-old boy in a car.
• United Flight 553 crashed near Midway in 1972; passenger Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, was carrying $10,000 in cash.

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Cargill began in 1865 in Conover, Iowa, where William Wallace Cargill and his brothers built grain flat houses, the storage bottleneck every farmer had to pass through. When he died in 1909 the company was drowning in debt and issued $2.25 million in gold notes due in 1917. World War I sent grain prices to records, and Cargill paid off everything by 1915. Under John MacMillan Sr. it expanded into Canada, Europe, Latin America and trade with the Soviet Union. After the 1936 corn crop failure, the Chicago Board of Trade ordered Cargill in 1937 to sell physical corn reserves; it refused, was accused of trying to corner the market and was suspended, and when the suspension lifted it never rejoined, trading through independent brokers instead. Today it is the largest privately held company in the United States, with $154 billion in 2025 revenue, about 155,000 employees and roughly 22 percent of the U.S. meat market, and more than 90 percent is still owned by the founding family.

World War II saw Cargill build T-1 tankers for the U.S. Navy and buy Nutrena Feeds. It struck a $40 million wheat deal with the Soviet Union in 1963, hit $5 billion in sales by 1972, and was carrying $4 billion in debt by 1999 after the Asian financial crisis and Russia's default. In June 2020 it stopped publishing quarterly results it had released since 1996. Its supply chains have drawn lawsuits over child labor on West African cocoa farms, a $30 million 2024 settlement of claims that meatpackers suppressed wages, which it denied, and a COVID-19 outbreak linked to more than 1,500 cases at its High River, Canada, plant. Environmental groups tie it to deforestation through a 2003 soy port at Santarém in the Amazon and palm oil from Sumatra and Borneo.

• In 1971 Cargill sold Iraq 63,000 tons of seed grain treated with a methylmercury fungicide; it arrived late, was baked into bread, and caused at least 650 documented deaths.
• The Iraqi grain was dyed pink and labeled in Spanish and English, which local farmers largely could not read.
• A Brazilian court fined Cargill more than $120,000 in 2023 over child labor in cocoa harvesting.
• NGOs allege Cargill used 36 shell companies in Colombia to acquire more than 50,000 hectares, over 30 times the legal limit.
• In 2024 the USDA found human-grade antibiotics given to cattle later sold as raised without antibiotics.

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Bayer began in 1863 in Barmen, Germany, when dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott started making synthetic dyes from coal tar chemistry. The same aniline compounds pointed the company toward medicine. In 1899 it launched aspirin, officially credited to chemist Felix Hoffmann, though Arthur Eichengrün, a Jewish Bayer chemist, later asserted while imprisoned at Theresienstadt that he directed the work and coined the name. From 1898 to 1910 Bayer also sold heroin, named from the German word for heroic, as a non-addictive morphine substitute for coughs, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Phenobarbital followed in 1912. In World War I Bayer made chemical weapons, and the U.S. and Canada confiscated its assets and trademarks, which is why aspirin is a generic word in America. In 1925 Bayer merged with BASF, Hoechst and others into IG Farben, where Gerhard Domagk discovered Prontosil, the first commercial antibacterial drug, and won a 1939 Nobel Prize the Nazi regime forced him to decline.

During World War II IG Farben built the Buna Works at Monowitz, Auschwitz III, and by 1943 nearly half its workforce was slave labor and conscripts, including about 30,000 Auschwitz prisoners. SS physician Helmuth Vetter, on Bayer's payroll, ran lethal experiments on inmates. After Nuremberg, Fritz ter Meer was sentenced to seven years, yet in 1956 he became chairman of Bayer's supervisory board. Later scandals included its Cutter Laboratories unit selling unheated Factor VIII clotting concentrate in Asia and Latin America after a heat-treated version existed, and the 2001 withdrawal of Baycol after 52 deaths. In 2018 Bayer bought Monsanto for $66 billion, the largest acquisition by a German company, and inherited Roundup litigation over non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

• A surviving memo shows a Bayer employee paid 170 Reichsmarks each for 150 female Auschwitz inmates, then asked for another group after they died in experiments.
• Ter Meer served as Bayer's supervisory board chairman from 1956 to 1964, during West Germany's postwar rebuilding.
• Thousands of hemophiliac patients in the regions that received the unheated Factor VIII contracted HIV and died of AIDS.
• Roundup claims passed 165,000, and Bayer committed more than $10 billion to settlements without admitting liability.
• By 2023 Bayer's market value had fallen about 60 percent, leaving the whole company worth less than it paid for Monsanto.