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Hyatt Hotels began in 1954 with the Hyatt House, a motel beside Los Angeles International Airport opened by Hyatt Robert von Dehn and Jack Dyer Crouch. In 1957 Jay Pritzker bought it for $2.2 million, and his brother Donald soon joined him. The Pritzkers bet that air travel was creating a class of flying executives who valued time over setting, and within two years they had airport hotels in San Francisco and Seattle. In 1967 the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, designed by John Portman, opened with a towering indoor atrium and glass elevators that became the signature of the Hyatt Regency brand. Today Hyatt operates over 1,300 hotels and all-inclusive properties in 69 countries.

On July 17, 1981, two skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City collapsed during a crowded tea dance, killing 114 people and injuring over 200. A late design change had hung the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway instead of from the ceiling, doubling the load on the fourth-floor box beams. Decades later, family member Liesel Pritzker sued relatives for over $6 billion, alleging her trusts had been looted. Settling and dividing the family empire required cash, and in November 2009 Hyatt raised $1.15 billion in an IPO under the ticker H, with Thomas Pritzker as executive chairman and Mark Hoplamazian as CEO.

• Hyatt first went public in 1962, and the Pritzkers took it private again in 1979.
• The first Grand Hyatt, in New York, was a partnership with Donald Trump, whose share the Pritzkers later bought out after lawsuits.
• In August 2009 three Boston-area Hyatts fired their entire housekeeping staffs, the Hyatt 100, and Governor Deval Patrick threatened a state boycott.
• Hyatt turned AmeriSuites into Hyatt Place and Summerfield Suites into Hyatt House, and paid $2.7 billion for Apple Leisure Group in 2021.
• PETA has pressed Hyatt over an Alaska hotel's Iditarod sponsorship, with over 40,000 public pleas and no response from the corporate office.

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The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, bitter rivals on the New York to Chicago routes, proposed merging in 1957 as trucks and the 1956 interstate highway program drained their freight and the Interstate Commerce Commission barred them from raising rates or dropping money-losing routes. The ICC took nearly a decade to approve the deal. By the time Penn Central formed in 1968, many young managers had left, the cultures of Stuart Saunders' traditional Pennsylvania and Alfred Perlman's modern New York Central had never meshed, and regulators required the new company to absorb the bankrupt New Haven railroad.

Incompatible computers lost trains, union contracts kept crews from handling each other's equipment, and rotten cross ties caused standing derailments; the Cleveland yard averaged six derailments a day. Losing about $1 million a day, management diverted cash into real estate and pipelines, borrowed to keep paying dividends, and reported a 1969 railroad loss of $56 million to the public and $67.8 million to the ICC while internal figures showed $190.8 million. Washington refused aid without new leadership, the board fired Saunders and CFO David Bevan, and after requests for a $750 million loan guarantee and a $200 million defense loan failed, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy on June 21, 1970, then the largest in U.S. history. Amtrak followed in 1971 and Conrail in 1976.

• In 1969 a Maine potato shipment rotted at New York's Selkirk yard, and Bangor and Aroostook shippers vowed never to ship by rail again.
• Bankruptcy-era president William Moore fired a superintendent for failing to clear a derailed coal train from a Baltimore tunnel within one hour.
• Moore was ousted after using railroad staff to renovate his home and having Scott Paper bill Penn Central for toilet paper to cover a borrowed corporate jet.
• Investor Max Heine bought bonds at pennies on the dollar, betting the assets were worth more than the debt, and profited in the 1978 reorganization.
• The 1978 Supreme Court case Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City upheld the city's block on a tower over Grand Central, which the MTA bought in 2020.

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The T-72 began as an act of defiance. In the 1960s Alexander Morozov's Kharkiv bureau built the T-64, with an autoloader and a fragile 5TDF opposed-piston two-stroke diesel that took about twice as long to build as a V-shaped engine. The GABTU, the Soviet Main Agency of Armored Forces, ordered Leonid Kartsev's bureau in Nizhny Tagil to refit the T-64 with a V-12 diesel as a cheap mobilization model. Kartsev instead combined the T-64's gun, the V-12 and the suspension of his rejected Object 167 in a project code-named Ural. Field tests showed it was cheaper and more reliable, and in 1973, after Kartsev had retired due to illness, it was adopted as the T-72. About 25,000 were built, serving in over 40 countries.

The 41-ton tank carries a 125mm smoothbore fed by a floor-mounted carousel of 22 two-part rounds, with 17 more stowed around the crew compartment. A penetrating hit that ignites those spare charges can set off all 39 rounds and blow the turret off the hull, the jack-in-the-box effect. Armor evolved through the composite "Dolly Parton" turret of the 1979 T-72A, the thicker T-72B and Kontakt explosive reactive armor. Iraqi T-72s beat British Chieftains in the Iran-Iraq War, and Hafez al-Assad called it the best tank in the world after Lebanon in 1982. In 1991, downgraded Iraqi export models firing 1970s steel-core rounds were destroyed at 73 Easting by Abrams crews using thermal sights.

• Soviet rules allowed crewmen up to 5 feet 9 inches, so the short-crew legend is mostly a myth, though the interior is very cramped.
• With a snorkel the T-72 can cross rivers 5 meters deep, and a stalled engine must restart within about six seconds before it floods.
• Explosive reactive armor throws metal plates across an incoming shaped charge jet to break it up.
• Cope cages welded over turrets in Ukraine gave little protection against tandem-charge Javelin missiles and could trap crews.
• Kartsev's design became the basis for the later T-90 series.

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Prudential Financial began in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875, when John F. Dryden founded the Widows and Orphans Friendly Society, soon renamed the Prudential Friendly Society. Its one product was industrial burial insurance for the urban working class at three cents a week, collected door to door by agents. Relative to the death benefit, those premiums cost more than ordinary life insurance, and when a family missed a payment the policy lapsed and the company kept everything paid in. In 1907 Louis Brandeis pushed Massachusetts reforms that let savings banks sell cheaper life insurance. Prudential's Rock of Gibraltar symbol was inspired by Snake Hill, a rock formation in Secaucus beside the New Jersey Turnpike.

In 1954, after blockbusting in East Palo Alto, Prudential and Equitable refused to insure mortgages for white families in integrated neighborhoods, in line with FHA and VA redlining rules. The 1981 purchase of the brokerage Bache led to an SEC finding that Prudential Securities had defrauded investors of nearly $8 billion through risky limited partnerships sold as safe income, and a 1993 settlement of $330 million plus $41 million in fines. A $2 billion class action over policy churning followed in 1997. Prudential sold its health unit to Aetna for $1 billion in 1999, demutualized, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2001. By 2019 it was the largest U.S. insurance provider, with over $815 billion in assets.

• About 400,000 investors lost money in the limited partnership scheme, at the time the largest fraud the SEC had uncovered.
• Regulators from 30 states imposed a $35 million fine over churning, in which agents replaced older cash-value policies to earn fresh commissions.
• In 2010 military families sued over retained asset accounts that paid 0.5 percent while Prudential earned up to 4.2 percent on the money; earlier similar suits had been dismissed.
• In August 2004 the Newark headquarters was fortified with concrete barriers and X-ray machines after terrorist threats were discovered.
• In 2026 its Japanese life insurance unit suspended new sales for nearly a year after a misconduct probe, at an estimated cost of over half a billion dollars.

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The M1 Abrams grew out of the failure of the MBT-70, a U.S. and West German project launched in 1963 with an autoloader, a driver seated in the turret, adjustable hydropneumatic suspension and a gun that fired guided missiles. By 1969 its estimated unit price had reached $1 million, and Congress canceled it. The 1972 XM1 program capped the cost at $507,790 per tank and required competing contractor prototypes. At Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1976, General Motors' variable compression diesel design beat Chrysler's gas turbine on armor, fire control and cost, but in July 1976 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delayed the award and made a turbine mandatory, and Chrysler won the contract.

The production tank used British-designed Chobham composite armor, moved from a 105mm rifled gun to a 120mm smoothbore firing depleted uranium darts on the M1A1, and ran on the AGT-1500 turbine, reaching 45 mph while burning 1.5 to 3 gallons per mile. In Desert Storm in 1991, nearly 2,000 Abrams deployed and none was destroyed by enemy tank fire: of nine lost, seven were friendly fire and two were destroyed by U.S. forces after getting stuck. Later came the Tank Urban Survival Kit for Iraq, Ukrainian crews welding cages over turrets against drones, and the Marine Corps giving up all its tanks in 2020 under Force Design 2030.

• Testers at Fort Bliss threw tracks with the "bow tie," slamming into reverse at speed, so Chrysler added a device to block it.
• Chrysler earned about 5 percent of its income from military sales, while GM earned about 1 percent and bid only after a Pentagon plea.
• At 73 Easting, Captain H.R. McMaster's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment used thermal sights to fight through a sandstorm.
• The Abrams could kill tanks at 2,500 meters, while Iraqi tanks could not answer until within 2,000 meters.
• In 1993 the FBI borrowed two Abrams tanks during the Waco siege to breach the compound walls.

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The Churchill tank grew from the A-20, an infantry tank designed for the trench warfare British planners expected in a second European war. After France fell and the army left much of its equipment at Dunkirk, director of tank design Dr. H.E. Merritt revised it into the A-22, and Vauxhall Motors was told to put it into production within one year. The first Churchills rolled out in June 1941 with a leaflet apologizing to crews for their flaws. The 350-horsepower Bedford Twin-Six joined two truck engines into a flat-12, the tank was underpowered, and in one 1942 exercise a single Churchill needed five gearbox replacements. Its Merritt-Brown triple differential, however, could drive the tracks in opposite directions and spin the tank in place.

At Dieppe in August 1942, about 60 Churchills supporting Canadian troops bogged down on the stony chert beach, yet none was penetrated by German anti-tank fire while manned. In Tunisia in 1943, a Churchill of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment jammed the turret of Tiger 131 with a six-pounder shell at Longstop Hill, giving the Allies their first intact Tiger, still running at the Tank Museum in Dorset. The Mark VII carried 152mm of frontal armor, thicker than the Tiger I, and the chassis carried Percy Hobart's specialist vehicles. Over 300 went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. The Black Prince, built for a 17-pounder gun, reached only six prototypes before cancellation in 1945 as the Centurion arrived, and the Churchill retired in 1952.

• One King Force tank at the Second Battle of El Alamein was hit up to 80 times, and only one of the six was knocked out.
• At Steamroller Farm, two Churchills destroyed multiple 88mm guns, 25 wheeled vehicles and two Panzer III tanks.
• The NA75 used 75mm guns cut from mine-damaged Shermans and mounted upside down; about 200 were converted.
• The AVRE's 230mm spigot mortar, the "flying dustbin," had to be reloaded by hand through a roof hatch.
• The Crocodile flamethrower towed a 400-gallon armored fuel trailer linked by an articulated coupling.

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The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the DDG-1000, began as the DD-21 program after Congress required the Navy to replace the shore bombardment capability lost when the Iowa-class battleships retired. The result displaces over 15,000 tons, about 40 percent more than a standard destroyer, yet looks like a fishing boat on radar thanks to a wave-piercing tumblehome hull that slopes inward, a shape often compared to the Civil War ironclad CSS Virginia. It runs with a crew of 147 through a Linux-based network on IBM blade servers, places 80 missile cells in a Peripheral Vertical Launch System around the hull, and generates 78 megawatts through a turboelectric drive fed by two Rolls-Royce gas turbines.

The plan for 32 ships fell to 24, then seven, then three: USS Zumwalt, USS Michael Monsoor and USS Lyndon B. Johnson. With $9.6 billion in research spread over three hulls, the program reached $22.5 billion, triggering a Nunn-McCurdy breach and a cost near $7.5 billion per ship. Its two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems were built to fire the Long Range Land Attack Projectile, but with so few ships each round rose to between $800,000 and $1 million, and the Navy canceled the ammunition. Budget cuts removed the SPY-4 radar and the ship lacked the Aegis software used for ballistic missile defense, so starting in 2023 the Navy began removing the guns to fit Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles.

• The Government Accountability Office found only four of the design's 12 critical technologies were mature.
• Water sleeting over the hull and exhaust mixed with cool air aim to match the ship's surface temperature to the sea.
• Explosions in the peripheral launch cells are designed to vent outward into the ocean rather than into the ship.
• The LRLAP had an 83 nautical mile range, and the water-cooled guns could fire 10 rounds a minute from a 750-round automated magazine.
• For comparison, a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine costs about $2.7 billion.

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State Farm was founded in 1922 in Bloomington, Illinois, by retired farmer George J. Mecherle as a mutual automobile insurer for farmers, who drove less and crashed less than city motorists but paid the same premiums. As a mutual, it is owned by its policyholders. It grew into the largest U.S. property, casualty and auto insurer, with $104.2 billion in 2023 revenue, a $6.3 billion net loss that year, 65,000 employees and 19,000 captive agents. Its "Like a good neighbor" jingle was written by Barry Manilow in 1971, and Jake from State Farm began in a 2011 ad played by employee Jake Stone before actor Kevin Miles took over the role in 2020.

Behind the brand is a long record of court fights. After a 2006 Good Friday hailstorm in Indiana, roofer Joseph Radcliffe reported State Farm to regulators; the company accused him of vandalism on fabricated evidence, he faced 14 felony counts that were dismissed, and a jury awarded him $17 million. After Hurricane Katrina, adjusters Cori and Kerri Rigsby alleged that wind damage was reclassified as flood damage to shift costs to the federal flood program, and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in a case that ended in a $100 million settlement. In 2023 State Farm stopped taking new homeowner applications in California, and in February 2025 it requested an emergency 22 percent rate hike there after the January wildfires.

• In the Campbell case, State Farm contested a 1981 crash claim, assured its driver his assets were safe, and later faced a $145 million punitive damages ruling.
• A 1993 lawsuit over a so-called Jewish Lawyers List, used to route claims to the fraud unit, ended in a $30 million settlement.
• An NYU study cited in a 2020 lawsuit found Black customers faced 20 percent higher odds of needing three or more contacts to get claims approved; the company denies the allegations.
• Attorney Dickie Scruggs pleaded guilty to trying to pay a judge a $50,000 bribe in a related Katrina settlement.
• A California regulatory review found nearly 400 claims from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires were mishandled, delayed or underpaid.

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The Los Angeles class, known as the 688 class after lead boat SSN-688, grew from late-1960s alarm over fast Soviet submarines armed with anti-ship cruise missiles. The existing Sturgeon class could not keep pace with a carrier battle group at full speed, so the new design was about 50 percent larger to hold the S6G pressurized water reactor, with machinery on shock-absorbing rafts to keep noise out of the water. The boats broke with the tradition of naming submarines after sea creatures and took the names of American cities; asked why, Admiral Hyman Rickover answered that fish don't vote. Building them was contentious: in 1976 General Dynamics Electric Boat filed a $544 million claim over Navy design changes, which the Navy settled for $843 million under special public law authority.

In 1979 and 1980 inspectors found non-conforming steel and thousands of defective or missing welds, and the shipyard filed a $100 million insurance claim to cover reinspection. The Navy built 62 boats over more than 20 years in three flights, and officially lists the speed only as over 25 knots and the operating depth as 650 feet, while Tom Clancy estimated 37 knots and Jane's Fighting Ships a 1,475-foot test depth. The ARCI program later swapped custom sonar computers for commercial processors. Some boats, such as USS Bremerton and USS San Francisco, served over 40 years, while others retired after 15 or 20 to avoid the cost of midlife refueling.

• A single boat eventually cost around $900 million, and Electric Boat's first batch was 18 boats.
• Flight II added 12 vertical launch tubes for Tomahawk cruise missiles behind the sail.
• The 688I moved its retractable diving planes from the sail to the bow so the sail could punch through Arctic ice.
• An electrolytic oxygen generator splits seawater for breathable air and produces explosive hydrogen that must be pumped overboard.
• USS Dallas in The Hunt for Red October, USS Chicago in Red Storm Rising and the game 688 Attack Sub made the class a pop culture fixture.

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The Seawolf-class attack submarine began design work in 1983, when the U.S. Navy wanted a successor to the Los Angeles class that could hunt quiet Soviet submarines, the Typhoon ballistic missile boats and the Akula attack boats, in the deep ocean. The plan called for 29 boats over 10 years. Then the Cold War ended. By 1995 the projected cost of just 12 boats was $33.6 billion, almost $3 billion each, and only three were completed: USS Seawolf, USS Connecticut and USS Jimmy Carter. The design used HY-100 steel for a 1,600-foot test depth and a single S6W reactor sending 45,000 horsepower to a pump jet, for a top speed of 35 knots and a silent speed of 20 knots in a 353-foot hull displacing 8,600 tons surfaced.

The third boat took a different path. USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23) cost $3.5 billion in total, roughly $887 million of it for General Dynamics Electric Boat modifications that stretched it to 452.8 feet and over 12,000 tons submerged. The added Multi-Mission Platform can launch and recover Navy SEALs and remotely operated vehicles and serves as an underwater splicing chamber for tapping undersea fiber optic cables, a role previously handled by the decommissioned USS Parche. The Seawolf class remains the second most expensive submarine class ever built, behind France's Triomphant class, and its technology carried into the cheaper Virginia class.

• Diving below a thermocline lets the boat hide under a temperature layer that bends or bounces enemy sonar.
• The pump jet places the rotor inside a shroud to prevent cavitation, the noisy collapse of vapor bubbles behind open propeller blades.
• Eight 26.5-inch torpedo tubes, twice the Los Angeles class, serve up to 50 Tomahawk, Harpoon and Mark 48 weapons.
• The ARCI-modified AN/BSY-2 combat system links a spherical bow array, a wide aperture flank array and a towed array.
• Roughly 99 percent of international data travels on seafloor cables, which is why the intercept mission goes to the ocean floor.