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Club Med began in 1950 as a low-cost summer tent colony run by Belgian entrepreneur Gerard Blitz, first on Majorca and then in Djerba, Tunisia, built around sports, nature and social equality. Blitz charged too little to cover his costs and was bankrupt by 1953. His main creditor, tent supplier Gilbert Trigano, known as the King of Camping, took control and in 1954 opened a village in Palinuro, Italy, where guests slept in straw huts with no electricity and shared bathrooms. When expansion costs threatened collapse again, Baron Edmond de Rothschild invested in 1961 after visiting a resort.

Club Med expanded to Tahiti by 1965 and to Guadeloupe and Martinique, launched the Mini Club for children in 1967, adopted the short Club Med name for North America in 1974, and built the five-masted Club Med II. It became a for-profit company in 1995. Shareholders ousted the Triganos in 1997, and new CEO Philippe Bourguignon added gyms, urban Club Med World venues in Paris and Montreal, and a youth brand called Oyo before losses and the 2001 travel collapse. Henri Giscard d'Estaing closed those ventures and moved upscale, with over $530 million in renovations in 2006 and 2007. A bidding war that began in 2013 ended with Fosun International buying the company for 939 million euros.

• Club Med opened winter ski villages in Switzerland as early as 1956.
• The sailing ship Vendredi 13 was refitted for cruises out of Martinique.
• Greek unions reported understaffing, crowded staff buses, kitchens without air conditioning and unpaid agency wages at the Gregolimano resort.
• May 1968 graffiti in Paris called Club Med a cheap holiday in other people's misery, a line echoed by the Sex Pistols.
• The name inspired the phrase Club Fed for minimum security prisons housing white collar convicts.

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Little Caesars began on May 8, 1959, when Mike and Marian Ilitch opened Little Caesar's Pizza Treat in a Garden City, Michigan strip mall, selling hot dogs, chicken, subs, shrimp and fish alongside pizza. The first franchise opened in Warren in 1962. In 1979 the Pizza Pizza campaign offered two pizzas for about the price of one pizza from competitors, packed side by side on a long cardboard sheet inside a stapled paper sleeve, a format that lasted until square Pan Pan pizzas brought standard boxes in 1988. The chain grew into the third largest pizza company in the United States, behind Domino's and Pizza Hut.

The 1980s and 1990s brought experiments: former Chuck E. Cheese's locations became Little Caesars Family Fun Pizzerias and then Caesarland arcades, which ran until 2011, and outlets opened inside Kmart stores. In Canada the chain cannot say Pizza Pizza, a trademark held by another company. In 1997 it introduced sign spinners and the $5 Hot-N-Ready large pepperoni, made possible by conveyor-driven air impingement ovens that cook every pizza the same way. Abroad, it left Russia in 2022, opened and then closed UK stores by 2026, quit Singapore in 2024, and entered the UAE in 2025 and Malaysia in 2026.

• In 1998 the chain filled an order of 13,386 pizzas for VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina.
• Pizza by the Foot, a three-foot pizza from 1996, was dropped in the United States but sells as Pizza by the Meter in Saudi Arabia.
• Crazy Bread arrived in 1982, a Detroit-style Deep!Deep! Dish in 2013, and Crazy Puffs in Canada in 2023 and the U.S. in 2024.
• As of 2021, two Kmart locations survived, one in Guam and one in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• The 2017 mascot update removed Caesar's chest hair and hid the letters LC in his toga.

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Hertz began in Chicago in 1918, when 22-year-old Walter L. Jacobs rented out a dozen Ford Model Ts. John D. Hertz, a salesman stuck with traded-in cars at a dealership, painted them yellow as a taxi fleet and bought Jacobs' business in 1923. General Motors bought the brand in 1927, and Hertz introduced a rental charge card in 1926, a Chicago Midway Airport location in 1932 and the first one-way rental plan in 1933. John Hertz bought it back in 1953 and took it public, then it passed to RCA in 1967, to United Airlines parent UAL in 1985 and to Ford for about $1.3 billion two years later.

Hertz financed its fleet with asset-backed securities secured by the cars, so when travel stopped and used car prices fell in April 2020, lenders demanded cash it did not have. It filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020, and Carl Icahn took a loss of roughly $2.3 billion. Retail traders then pushed the bankrupt stock from 59 cents to $5.50, and Hertz sold $29 million of a planned $1 billion share offering before the SEC stepped in. After emerging in July 2021, it ordered 100,000 Teslas, then began selling off a third of its EV fleet in early 2024 as Tesla price cuts and repair costs hit resale values; CEO Stephen Scherr stepped down in March 2024.

• A Hertz time-and-temperature sign on the Texas School Book Depository roof, installed in 1959, helped witnesses time the 1963 Kennedy assassination.
• In 1966 Hertz rented 1,000 Shelby GT350H Mustangs through its Rent-A-Racer program.
• O.J. Simpson ran through airports in Hertz ads in the 1970s alongside Arnold Palmer and Jamie Lee Curtis.
• A grass fire sparked by one car's exhaust destroyed 1,200 parked Hertz vehicles in southwest Florida.
• A sync failure between branch and corporate systems led to false theft reports, and in December 2022 Hertz agreed to pay about $168 million to settle 364 claims.

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The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, nicknamed Fat Amy and the Battle Penguin by pilots, grew out of the post-Cold War Joint Strike Fighter program, which aimed to replace the F-16, F/A-18, A-10 and Harrier with one design whose three variants shared 70 percent of their parts. Lockheed's X-35 beat Boeing's X-32 in 2001 thanks to a shaft-driven lift fan: a clutch sends nearly 29,000 horsepower to a horizontal fan behind the cockpit while the rear nozzle swivels 90 degrees down. That produced the F-35A for the Air Force, the hovering F-35B for the Marines and the larger-winged F-35C for Navy carriers.

By 2003 the F-35B was more than 2,000 pounds overweight and could no longer hover safely. Lockheed's STOVL Weight Attack Team trimmed titanium bulkheads and shrank weapons bays, at a cost of $6.2 billion and an 18-month delay. Production ran alongside testing, a strategy called concurrency that a former Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition labeled acquisition malpractice, and commonality ended near 25 percent. The payoff is sensor fusion: the APG-81 AESA radar, the ASQ-239 Barracuda electronic warfare suite, six DAS infrared cameras that let pilots see through the cockpit floor, and the MADL data link. The program's $2 trillion estimate runs to 2088, with about half reflecting projected inflation.

• Early F-35B airframes cracked, the F-35C tailhook bounced over arresting wires, and fuel tanks proved vulnerable to lightning strikes.
• An F-35A costs about $92 million, while an F-35B runs over $121 million.
• The United Kingdom is the sole Tier 1 partner; Turkey was removed after buying a Russian air defense system.
• Israel flies a customized F-35I Adir and was the first to use the jet in combat, in 2018.
• The F-35A is certified to carry the B61 nuclear bomb, and the fleet is planned to fly until 2088.

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The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey traces back to April 1980 and Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue 53 Americans held in Tehran. At the Desert One rendezvous, helicopters hit a haboob sandstorm and broke down, and one collided with a C-130 in the dark, killing eight service members. The Pentagon launched the JVX program in 1981, and by 1983 Bell (wings, rotating nacelles, proprotors) and Boeing (fuselage, cockpit, avionics) teamed up to build a tiltrotor that could carry 24 troops, tilt its engines 90 degrees in about 12 seconds, and fly over 300 miles per hour. It flies only through a triple-redundant fly-by-wire system, and the FAA created a new powered lift category for it. The Marine Corps, worried about its own survival as a branch, became its champion.

Development costs jumped from $2.5 billion in 1986 to a projected $30 billion by 1988, partly because the wing had to rotate flat over the fuselage to fit amphibious ship elevators. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney tried to kill the program from 1989 to 1992, but Congress kept funding it. In April 2000 an Osprey crashed near Marana, Arizona, killing 19 Marines and four crew; investigators pointed to vortex ring state. As of early 2026, the episode counts 17 hull-loss accidents and 65 deaths, yet 2011 reports put its accident rate at about half the Marine rotorcraft average. The Army, which started JVX, left in 1988 and later chose the Bell V-280 Valor tiltrotor.

• In 2001 a Marine V-22 squadron commander was relieved of duty amid allegations that his unit falsified maintenance records.
• By 2002 an Osprey cost about $60 million, compared with roughly $35 million for a CH-53E with greater payload.
• A late 2023 crash off Japan killed eight crew and grounded the fleet across all branches for three months.
• In 2011 an Osprey flew from a ship in the Mediterranean deep into Libya to rescue a downed F-15 pilot.
• The Marines fielded it in Iraq in 2007, the Air Force CV-22 followed in 2009, the Navy CMV-22 in 2021, and Japan became the first foreign buyer.

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Boston Airport opened in September 1923 at Jeffries Point in East Boston, started scheduled flights to New York in 1927, and was named in 1943 for General Edward Lawrence Logan. Hemmed in by water, it grew by filling in 1,800 acres of Boston Harbor, absorbing Noddle's Island, Apple Island and Governor's Island, and sits about two and a half miles from downtown. By the mid-1960s Massport used eminent domain to take homes and Wood Island Park, a 46-acre Frederick Law Olmsted park, and bulldozed Neptune Road for runway 15R/33L, while residents, including mothers with strollers, lay in the streets to block trucks.

The protests halted runway 15L/33R at 2,557 feet, the shortest runway at any top-30 U.S. airport, closed to takeoffs. Crosswind runway 14/32, proposed in 1973 to handle northwest winds, did not open until 2006, and state legislators placed the Hyatt Harborside Hotel, built in 1992, on its centerline to block any extension for heavy jets. On September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 left Logan, and the Massport CEO was forced to resign. In 2013 a lithium-ion battery fire on a parked Japan Airlines Boeing 787 at Logan led the FAA to ground the 787 fleet worldwide.

• American flags fly over gates B32 and C19 as memorials to the September 11 flights.
• Our Lady of the Airways, opened in 1951 in Terminal C, was the first U.S. airport chapel.
• Terminal A was the first U.S. airport terminal to earn LEED certification, with heat-reflecting roofs and waterless urinals.
• A 250-foot water security zone marked by 29 buoys rings the airport.
• A remote terminal in Framingham lets some Delta and JetBlue passengers check bags and clear security before a sealed bus ride to Logan.

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AstraZeneca was formed in 1999 by merging Sweden's Astra AB, founded in 1913 by doctors and apothecaries, with Britain's Zeneca, spun out of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1993. From 2013 CEO Pascal Soriot cut jobs and focused research on three hubs, Cambridge, Gothenburg and Gaithersburg, Maryland, including a $1 billion Cambridge discovery center by Herzog & de Meuron for more than 2,000 scientists. In 2014 the board rejected a $117 billion takeover bid from Pfizer, then bought growth: MedImmune for over $15 billion in 2007 had brought biologics, and Alexion Pharmaceuticals for $39 billion in 2021 brought rare diseases.

In early 2026 AstraZeneca bought Boston AI firm Modella AI, licensed kidney drug candidates from China's CSPC for up to $1.77 billion, and moved its U.S. listing from Nasdaq to the NYSE after nearly $59 billion in 2025 revenue. Merger talks with Bristol Myers Squibb in August 2026, at valuations near $400 billion, did not produce a deal. Its record includes Nexium, a purified mirror-image version of Prilosec patented as the original neared expiry, and a $520 million 2010 settlement over off-label marketing of the antipsychotic Seroquel. In late 2024 AstraZeneca China president Leon Wang was detained in a corruption probe that included claims staff falsified genetic tests to win reimbursement for the lung cancer drug Tagrisso.

• In 2015 the company underwrote a Cambridge to Gothenburg flight, reserving 20 of 32 seats four days a week.
• Astra USA chief Lars Bildman was fired and jailed, and under the faithless servant doctrine he forfeited his salary and bonuses for the period of his disloyalty.
• COVID-19 vaccine contracts with the UK and EU, signed a day apart and both built on best reasonable efforts language, set off a supply dispute.
• Its Chinese unit faced backlash in 2008 for a slow donation after the Sichuan earthquake.
• In 2024 the NHS blocked the breast cancer drug Enhertu, priced at over £117,000 per course, which extended life by about five months.

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In 1888 Dr. Wallace C. Abbott, a 30-year-old University of Michigan graduate practicing in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, tackled the unreliable strength of liquid plant extracts. He isolated active alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, quinine and strychnine and pressed them into small, shelf-stable dosimetric granules. Abbott reached London by 1907 and North Chicago by the 1920s. In 1964 it merged with Ross Laboratories, maker of Similac, adding steady nutrition revenue later joined by Pedialyte and Ensure. It bought Knoll for nearly $7 billion, TheraSense in 2004 and Guidant's vascular unit in 2006.

In 2013 CEO Miles D. White spun the research drug business off as AbbVie, and Abbott bought St. Jude Medical for $25 billion and Alere for nearly $6 billion in 2017. The FreeStyle Libre glucose sensor won FDA approval that year. Alere's testing capacity powered the 13-minute ID NOW in March 2020 and the roughly $5, 15-minute BinaxNOW antigen card in August 2020, with over 400 million COVID-19 tests shipped by early 2021. In 2022 Abbott shut its main Michigan formula plant and recalled formula after reports of bacterial infections in infants, including deaths, triggering a national shortage. A 2024 jury ordered nearly $500 million over claims its premature infant formula raised the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis.

• In 1966 federal investigators found Abbott had sold the powder equivalent of two million methamphetamine doses to a criminal distributor on Long Island.
• Settlements include $875 million by subsidiary TAP Pharmaceutical in 2001, $600 million after the 2003 Operation Headwaters sting, and a $500 million fine in 2012 over Depakote marketing.
• Subsidiary Arriva Medical paid $160 million in 2021 over Medicare glucose monitor billing, including for deceased patients.
• A 2023 recall of Proclaim and Infinity deep brain stimulators followed 73 reported injuries tied to an MRI mode software fault.
• Abbott stayed in Russia after the 2022 invasion as a top branded generics supplier, earning a D from the Yale School of Management.

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On a 2002 surf trip to Australia, Nick Woodman wanted footage of himself on waves, something only sponsored pros with camera crews could get. He named his company GoPro after that goal and his cameras Hero. Funded by $230,000 from his parents and $20 bead and shell belts sold from his Volkswagen van, he spent two years prototyping and in 2004 launched a 35 mm film camera in a waterproof wrist case at an action sports trade show in San Diego. It sold about $150,000 in its first year. The first digital GoPro in 2006 recorded silent 10-second clips, yet revenue jumped to $800,000 and then $3.4 million.

HD video and a 170-degree lens followed, and from 2010 GoPro built its marketing on customer videos, eventually paying out a million dollars in challenges. The 2014 IPO raised over $427 million at a valuation near $3 billion, and shares peaked at $86. Woodman pushed into media channels on Xbox, PlayStation and Virgin America, then built the Karma drone in-house; launched in late 2016, it lost power when vibration shook the battery loose, forcing a recall, and GoPro left drones by early 2018. With memory prices driven up by AI data centers and the stock at $1.33, Woodman agreed on September 1, 2026 to a $285 million merger with Starman Optical.

• Layoffs ran from 100 and then 200 jobs in 2016 to 270 in 2017, 250 in 2018 and 20 percent of staff in 2020.
• In July 2026, entities affiliated with Woodman put $20 million into GoPro through senior secured notes.
• Starman Optical took 90 percent of the company, leaving existing shareholders with 10 percent.
• Starman plans to point GoPro's lens and sensor technology at AI data centers and aerospace.
• GoPro cameras flew around the moon on NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026.

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Charlie Ergen, Candy Ergen and Jim DeFranco founded EchoStar Communications in 1980 to sell 10-foot C-band satellite dishes in rural America. In 1987 they applied to the FCC for a direct broadcast license, won the 119 degrees west orbital slot in 1992, launched EchoStar 1 in late 1995 and turned on the DISH Network, short for Digital Sky Highway, in March 1996. Monthly subscriptions funded growth to more than 14 million subscribers by 2010, and in 2007 the satellite infrastructure business was spun off from the consumer TV service. Under CEO Joe Clayton, Dish spent over $3 billion on distressed assets, including Blockbuster Video for $322 million in April 2011, which became the Blockbuster Movie Pass bundle.

The 2012 Hopper DVR's AutoHop skipped commercials in recorded primetime shows, and ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC sued; Dish settled by disabling the feature for a period after broadcast. Sling TV launched in 2015 as an internet-delivered live TV service for cord cutters. Dish then bought Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion in 2020 as Sprint and T-Mobile merged, signed a $5 billion, 10-year roaming deal with AT&T in 2021, and by June 2023 covered 70 percent of the U.S. population with its own 5G network. EchoStar reacquired Dish in August 2023. In September 2024 DirecTV offered $1 for Dish's video business plus its debt, and bondholders rejected the required losses that November.

• Dish dropped regional sports networks from 2019 to 2021, and subscribers fell from over 14 million in 2012 to about 10 million in 2022.
• A February 2023 ransomware attack shut call centers, created waits of up to 14 hours and sent the stock to a 14-year low.
• In October 2023 the FCC fined Dish $150,000 because EchoStar-7 ran out of fuel before reaching its disposal orbit, the first U.S. space debris fine.
• EchoStar missed more than $500 million in interest payments, and regulators suspended its strategic decisions on Boost Mobile.
• On June 30, 2026, DISH DBS filed for Chapter 11 in Texas, with plans to wind down Dish Wireless.