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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.

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AbbVie was born in 2012 as a spinoff from Abbott Laboratories, its name joining Abbott with "vie," from the Latin for life. Its fortune rested on Humira, an injectable biologic for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and plaque psoriasis that was for years the best-selling prescription drug in the world and still brought in $9 billion, 16 percent of company revenue, in 2024. Because biologics are grown from living cells, rivals can only make biosimilars, and those arrived in January 2023. AbbVie prepared with in-house successors Skyrizi ($11.7 billion in 2024) and Rinvoq ($6 billion in 2023), then bought what it could not invent: Allergan and Botox for about $63 billion in 2019, ImmunoGen for $10.1 billion, Cerevel for $8.7 billion, Aliada Therapeutics for $1.4 billion, and a psychedelic depression candidate from Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion.

A House Oversight and Reform Committee report accused AbbVie of building a patent thicket of overlapping patents around Humira and leaning on Orphan Drug Act protections to delay competition. The company paid $25 million in 2018 over kickback allegations involving the cholesterol drug Tricor and $24 million in 2020 over Humira nurse ambassadors, and in 2022 agreed to pay up to $2.37 billion to settle opioid marketing lawsuits tied to Allergan while denying wrongdoing. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Medicare price of its cancer drug Imbruvica was cut 38 percent by 2026. That January, AbbVie struck a direct deal with the Trump administration: $100 billion in U.S. investment over ten years and lower Medicaid prices, in exchange for exemptions from future tariffs and pricing mandates.

• A 2014 bid for Shire, structured as a tax inversion, died after the U.S. Treasury changed its rules, costing AbbVie a $1.6 billion breakup fee.
• Botox, acquired with Allergan, earned AbbVie $6 billion in 2024 and is used for chronic migraines and muscle spasms as well as wrinkles.
• A 2021 Senate Finance Committee inquiry found Humira patents housed in Bermuda: 75 percent of Humira sales were in the U.S., but only 1 percent of that income was reported for U.S. taxes.
• AbbVie and biosimilar maker Alvotech sued each other over Humira and settled out of court in 2022.
• The ImmunoGen purchase brought Elahere, an ovarian cancer drug that had already cleared the riskiest stages of clinical trials.

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The 4.2-mile Las Vegas Strip, home to the Bellagio and Caesars Palace, lies outside the city of Las Vegas in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester. In the early 1930s Las Vegas Boulevard South was Highway 91, the Arrowhead Highway, leading to downtown and Fremont Street. The Paradise Club opened on it in 1931, and in April 1941 the El Rancho Vegas, with 63 bungalow rooms, began catching Los Angeles drivers before they reached town. Former Los Angeles police officer Guy McAfee named the road after the Sunset Strip, and Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo opened in 1946. In 1950 Mayor Ernie Cragin, facing rising municipal debt, moved to annex the casinos. A group led by Gus Greenbaum of the Flamingo persuaded Clark County commissioners to grant town status, and because a city could not annex a town without its residents' consent, the Strip stayed under county control.

County rule left developers free to build big. Kirk Kerkorian opened the International Hotel in 1969 with over 1,500 rooms, and Steve Wynn's Mirage, built for about $630 million in 1989, needed over a million dollars a day to break even, so its volcano, gardens and restaurants all had to earn money. The themed 1990s of the Luxor and Excalibur gave way to the Bellagio, the Wynn and the $8.5 billion CityCenter. The Mirage closed in July 2024 to become a Hard Rock, and the 67-year-old Tropicana was imploded in October 2024, its site set for the Athletics' ballpark in 2028. UNLV data shows blackjack fell from 77 percent of tables in 1985 to 50 percent in 2019 and from half of table revenue to 11 percent, while baccarat rose from 13 to 37 percent.

• Big Strip casinos took in more than $6 billion in gaming revenue in 2019.
• The Golden Knights, Raiders, Aces and a Formula One race on Las Vegas Boulevard reflect a shift toward sports as younger visitors play fewer slots.
• A planned bypass called Diamond Arena Drive near Russell Road would be the Strip's first new intersection in 60 years, built to serve a proposed NBA arena.
• Nearly all indoor water on the Strip is treated and returned to Lake Mead, and the Bellagio fountains run on a private well.
• MGM Resorts put more than 26,000 solar panels across 28 acres on the Mandalay Bay Convention Center roof.

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The Merkava, Hebrew for chariot, is the main battle tank of the Israeli Armored Corps, and it exists because of a broken deal. In the late 1960s Israel worked with Britain on the Chieftain and trialed prototypes for years, expecting to buy it and produce it locally, until Britain canceled and offered the tank to Arab nations instead. After heavy armor losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel Tal pushed for a domestic tank, and the Merkava Mark 1 entered service in 1979. Its engine sits at the front, so a shell that gets through the front armor must chew through the transmission and engine block before reaching the four-person crew. The empty rear holds clamshell doors for loading ammunition under fire, carrying troops or evacuating wounded, and the chassis led to the Namer infantry fighting vehicle.

The design accepts more mobility kills to keep trained crews alive. In the 1982 Lebanon War the Mark 1 beat Syrian T-62s, and the Mark 2 moved its 60 mm mortar inside and added rear chain netting against RPGs. The 1989 Mark 3 brought a 1,200 hp engine, a 120 mm smoothbore able to fire guided missiles, and bolt-on modular armor that crews can replace in hours. In 2006 Kornet and RPG-29 tandem warheads destroyed five Merkavas, and the Mark 4 removed the loader's roof hatch, stored rounds in fireproof canisters and added the Windbreaker system, known abroad as Trophy, which proved itself in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. In the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, fighters fired from inside 50 yards, salvoed RPGs and dropped grenades from commercial drones, and the IDF welded slat armor onto turret roofs that October.

• Trophy uses radar to track incoming rockets and fires a directed blast of fragments to destroy them, so nearby infantry must keep a standoff distance.
• Hamas distributed flyers explaining how to defeat Trophy by firing at close range and overwhelming its reload.
• The Merkava IV Barak gives its commander Elbit's Iron Vision helmet, which stitches outside camera feeds into a 360-degree view through the armor.
• The Carmel successor program aims to cut weight from 65 to 35 tons with a two-person crew and a hybrid electric drive for quiet movement.
• Carmel test vehicles run their defense systems and weapons with standard Xbox controllers.

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The Leopard 1 was West Germany's answer to a 1956 problem. The new Bundeswehr relied on aging American M47 and M48 Pattons, and designers believed HEAT warheads made heavy armor pointless, so the requirement capped weight at 30 tons and stressed mobility and firepower. After the joint Europa Panzer effort with France and Italy stalled, Porsche's prototype won in 1963. It had an 820 hp MTU diesel packaged with the transmission in a single power pack that crews could swap in about 20 minutes, important for fighting on a nuclear, biological and chemical battlefield, plus the British 105 mm Royal Ordnance L7 rifled gun. The light design left spare capacity for later upgrades.

The 1A1 added Cadillac Gage gun stabilization and a deep-wading snorkel, the 1A3 and 1A4 brought welded turrets with spaced armor and a commander's panoramic sight, and the 1A5 refit of over 1,200 tanks added the Leopard 2's EMES-18 laser fire control and thermal imaging. The tank's first combat came in 1994 in Bosnia, when seven white-painted Danish UN Leopard 1A5s relieved a Swedish-manned post under Bosnian Serb fire and took no casualties in Operation Bøllebank. Canada's up-armored Leopard C2s fought in Afghanistan in 2006, the first Canadian tank gunfire since Korea, but turret heat pushed Canada toward the Leopard 2. After 2022, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands funded refurbishing over 100 Leopard 1A5s for Ukraine.

• Exporters included Australia, Belgium, Canada, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Denmark.
• Rheinmetall bought back 50 tanks that OIP Land Systems had acquired from Belgium in 2014 for about 37,000 euros each, and stripped 20 for parts.
• Switzerland blocked RUAG from selling 96 former Italian Leopard 1s stored in Italy, then approved 71 for Germany in mid-2025 on condition they never reach Ukraine.
• Ukraine's 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade fields a Leopard 1A5 variant covered in explosive reactive armor and anti-drone cages.
• A company called Ram Europe turned a Leopard 1 into a 15,000-liter off-road fire engine called the Jumbo.

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The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer was designed in the 1980s, commissioned its lead ship in 1991, and as of April 2026 has 75 ships in service, the longest production run of any U.S. Navy surface combatant. The design came out of fire. Earlier cruisers used aluminum superstructures to save top weight, and in 1975 USS Belknap collided with the carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Mediterranean, after which its aluminum superstructure burned and collapsed. British losses in the 1982 Falklands War reinforced the lesson. Gibbs and Cox and Bath Iron Works returned to all-steel construction, added about 130 tons of Kevlar around vital spaces, and kept within an 8,300-ton congressional cap on a hull 50 feet shorter than the cruisers, using a wide flared bow for seakeeping and four GE LM2500 gas turbines raised from 80,000 to 100,000 shaft horsepower for over 31 knots.

The ship is built around the Aegis combat system and fixed SPY radar panels, SPY-1 on early flights and SPY-6 on Flight III, which track hundreds of targets at once with no rotating blind spot. Its Mark 41 vertical launch system has 90 to 96 cells that can hold Tomahawks, SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles, ASROC and quad-packed Evolved Sea Sparrows. In the mid-2000s the Navy planned to end production with USS Michael Murphy, DDG-112, and shift to the stealthy Zumwalt, designed for coastal gunfire support. Around 2008 the rise of anti-ship ballistic missiles made ballistic missile defense the priority, and the Zumwalt was not optimized for it. The Navy cut the Zumwalt from 32 ships to three and restarted Burke production.

• Flight I ships had no helicopter hangars, and Flight IIA added hangars for two MH-60 Seahawks.
• Flight III ships carry 4,000-kilowatt generators to power SPY-6 and directed energy weapons.
• The ODIN laser dazzler blinds drone cameras, and USS Preble received the HELIOS high-energy laser.
• USS Bainbridge carries Raytheon Coyote launchers that send interceptor drones after enemy drones.
• Burkes fired Tomahawks in Operation Desert Strike in 1996 and the opening of Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and have spent months intercepting Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea.

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The Virginia-class attack submarine, the SSN-774 class, came out of the cost shock of the Seawolf, a $2.8 billion boat built to hunt Soviet submarines and canceled after three hulls once the Cold War ended. The Navy's Two for Four goal sought two boats for $4 billion by fiscal 2012. Only two U.S. yards are certified to build nuclear submarines, General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, and each Virginia is split between them: one builds the bow, sail and torpedo room, the other the reactor plant and engine room, and the sections travel by barge for final assembly. Each boat takes about 9 million labor hours and parts from over 4,000 suppliers, and the split keeps both yards' welders and nuclear pipe fitters employed.

The traditional periscope is gone. Photonics masts outside the pressure hull carry cameras, infrared sensors and laser rangefinders, and the control room moved down to a roomier deck, where crews steer the masts with a standard Xbox 360 controller that can be swapped for a new one at about $30. An open architecture brings hardware refreshes every four years and software every two. The S9G reactor produces 40,000 shaft horsepower and its core is designed to last the boat's full 33 years. Block 5 adds the Virginia Payload Module, a 70-foot section that stretches the boat from 377 to 460 feet and over 10,000 tons, raising Tomahawk capacity from 12 to 40 to replace retiring Ohio-class SSGNs. Under AUKUS, Australia is buying three used Block 4 boats, with an option on two more.

• A BAE Systems pump jet in a shrouded duct delays cavitation, the popping vapor bubbles that passive sonar listens for.
• Block 3 swapped the air-backed spherical sonar for a water-backed Large Aperture Bow array with fewer hull penetrations.
• Early boats had 12 vertical launch tubes, and Block 3 moved to two large Virginia Payload Tubes.
• The stretched Block 5 hull trades some agility for firepower, and later boats are slated for Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles.
• The Australian boats are a stopgap to replace diesel Collins-class submarines until the new SSN-AUKUS design arrives.

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GlobalFoundries, or GF, is the world's third-largest semiconductor foundry by revenue and the only major one with large plants in the United States, the European Union and Singapore. It began in 2008, when AMD decided to go fabless and spin off its manufacturing. Mubadala, the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, paid $700 million for a majority stake and absorbed $1.2 billion of AMD debt, and the company took its name in March 2009. Mubadala still held 82 percent after the 2021 IPO. GF bought Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor, and in 2014 and 2015 took over IBM's microelectronics business, with IBM paying GF $1.5 billion, plus plants in East Fishkill, New York, and Essex Junction, Vermont, and a 10-year deal to supply IBM server chips.

In 2018 GF canceled 7-nanometer development rather than outfit Fab 8 in New York with costly EUV lithography machines. It moved to specialty processes such as FD-SOI for cars, sensors and connected devices. A 2019 patent fight with TSMC, 16 patents claimed against 25 in the countersuit, ended within months in a cross-license deal. GF holds Trusted Foundry Category 1A status with the Pentagon and won a 10-year, $3.1 billion Defense Department contract in 2023, the same year General Motors signed an exclusive supply deal with its New York fab. In early 2024 it was the first major CHIPS Act recipient, with $1.5 billion planned, and in November 2024 it paid a $500,000 Commerce Department fine for about $17 million in shipments to an SMIC-affiliated entity.

• GF licensed Samsung technology to move from 14 to 12 nanometers before dropping out of the leading-edge race.
• Project Sprint, announced in 2025, is a 1.1 billion euro expansion in Dresden backed by the European Chips Act.
• Its 2025 and 2026 deals included Tagore Technology for gallium nitride, MIPS for RISC-V, and Synopsys' ARC processor business.
• It bought Advanced Micro Foundry in Singapore and InfiniLink to build silicon photonics and optical links between AI chips.
• In May 2026 GF received a $375 million U.S. grant to build a secure domestic quantum foundry.