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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.

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Rolls-Royce Holdings traces back to 1904, when engineer Henry Royce, who made dynamos and electric cranes, built a car that Charles Rolls wanted to sell; the pair incorporated in 1906. In 1971 runaway development costs on the RB211 jet engine pushed the company into voluntary liquidation, and Edward Heath's government nationalized it. The car division was split off in 1973, and the aerospace business stayed under state control until Margaret Thatcher's government privatized it in 1987. In 1994 it bought the American Allison Engine Company for $525 million, and the U.S. Department of Defense required a proxy board over classified F-35 work. Between 2003 and 2015 it sold engines under TotalCare, a "power by the hour" model that charged airlines a flat fee based on hours flown.

Then came the dark years. The IFRS 15 accounting standard barred booking future service revenue upfront, and restated 2015 profits would have been £900 million lower. In 2016 investigators uncovered a bribery network that used middlemen in Brazil, India, China, Angola and Indonesia from 1989 to 2013, and in 2017 the company posted a record £4.6 billion pre-tax loss that included a £671 million settlement with the Serious Fraud Office. Trent 1000 turbine blades on the Boeing 787 cracked prematurely, and the 2020 pandemic grounded the fleets that paid by the hour, leading to about 9,000 job cuts. Under CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç from January 2023, shares rose from £1 to £11 by July 2025 and the company reached a £90 billion valuation, fifth largest on the FTSE 100.

• Under the old rules, profit from a 20-year service contract offset the loss on building the engine itself; IFRS 15 forced the two apart.
• Faulty Trent 1000 engines needed inspection every 300 hours instead of thousands of flight hours between major checks.
• To survive 2020, Rolls-Royce sold its commercial marine unit to Kongsberg, its energy gas turbines to Siemens and ITP Aero to Bain Capital.
• Testbed 80, a £90 million facility opened in Derby in 2021 with 30-centimeter lead walls, X-rays engines running at 140,000 pounds of thrust.
• The company plans up to 16 small modular reactors in the UK, supplies PWR-3 reactors for SSN-AUKUS submarines, and took $3.52 million from the UK Space Agency in 2023 to design a lunar reactor.

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Marvel began in 1939 as Timely Publications, an offshoot of pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. Its first comic, cover dated October 1939, introduced an android Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner and sold nearly 900,000 copies, and Captain America followed in 1941. Goodman hired a 16-year-old office assistant who became Stan Lee. After the war, as Atlas Comics, the company dropped superheroes and chased trends from westerns and monsters to romance and Bible stories through dozens of shell companies. When DC's Justice League revived the genre, Goodman ordered a team book, and the 1961 Fantastic Four introduced bickering, flawed heroes, followed by Spider-Man and the Hulk. Cold War stories from 1962 to 1965 helped draw college readers.

In 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked for an anti-drug story. The Comics Code Authority refused its seal because the story showed narcotics, Marvel published it anyway, and the code was revised that year. In 1989 Ronald Perelman bought the company in a junk bond leveraged buyout, and Marvel flooded the direct market with variant and foil covers to service the debt. Seven top artists left to found Image Comics in 1992, the speculator bubble burst, and Marvel filed for Chapter 11 in December 1996. A merger with Toy Biz, the Ultimate Marvel line, leaving the Comics Code by 2001 and film licensing led to Disney's purchase for about $4 billion in 2009. In 2026 the comics division is moving from Manhattan to Burbank under editor-in-chief Stephen Wacker.

• Goodman's shell companies meant a failed trend or distributor hit only one entity.
• The 1950s churn trained staff to produce large volumes quickly on thin margins.
• Company-wide crossover events such as Secret Wars drove sales across the line in the 1980s.
• Film rights sold to outside studios kept Spider-Man and the X-Men apart on screen for years.
• In March 2023 the publishing arm moved under Disney Publishing Worldwide.

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Lockheed Martin formed in 1995 from a $10 billion merger of the Lockheed Corporation, maker of the U-2 and SR-71, and Martin Marietta, builder of Titan rockets and manager of Sandia National Laboratories. The post-Cold War Pentagon encouraged defense consolidation and covered merger costs, including an $8.2 million bonus for Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine. By 2024, 73 percent of revenue came from the US federal government and 65 percent from the Department of Defense, across aeronautics, missiles and fire control, rotary and mission systems, and space, with work for agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS, Census Bureau and Postal Service. In the 1990s the company supplied texture-mapping graphics for Sega's Model 2 and Model 3 arcade boards, drawing on its flight simulator work.

In 1999 NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost when Lockheed Martin software calculated thruster data in pound-seconds while NASA's navigation software expected newton-seconds. The F-35, won in 2001, made up 26 percent of 2024 revenue, while a 2020 Pentagon review counted more than 800 software defects. Lockheed bought Sikorsky for $7.1 billion in 2015 and in May 2026 announced an $8 to $9 billion Alabama plant for THAAD and PAC-3 interceptors. The Project on Government Oversight ranks it first for contractor misconduct, with over $676 million paid in 88 settlements since 1995. In the second quarter of 2025 it lost $1.6 billion on a classified program that its CEO described as magical and said the public would not learn about for years.

• The company bought the first commercial quantum computer from D-Wave in 2011 and builds the Orion capsule for the Artemis program.
• Engineering runs on a four-tier structure, a concurrent double helix method and Six Sigma discipline across about 123,000 employees.
• A 2015 settlement of $4.7 million resolved charges that Sandia operating funds paid a former congressman to lobby for the lab contract.
• China sanctioned the company in 2020 and 2023 over arms sales to Taiwan.
• Arms makers including Lockheed Martin reported higher sales and profits during the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 and 2023.

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HMS Queen Elizabeth, pennant number R08, is the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, christened on July 4, 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II with a bottle of Islay single malt from Bowmore rather than champagne. Defence Secretary Des Browne ordered her and sister ship Prince of Wales in July 2007 for about £4.085 billion. After the 2008 financial crisis the build was slowed, and costs rose to £6.2 billion by 2013. The hull was built in nine blocks at six yards, including Glasgow, Appledore, Rosyth, Hebburn, Portsmouth and Birkenhead, and in 2011 an 8,000-ton lower block was towed 600 miles around northern Scotland to Rosyth. Spreading the work kept shipyards alive during the recession. Her name and the motto Semper Eadem come from the World War I super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Leaving the Firth of Forth for 2017 sea trials meant surveying a riverbed charted 60 years earlier and clearing three bridges. She reached 32 knots against a 25-knot design speed, and a propeller shaft seal leak appeared that December. In autumn 2018 the Westlant 18 deployment brought the first F-35B ski-jump launch at sea, a backward landing and the first shipborne rolling vertical landing, and she anchored near the Statue of Liberty, a port closed to nuclear-powered US carriers. Carrier Strike Group 21 in 2021 brought her first combat strikes against ISIS, a COVID-19 outbreak among a vaccinated crew and an F-35B crash in the Mediterranean. A Merlin Mk4 ditched in the English Channel in September 2024, killing one crew member, and after a refit at Rosyth from July 2025 she returned to sea in April 2026.

• The ship is 284 meters long with a range of 10,000 nautical miles.
• Twin islands split navigation and flight control, and either can take over the other's role.
• She is three times larger than the Invincible class but needs only 679 crew to operate.
• The automated weapon handling system moves munitions with 50 people instead of about 160, and can run with 12.
• A ski jump with no moving parts replaced catapults to save cost and crew, limiting the deck to jets like the F-35B.

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BNSF Railway runs about 33,400 miles of track across 28 states and three Canadian provinces with 36,000 employees and more than 8,000 locomotives. Its roots reach back to the 12-mile Aurora Branch in Illinois in 1849, but the modern company formed after Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe announced their merger in 1994 and outlasted a Union Pacific bidding war in early 1995. When Union Pacific then bought Southern Pacific, regulators gave BNSF about 3,500 miles of trackage rights over UP lines. A planned 1999 merger with Canadian National collapsed after the Surface Transportation Board imposed a 15-month moratorium on major mergers. In 2010 Berkshire Hathaway, already holding about 22 percent, bought the rest in a deal valuing BNSF at $44 billion, Berkshire's largest acquisition.

BNSF earned over $25 billion in revenue and $5.5 billion in net income in 2022. It hauls Powder River Basin coal in unit trains, serves more than 1,500 grain elevators, and runs 100 to 150 trains a day on the Southern Transcon between Southern California and Chicago, double-tracked and triple-tracked at Cajon Pass. It absorbed the Montana Rail Link between 2022 and 2024 and turned aside a 2025 push from Ancora Holdings for a CSX merger in favor of joint intermodal service. A 2023 Federal Railroad Administration report found a gap between leadership's safety claims and workers' experience, and in 2024 BNSF furloughed 360 mechanical workers. In June 2024 a federal judge ordered it to pay $400 million to the Swinomish tribe for running far more traffic across the reservation than a 1991 easement allowed.

• BNSF carries Boeing 737 fuselages by rail from Wichita, Kansas to Renton, Washington.
• A commemorative SD70MAC, No. 9647, painted in merged Santa Fe and BN colors was nicknamed the Vomit Bonnet.
• New terminals include the $1.5 billion Barstow International Gateway and the 4,300-acre Surprise Logistics Center in Arizona.
• In 2014 OSHA ordered BNSF to pay over $526,000 for firing workers at its Havre, Montana terminal who reported injuries.
• A 2023 lawsuit by WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project ties BNSF trains to 63 grizzly bear deaths in Montana since 2008.

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The Waldorf Astoria began as two rival hotels on Fifth Avenue, where the Empire State Building now stands. In the 1890s William Waldorf Astor, feuding with his aunt, built the 13-story Waldorf beside her mansion, and her son John Jacob Astor IV answered with the taller Astoria next door. The hotels were joined by Peacock Alley, the 300-foot corridor that gave the name its hyphen; the hyphen was dropped in 2009. After the site was sold for the Empire State Building, a new 47-story Art Deco hotel rose on Park Avenue over New York Central tracks, using purchased air rights, 27,100 tons of steel, 11 million bricks and columns set on lead and asbestos pads to damp train vibration. It opened on October 1, 1931, with a radio address by President Herbert Hoover, but drew only 500 guests for more than 2,200 rooms.

Hotel president Lucius Boomer chose to sell prestige and privacy rather than cut back. An internal carriageway and the private Track 61 platform let leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt arrive unseen. The hotel hosted the 1947 meeting that produced the Waldorf Statement and the Hollywood blacklist, the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace with Dmitri Shostakovich as protesters ringed the block, and the 1954 basement purchase of four Dead Sea Scrolls by Yigael Yadin. IBM introduced its first personal computer there in 1981. Hilton sold the hotel to Anbang Insurance Group in 2014 for $1.95 billion, then a record hotel sale, and it closed in 2017 for conversion to condominiums with about 375 hotel rooms, while 62,000 square feet of interiors gained landmark protection.

• Society columns told readers to meet at the hyphen, which later became a double hyphen resembling an equal sign.
• Guy Lombardo's New Year's Eve broadcasts from the ballroom helped make Auld Lang Syne the midnight song.
• The Who were banned for life in 1968 after a destructive party, then forgiven in 1990 when their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction was held there.
• Herbert Hoover lived in the Waldorf Towers for decades, and Cole Porter kept two pianos in his apartment.
• Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and Victor Borge entertained in rooms such as the Wedgwood Room and the Starlight Roof.

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USS Nimitz, CVN-68, was commissioned in 1975 by President Gerald Ford and is the only carrier of its class named by surname alone. It is now the oldest serving aircraft carrier in the world. Its first crises came fast: in 1979 it deployed to the Indian Ocean during the Iran hostage crisis, and in 1980 it served as the staging platform for the failed rescue attempt that ended with a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert. In May 1981 a Marine EA-6B Prowler, low on fuel after a night bolter, crashed into parked aircraft on the flight deck, killing 14, injuring 45 and destroying or damaging nearly 20 aircraft. Several deck crew who died tested positive for marijuana traces that toxicologists said could not prove impairment, and the case led President Ronald Reagan to set the military's zero-tolerance drug testing policy.

In August 1981 Nimitz aircraft shot down two Libyan jets in the Gulf of Sidra incident. In a 1997 demonstration its air wing flew 771 strike sorties in four days and dropped more than 1,300 bombs. In 2004 its F/A-18F fighters, sent after the cruiser USS Princeton tracked unidentified objects, recorded the Tic Tac video the Pentagon declassified in 2017. A Russian Tu-95 bomber passed over the deck at 2,000 feet in 2008, the ship recovered the first carrier landing of an F-35C in 2014, and its air wing struck ISIS at Tal Afar in 2017. A 2020 COVID-19 outbreak forced a 27-day quarantine. Planned retirement slipped to March 2027 because of Ford-class delays and an 11-carrier mandate, sending the ship around Cape Horn in 2026 and to New York for the Fourth of July naval review.

• The ship displaces about 100,000 tons, roughly the weight of 350 loaded Boeing 747s.
• Two A4W reactors push it past 31.5 knots and allow 20 to 25 years between refuelings.
• Studies after the 1997 exercise found the equipment could have sustained that pace another 12 to 24 hours.
• In late 2025 in the South China Sea, an MH-60R and an F/A-18F crashed 30 minutes apart, and both crews were rescued.
• The carrier logged its 350,000th arrested landing in 2023.