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In 1806 English immigrant William Colgate opened a shop on Dutch Street in New York City, boiling animal fats with lye to make starch, soap and candles. A heart attack in 1833 briefly halted sales, and after his death in 1857 his reluctant son Samuel took over out of duty. The company sold soap in uniform-weight cakes in the 1840s, launched perfumed Cashmere Bouquet soap in 1872, sold toothpaste in shared glass jars in 1873, and in 1896 introduced Colgate Ribbon Dental Cream, the first toothpaste in a squeezable tube, using an invention by dentist Washington Sheffield. That same year Martin Ittner founded one of the world's first applied research labs for the company. In Milwaukee, B.J. Johnson's 1898 palm and olive oil soap became the world's best seller, the firm renamed itself Palmolive in 1917, merged with the Peet Brothers in 1926, and joined Colgate in 1928 as Colgate-Palmolive-Peet.

After World War II, Procter & Gamble's Tide synthetic detergent gutted Colgate's laundry business and Crest's stannous fluoride took the top toothpaste spot for a time. Colgate sponsored the daytime drama The Doctors from 1963 to 1982 but left soap operas to P&G. CEO George Henry Lesch restructured the firm in the 1960s and 70s, and in 2005 it sold Fab, Dynamo and other laundry brands to Phoenix Brands to focus on oral care, personal care and Hill's Pet Nutrition. It bought 84 percent of Tom's of Maine for $100 million in 2006 and Hello Products in 2020. Watchdogs have been harsh: Ethical Consumer gave it worst-possible ratings in 2024 on climate, plastic, palm oil and supply chain human rights, while praising its avoidance of toxic chemicals.

• The ABC network blocked Colgate from sponsoring Agnes Nixon's new soap opera All My Children.
• The hand on the Palmolive dish soap label belongs to Ford agency hand model Elizabeth Barber, photographed in 1985.
• Colgate announced in 2012 that it would cut 6 percent of its global workforce, more than 2,300 jobs.
• In 2011 the company kept triclosan in Total toothpaste under an old FDA gingivitis approval while withdrawing it from its soaps.
• Global Witness tied Colgate suppliers in 2021 to bribery and child labor in Papua New Guinea, and the company is named among parties responsible at the Chemsol Superfund site in New Jersey.

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The U.S. Navy built Aegis because 1960s shipboard radars could track only two to four targets while the Soviet Union was developing supersonic anti-ship missiles meant to arrive in swarms. A first attempt, the Typhon system begun in 1958, proved unreliable and was canceled in 1963. The Advanced Surface Missile System program started in 1964, was renamed Aegis in 1969 after the shield of Zeus, and was driven to a working prototype by Captain Wayne Meyer from 1970. The first engineering model went to sea on USS Norton Sound in 1973, and USS Ticonderoga became the first cruiser to carry it into the fleet. Its AN/SPY-1 radar steers beams electronically with no moving parts, pushes out 6 megawatts, and tracks well over 100 targets beyond 100 nautical miles.

In 1988 USS Vincennes, in the Persian Gulf, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people aboard. Investigators found Aegis worked as designed: its tapes showed the airliner climbing, at commercial speed and squawking a civilian code, while the crew reported a descending F-14. A recycled track number, TN-4474, and stress-driven scenario fulfillment helped produce the error. Aegis later expanded into ballistic missile defense, firing SM-3 interceptors to hit targets in space and SM-6 within the atmosphere, and now operates from ships and shore sites in many allied countries.

• Radar faces sit low on the superstructure because their weight and cooling equipment would make a ship top-heavy if mounted on a tall mast.
• Scientific American rated the Vincennes incident one of the five worst digital user interface debacles of all time.
• In December 2024 USS Gettysburg shot down a friendly F/A-18F Super Hornet over the Red Sea and nearly hit a second jet.
• The SM-3 carries no explosive warhead, destroying ballistic missiles in space with a kinetic kill vehicle.
• In the March 2025 FTX-40 Stellar Banshee test, USS Pinckney tracked a live air-launched ballistic missile carrying a new hypersonic warhead.

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In 1969 Soviet intelligence learned that the United States was building the F-15 Eagle, and the general staff asked for a fighter with Mach 2 speed, bomber-escort range, dogfight agility and short-runway performance. The requirement was split: the light fighter became the MiG-29 and the heavy long-range fighter went to Sukhoi as the Su-27, NATO name Flanker. The first prototype, the T-10, flew in May 1977 and was badly flawed: its ogival wing caused buffeting and instability, its AL-21 engines burned fuel too fast to meet range targets, and a heavy radar made it nose-heavy. The T-10-2 broke apart in a spin in July 1978 and the T-10-12 broke up in 1981, killing both test pilots. Chief designer Mikhail Simonov stopped the program and started over as the T-10S.

The production Su-27 was deliberately unstable, with its center of gravity behind its center of lift, and became the first Soviet operational fighter with fly-by-wire controls. Viktor Pugachev showed off the Cobra maneuver in 1989, pitching to a 120-degree angle of attack. China, the first export customer, bought 24 jets around the Soviet collapse in a deal valued at $1.3 to $1.5 billion, 70 percent paid in barter goods such as canned meat, thermoses and winter coats, and later built its own Shenyang J-11. Ethiopian Su-27s beat Eritrean MiG-29s in the 1998 to 2000 Badme War, and Russia and Ukraine both fly the jet today.

• The stripped, unpainted P-42 prototype reached a two-to-one thrust-to-weight ratio and broke the F-15 Streak Eagle's time-to-height records.
• The carrier-based Su-33 added canards to climb safely off a ski-jump ramp, and the Su-34 strike variant seats its crew side by side in an armored titanium tub.
• In September 1987 an Su-27 clipped a Norwegian P-3 Orion's propeller over the Barents Sea, and in March 2023 one collided with a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper over the Black Sea.
• The 2002 Sknyliv air show crash in Ukraine killed 77 spectators, the deadliest air show disaster in history.
• Ukrainian Su-27s have been adapted to fire U.S. AGM-88 HARM missiles and drop JDAM glide bombs, and display pilot Colonel Oleksandr Oksanchenko, "Grey Wolf," died flying one over Kyiv in 2022.

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Sanofi was founded in 1973 as a subsidiary of the French oil company Elf Aquitaine. It merged with Synthélabo in 1999, then in 2004 took over Aventis, which had been formed in 1999 from Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst Marion Roussel. Hoechst was one of the companies created when the Allies broke up IG Farben, the conglomerate that used slave labor at Auschwitz and supplied Zyklon B. On the French side, Rhône-Poulenc's Pasteur Mérieux business was tied in the 1980s to HIV-contaminated hemophilia blood products, with lawsuits filed by infected Iraqis as late as 2006. Sanofi's hostile 47.8 billion euro bid for Aventis met a poison pill defense, until the French government pushed for a domestic deal at 54.5 billion euros.

The prize was Plavix, the blood thinner clopidogrel. In 2006 Canadian generic maker Apotex began selling a copy, and a settlement collapsed after Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Peter Dolan made an undisclosed oral agreement with Apotex, prompting an FTC investigation and his firing. Sanofi and Bristol Myers won the patent case in 2011, with Apotex owing more than $442 million. Sanofi then spent over $17 billion on consumer and generics companies, dropped Aventis from its name in 2011, and bought Genzyme for over $20 billion. During COVID-19 it took a $2.1 billion Operation Warp Speed deal but halted its mRNA vaccine work in September 2021.

• The 2010 purchase of Chattem for $1.9 billion brought Allegra, Icy Hot, Gold Bond and Selsun Blue into the company.
• In 2024 and 2025 Sanofi spun off that consumer unit as Opella, selling a 50 percent controlling stake to private equity for about 10 billion euros.
• A 2015 recall pulled every Auvi-Q epinephrine injector in the U.S. and Canada over inconsistent dosing, leaving Mylan's EpiPen to take the market.
• A flood at a Sanofi Pasteur plant in Toronto led to a global BCG vaccine shortage from 2012 to 2014, and FDA inspectors found mold and nesting birds.
• Sanofi said it renamed itself partly so the name would be easier to pronounce in markets such as China.

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F. Hoffmann-La Roche was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1896 by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, and in 1934 became the first company to mass produce synthetic vitamin C, sold as Redoxon. During World War II it moved its Jewish employees from Europe to the United States, while its factories in Germany and Poland used forced labor, including prisoners of war. In 1956 Roche researchers working on tuberculosis drugs created iproniazid, which failed against TB but lifted patients' mood and opened the antidepressant field, and in 1957 another Roche lab produced the first benzodiazepine, the class that includes Valium and Rohypnol. Roche bought the PCR testing patents in 1992, and in 1995 the FDA approved its HIV protease inhibitor saquinavir.

In 1976 a reactor at a plant in Seveso, Italy, owned by a Roche subsidiary, released a dioxin cloud. In 1973 executive Stanley Adams gave the European Economic Community documents showing a vitamin price-fixing cartel; when the documents were not redacted, Roche identified him, and Swiss police arrested him under industrial espionage law. His wife, falsely led to believe he faced decades in prison, took her own life. Roche pleaded guilty to the worldwide vitamin conspiracy in the United States in 1999 and paid a $500 million fine. It later bought Genentech for $46.8 billion and, in 2025, pulled the lymphoma drug Lunsumio from Switzerland after a pricing dispute.

• Within two years of saquinavir and similar drugs reaching the market, annual U.S. AIDS deaths fell from over 50,000 to roughly 18,000.
• In 2013 Roche repaid 3.2 billion Swiss francs to Swiss tax authorities over transfer mispricing.
• Acquisitions include Flatiron Health and Foundation Medicine in 2018, Spark Therapeutics and its $850,000 blindness gene therapy Luxturna in 2019, and Carmot Therapeutics in 2023.
• Lunsumio treats a rare lymphoma affecting about 24 patients a year in Switzerland and cost more than 7,000 Swiss francs per dose.
• Through bearer shares, the founding Hoffmann and Oeri families still hold slightly over half of Roche's voting rights.

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Chuck E. Cheese began as a way to sell video games. In the late 1970s Atari founder Nolan Bushnell wanted his arcade machines out of bars and pool halls and into family spaces, so he built them a pizza restaurant: pizza's 20 to 30 minute bake time kept children at the game cabinets, and an animatronic stage show inspired by Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room gave families a reason to come. The costume he had planned to use turned out to be a rat, and marketers talked him out of calling the place Rick Rat's Pizza. The first Pizza Time Theatre opened in San Jose, California in May 1977. In 1979 Bushnell signed hotel franchiser Robert Brock to develop locations in 16 states.

Brock then saw Aaron Fechter's far more fluid pneumatic animatronics, the Rock-afire Explosion, broke with Bushnell, and opened rival ShowBiz Pizza Place in Missouri in March 1980. A court ordered Brock to pay Bushnell a share of revenue from his first 160 locations, but the 1983 video game crash sank Pizza Time Theatre into Chapter 11 in 1984 with a $58 million loss, and Brock's company bought it in 1985. Decades later the chain swapped out its mascot's voice, began removing robot stages in 2017, filed for bankruptcy again during COVID-19, and opened adult-focused Chuck's Arcade venues in June 2025.

• Australian locations opened in 1981 as Charlie Cheese because "chuck" is local slang for throwing up.
• Fechter would not sign over his character rights, so the company refitted his robots with Chuck E. Cheese character skins in a 1990 Concept Unification program finished in 1994.
• In 2012 the longtime voice of Chuck E. was replaced by Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup, and the character became a guitar-playing rock star.
• After a 2024 phaseout announcement drew protest, the company kept classic animatronic stages at legacy sites in Northridge, California and Nanuet, New York.
• During the pandemic it sold delivery pizza as Pasquale's Pizza and Wings, named for the band's drummer, before retiring that brand in 2025.

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Olive Garden was created by General Mills, the cereal maker, which opened the first restaurant in Orlando, Florida on December 13, 1982, with co-founders including Blaine Sweatt. Following the Red Lobster playbook, it reached 145 locations by 1989, and in 1995 General Mills spun off its restaurants as Darden Restaurants, named for Red Lobster founder Bill Darden. In 1998 "The" was dropped from the name and the slogan became "When you're here, you're family." The chain's Culinary Institute of Tuscany, promoted in ads, amounted to managers staying at a rented hotel and visiting a local restaurant in the off season. In 2009 its average check was $15, against more than $90 at Darden's Capital Grille, and unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks cost the company very little.

The Never Ending Pasta Bowl sold more than 13 million bowls in 2013, a $99 seven-week Pasta Pass was limited to the first 1,000 buyers in 2014, and a $500 lifetime pass followed in 2019. After sales slipped from $3.3 billion in 2010, the activist hedge fund Starboard Value, led by Jeff Smith, released a 294-slide presentation in 2014 attacking the 96-item menu, custom-length straws and piles of stale breadsticks, and revealing that kitchens had stopped salting pasta water to extend cookware warranties. Darden conceded much of it, and a month later shareholders replaced its entire board.

• Darden's rebuttal defended unlimited breadsticks and corrected Starboard that its takeout containers were microwave safe, not dishwasher safe.
• A 2011 tip-out program let more server wages fall to the $2.13 federal tipped minimum, and in 2012 the chain tested shifting most staff to part-time.
• Darden pledged in 2016 to drop battery-caged eggs by 2018 and crated pork by 2025, and later widened the cage-free pledge to international locations by 2027.
• Olive Garden was the largest U.S. casual dining chain from 2018 until Texas Roadhouse passed it in 2025.
• In August 2019 Darden released a statement backed by financial records denying rumors it was funding Donald Trump's 2020 campaign.

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In the 1940s most American ice cream came in vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Irv Robbins learned the trade as a teenager in his father's shop in Washington state, while his future brother-in-law Burt Baskin made ice cream for fellow Navy men in the Pacific during World War II. In 1945 Robbins opened Snowbird Ice Cream in Glendale, California, offering 21 flavors, and in 1946 Baskin opened Burton's Ice Cream Shop in Pasadena. They combined operations, growing to six stores by 1948 and more than 40 by 1949, when, as Huntington Ice Cream Company, they bought a dairy in Burbank so they could develop unusual flavors without relying on a supplier.

In 1953 the Carson Roberts advertising agency urged them to unite under one name, a coin toss put Baskin first, and the 31 concept promised a flavor for every day of the longest months. Early flavors included black walnut, coffee candy and chocolate mint. Stores had pink and brown polka dots, offered free samples on a tiny pink spoon, and discouraged sitting so lines kept moving. Franchising spread the format in the 1960s, the name became Baskin-Robbins Inc. in 1962, and in 1967 the partners sold to United Fruit Company for an estimated $12 million.

• Burt Baskin died of a heart attack in 1967, the year of the sale, at age 54.
• Irv Robbins lived until 2008, dying at 90, and saw the chain spread to cities such as Tokyo, Riyadh, Seoul and Sydney.
• Baskin-Robbins now has more than 7,800 stores worldwide.
• Removing seating was a deliberate break from the slow 1930s and 1940s soda fountain model.
• Former counter workers include a teenage Barack Obama and Oscar-winning director Chris Buck.

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John F. Kennedy International Airport sits on more than 5,000 acres of former Queens marshland that included the Idlewild Beach Golf Course. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, seeing his first airport overwhelmed soon after it opened in 1939, secured the Jamaica Bay site, and Idlewild opened in 1948 with President Harry Truman and Governor Thomas Dewey, rivals in that year's presidential race, both at the ceremony. In 1951 the Port Authority banned early jetliners over noise and held out until a Sud Aviation Caravelle passed strict noise tests in 1957, while two Soviet Tupolev jets were refused. After three fatal crashes near Newark in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1952 briefly closed Newark Airport, Idlewild absorbed the traffic and by 1954 was the busiest international hub in the world.

When the airlines rejected a single 55-gate terminal, architect Wallace Harrison proposed Terminal City, in which each carrier built its own terminal. The results included Pan Am's Worldport with its flying saucer roof, American's 317-foot stained glass window by Robert Sowers, Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center and I.M. Pei's glass-walled Sundrome. The airport was renamed for Kennedy in December 1963 and nearly received the code KIA before JFK was adopted in 1968. Boeing 747s soon made those terminals obsolete, and a $13 billion redevelopment is now consolidating the airport into new mega-terminals.

• Pan Am's Worldport pioneered enclosed passenger jetways, so its travelers never walked through the rain to board.
• The Worldport was demolished in 2013, and the TWA Flight Center survived a preservation fight to reopen as a hotel in 2019.
• In December 1978 mobsters stole $5 million in untraceable cash plus about another million in jewelry from the Lufthansa cargo terminal, the robbery behind Wiseguy and Goodfellas.
• After September 11, Hangar 17 stored about 2,500 pieces of steel, crushed emergency vehicles and personal items recovered from the World Trade Center.
• The Ark, a $65 million terminal for animals with climate-controlled stalls and medical facilities, opened in 2017.

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Priceline was founded in Connecticut in 1997 by Jay Walker with early funding help from Michael Loeb, launched its website in 1998, and went public in the 1999 IPO wave under CEO Richard Braddock, formerly the number two executive at Citicorp. Its hook was Name Your Own Price, a form of opaque travel inventory: travelers set a city, quality level and price, and paid a nonrefundable charge before learning which airline or hotel they had. Airlines and hotels could fill empty seats and rooms without publicly cutting rates, and Priceline kept the spread between the customer's bid and the supplier's floor. In 2000 an affiliate called Webhouse Club stretched the model to groceries and gasoline, alongside long-distance phone service, cars and Priceline Yard Sales.

Nearly all the non-travel experiments shut down by 2002. William Shatner, signed in 1997 for stock instead of cash, became the face of the brand; a later CEO, Jeffrey Boyd, called the reported $600 million payout an urban legend. Shatner's Negotiator persona arrived in 2007, died in a 2012 bus crash ad and returned as a surfing ghost. Bidding ended for flights in 2016, rental cars in 2018 and hotels in 2020, replaced by Express Deals and Pricebreakers. The company renamed itself The Priceline Group in 2014 and later became Booking Holdings.

• Leonard Nimoy briefly replaced Shatner in 2004, leading to ads in which Shatner ran into his own replacement.
• A 2012 ad featuring Long Island Medium star Theresa Caputo drew criticism for appearing to mock Native American smudging rituals.
• DJ Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation challenged Caputo to take its $1 million paranormal challenge.
• The FTC warned the hotel industry in 2012 about hidden resort fees, yet such fees kept appearing at checkout for years.
• In 2013 Priceline was accused of using the firm Wiki-PR, which ran networks of fake accounts to edit Wikipedia for clients.