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Ettore Bugatti was born in Milan in 1881 to art nouveau furniture and jewelry designer Carlo Bugatti; his brother Rembrandt was a sculptor. In 1909 he founded his car company in Molsheim, in Alsace, then part of the German Empire, and treated engines as fine objects: mechanics hand-scraped mating surfaces so blocks sealed metal to metal without gaskets, exposed parts got guilloché finishes, and front axles were forged with an opening for the spring to pass through. After World War I, Alsace became French, and less than four months after the Treaty of Versailles he showed three light cars at the 1919 Paris Motor Show, including the overhead-cam Type 13.

The 1924 Type 35 won the first Monaco Grand Prix in 1929 and the Targa Florio five years running from 1925 to 1929, and Bugatti mocked W.O. Bentley's heavy Le Mans winners as the world's fastest trucks. He built Autorail trains with surplus engines from the Type 41 Royale and designed the 100P racing plane with Belgian engineer Louis de Monge. In June 1939 a single Bugatti driven by Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron won Le Mans, but on August 11 his son Jean was killed testing a Type 57 near Molsheim. Ettore died on August 21, 1947, and the original company ceased operations in 1952.

• The little Type 10 took the top four places in its first race.
• The 100P buried two car engines behind the cockpit, drove counter-rotating propellers and used forward-swept wings.
• The plane was hidden in a barn during World War II and never flew.
• Romano Artioli bought the name in 1987 and launched the EB110, but the revival went bankrupt by 1995.
• Under Volkswagen came the 1,000-horsepower Veyron and the Chiron, which weighs over 4,300 pounds.

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Toyota's roots lie in Sakichi Toyoda's 1924 Model G automatic loom, which halted itself whenever a thread broke, a principle called jidoka. In 1929 the British firm Platt Brothers bought the patent rights, and Sakichi gave the money to his son Kiichiro Toyoda to build a car. Kiichiro set up an automobile division inside the loom works in 1933, built the Type A engine in 1934, launched the G1 truck in 1935 as the government favored trucks, and completed the Model AA passenger car in 1936. After a public logo contest, brother-in-law Risaburo Toyoda changed the spelling from Toyoda to Toyota, written in eight strokes with a crisper sound, and Toyota Motor Company was incorporated in August 1937.

Bombers struck the Koromo plant a day before Japan's surrender, and the 1949 stabilization program left the company insolvent; the Bank of Japan's rescue split manufacturing from sales and forced layoffs, and Kiichiro resigned in 1950. He died in March 1952 before the Toyopet Crown prototypes were finished; the Crown sold well in Japan from 1955 but failed in the US in 1958. Cousin Eiji Toyoda studied Ford's River Rouge plant and combined jidoka with just-in-time production, Kiichiro's son Shoichiro reunited sales and manufacturing in 1982, the NUMMI venture with General Motors opened in Fremont in 1984, and grandson Akio Toyoda took over in 2009.

• The family name translates to fertile rice paddies, and the new spelling distanced the carmaker from farming and looms.
• Laws restricting foreign automakers in Japan shielded the young company from Ford and GM.
• After the war Toyota kept going partly by repairing damaged US military vehicles.
• American sales staff warned that the Toyopet name suggested toys, which break.
• During the recall crisis Akio Toyoda drove recalled models and testified before Congress, following genchi genbutsu, go and see for yourself.

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Sony began in 1946 in the damaged Shirokiya department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi, where former Imperial Navy research engineer Masaru Ibuka repaired radios and restored the shortwave reception wartime authorities had disabled. Akio Morita read about the shop in the Asahi Shimbun, rejoined his wartime colleague, and with about 190,000 yen from Morita's family they founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. An early electric rice cooker failed because black-market rice varied in moisture, and their Type G tape recorder weighed over 70 pounds. In 1954 Morita licensed the transistor from Bell Labs while Japan's big firms stuck with vacuum tubes, leading to the TR-55 and pocket-sized TR-63 radios.

Needing an export name, they blended the Latin sonus with the slang sonny boy to make Sony, overruling Mitsui Bank's push for Sony Electronic Industries. Morita moved to the US in 1960, hired experienced managers away from other Japanese firms despite lifetime employment norms, and refused to cut prices in downturns. Opera singer Norio Ohga set the CD at 12 centimeters to hold Beethoven's Ninth, oversaw the purchases of CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989, and the PlayStation followed in 1994. Siloed divisions later lost digital music to Apple's iPod until Kazuo Hirai's 2012 One Sony plan sold VAIO and refocused the company.

• The initials TTK were already used by a Japanese railway, and Teletech was taken in America.
• Sony held prices during recessions to recast Made in Japan as a mark of quality.
• Sony-made components ended up in US military equipment during the Vietnam War.
• Howard Stringer, Sony's first foreign CEO, cut jobs while early Spider-Man films propped up results.
• Sony now makes image sensors for nearly every smartphone and runs Crunchyroll.

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Nike began in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports, founded by University of Oregon middle-distance runner Phil Knight and his track coach Bill Bowerman to distribute Japan's Onitsuka Tiger shoes, which Knight sold from the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant; the first year brought about 1,300 pairs and $8,000. When the supplier relationship broke down in 1971, Bowerman poured liquid urethane rubber into his wife's waffle iron to make a sole that gripped artificial tracks. Olympic champion Otis Davis said Bowerman made the first custom pair for him and that he hated them. First employee Jeff Johnson suggested the name Nike, and design student Carolyn Davidson drew the swoosh for $35.

The waffle tread led to the 1972 Moon Shoe and the 1974 Waffle Trainer, and Dan Wieden's 1988 Just Do It slogan adapted Gary Gilmore's last words before his execution, Let's do it. Signing Michael Jordan in 1984 carried the brand into street culture, and the 2017 Vaporfly, with Pebax foam and a carbon fiber plate, improved marathon times by up to 4.2%, leading World Athletics to limit foam thickness and plates. With revenue over $46 billion by 2025 and production in contract factories, Nike has faced scrutiny over factory conditions, offshore structures exposed in the Paradise Papers and inquiries into forced labor in China's Uyghur region.

• Nike's first major brand commercial did not show a shoe.
• Using the Beatles song Revolution in a 1987 ad brought a $15 million lawsuit.
• A pair of 1972 Moon Shoes sold at Sotheby's in 2019 for over $437,000.
• The 2018 Colin Kaepernick campaign drew shoe burnings, then a surge in online orders and a rising stock price.
• In 2019 Nike recalled a Betsy Ross flag shoe after Kaepernick and others objected.

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Rudolf Dassler was born in 1898 in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, the son of a shoe factory worker and a mother who ran a laundry. After service in World War I and sales jobs at a porcelain factory and a Nuremberg leather trader, in 1924 he and younger brother Adi started the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory in their mother's laundry room, pedaling a stationary bicycle for power when the town's electricity failed. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics they persuaded Jesse Owens to wear their spikes, he won four gold medals, and sales reached about 200,000 pairs a year before World War II.

Both brothers joined the Nazi party, the factory turned to military boots, and in a 1943 bomb shelter Rudolf took Adi's remark about the bloody bastards being back as aimed at him. Detained by American soldiers after the war over alleged Waffen SS ties, he became convinced Adi had turned him in. In 1948 the company was dissolved, Rudolf moved across the Aurach river and named his firm Ruda, then Puma, and the town split into Puma and Adidas families. With national coach Sepp Herberger he developed the Super Atom boot with screw-in studs, and by 1970 the rivalry had passed to sons Armin and Horst.

• Herzogenaurach was nicknamed the town of bent necks because residents checked each other's shoes before speaking.
• Puma paid sprinter Armin Hary, who won 100-meter gold at the 1960 Olympics in Pumas, then wore Adidas on the podium.
• Puma broke the Pelé Pact at the 1970 World Cup, reportedly paying Pelé $120,000 to tie his Puma King boots on camera before kickoff.
• Tommie Smith and John Carlos had their Puma Suedes on the podium during their 1968 Olympic protest.
• The 1973 Clyde for Walt Frazier crossed into hip hop and skate culture, and Rudolf's sons sold their stake in 1989.

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The Panic of 1857 followed a boom fueled by California gold, which let Eastern banks issue large amounts of paper credit until easy surface deposits thinned in the mid-1850s. Investors poured money into paper railroads, companies that sold stock and bonds on land grants before laying any track, while Samuel Morse's telegraph linked the financial centers and removed the old delay in bad news. In March 1857 the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision struck down the Missouri Compromise, adding political risk to Western land and railroad securities, and in August the oldest flour and grain company in New York City failed.

On August 24, 1857, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, a clearinghouse for capital between East and West, failed amid fraud by its management, setting off margin calls. In September the SS Central America sank in a hurricane off the Carolinas with more than 400 lives and over 30,000 pounds of California gold meant for New York banks, which then suspended specie payments. Britain suspended the Bank Charter Act of 1844 so the Bank of England could issue more notes, while President James Buchanan refused relief and pressed banks to pay in coin. The South's quick recovery fed cotton is king boasts on the road to the Civil War.

• Ohio Life's executives had embezzled funds to cover disastrous speculative bets.
• New York banks used the New York Clearinghouse to pool gold reserves and issue joint certificates.
• Wheat fell from over $2 a bushel in 1855 to about 80 cents by 1858 as Russian grain returned after the Crimean War.
• Keokuk, Iowa, owed nearly a million dollars on railroad bonds, and lots once appraised at $1,000 could not sell for $10.
• The Boston and Worcester railroad cut its remaining workers' pay by 10%.

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The Panic of 1893 grew out of a strained Gilded Age economy: the McKinley Tariff of 1890 raised import taxes to as much as 50%, and the 1890 Barings crisis, set off by Argentine defaults after a wheat failure and the Revolution of the Park, pushed British investors to sell American railroad securities and ship the gold home. Railroads added 100,000 miles of track between 1878 and 1896 on borrowed money, and the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went into receivership on February 20, 1893, 12 days before Grover Cleveland's inauguration. Cleveland blamed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and pushed its repeal, pitting gold-standard Eastern bankers against farmers and Western miners who wanted free silver.

On May 5, 1893, stocks plunged 24% as the National Cordage Company, which had used its own stock as collateral for loans to corner imported hemp, collapsed when banks called the loans. Over 15,000 companies and 500 banks failed, the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific and Santa Fe railroads collapsed, and unemployment reached 43% in Michigan. Cleveland sent the Army to enforce an injunction that broke the 1894 Pullman strike, Eugene V. Debs went to federal prison, and with Treasury gold down to $42 million in February 1895, Cleveland borrowed $65 million in gold from J.P. Morgan and the Rothschilds.

• Within a year, a quarter of all US rail mileage was in receivership.
• Detroit mayor Hazen S. Pingree's Potato Patch Plan turned vacant city lots into food plots.
• George Pullman cut wages about 30% without lowering rents in his company town.
• The Populist Party's 1892 presidential candidate won over 8% of the popular vote.
• The Morgan syndicate warned New York firms not to ship gold abroad, lifting reserves back above the $100 million legal minimum.

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The Shard began in 1998, when developer Irvine Sellar eyed Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block beside London Bridge Station, after a government white paper encouraged tall buildings near transport hubs. In spring 2000 he met architect Renzo Piano for lunch in Berlin, where Piano, who disliked conventional skyscrapers, sketched a spire rising from the Thames on the back of the menu, drawing on railway lines, ship masts and Canaletto's paintings of London church spires. English Heritage warned it would be a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, handing the tower its name, and after a public inquiry John Prescott approved it in 2003 as a design of the highest quality.

Demolition preparations began in September 2007 as the credit crunch hit, the construction price from Mace rose from £350 million to almost £435 million, and in 2008 Qatari investors paid £150 million for an 80% stake; Qatar now owns 95%. Redesigned after the NIST report on the World Trade Center, the 309.6 metre tower has a post-tensioned concrete core, sways up to 400 millimetres and was built top down, a first for the UK. In 2011 workers found a fox, later named Romeo, living near the top. Completed in 2012, its 95 storeys hold clinics, offices, an Al Jazeera studio, the Shangri-La hotel, apartments and the UK's highest public viewing gallery.

• The 500-ton, 66-metre spire was test-assembled on an airfield in North Yorkshire before going to London.
• Its 11,000 panes of glass cover an area equal to almost eight football pitches.
• The core passed One Canada Square in 2010, ending its 18-year run as Britain's tallest building.
• George King-Thompson free-climbed the exterior in 2019 and was sentenced to six months in a youth offenders institution.
• Six Greenpeace climbers spent 16 hours scaling it in 2013 to protest Shell's Arctic drilling.

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Sotirios Voulgaris was born in March 1857 in Paramythia, in Ottoman-ruled Epirus, one of 11 children in an Aromanian family rooted in Kalarites, the largest silversmithing center in the Balkans. Family lore traced the line to royal Balkan figures who took refuge in Venetian Corfu in the 16th century, a claim Count Stefanos Voulgaris disputed. In 1881 the family left for Italy, where his first jewelry shop in Naples was abandoned after a series of burglaries; he started again in Rome at Via Sistina 85 in 1884 and in 1905 opened the flagship on Via Condotti, the street linking the Spanish Steps to the heart of Roman commerce.

His early silver pieces blended Byzantine and Islamic floral motifs, but by the 1920s he had moved to platinum settings and Parisian Art Deco, and in the 1930s he paired geometric diamond motifs with large colored gemstones. He married Eleni Bossio in 1888, had six children and died in 1932, leaving the business to sons Giorgio and Costantino, who in 1934 unveiled the BVLGARI name with a classical Latin V. Later generations turned to gold during wartime metal shortages, created the Serpenti bracelet watches and dressed Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman, and LVMH acquired the company in 2011 for 4.3 billion euros.

• For an immigrant artisan, the stolen Naples stock was effectively his life savings.
• Platinum's higher melting point demanded new torches and tools but held stones securely with very little metal.
• His 1930s convertible jewels could be taken apart and worn in several ways.
• The Trombino ring, named for a small trumpet, set a central stone in a broad, tapering band.
• Grandsons Paolo and Nicola helped lead the house through Rome's postwar Hollywood on the Tiber years.

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Australia's Woolworths began in Sydney in 1924, when founders Percy Christmas, Stanley Chatterton, Cecil Scott Waine, George Creed and Ernest Williams set aside a proposed Wallworths Bazaar after Christmas dared Williams to use the Woolworths name, which was available in New South Wales and had no link to the American F.W. Woolworth chain. Its Stupendous Bargain Basement was the first variety store anywhere to use cash registers that printed customer receipts. The company survived the Depression and the military's takeover of its Sydney warehouses in World War II, opened its first purpose-built supermarket in 1960, built the discount stores that became Big W, bought Safeway in 1985 and floated in 1993 in what was then Australia's largest IPO.

Expansion took it into Dick Smith electronics, petrol stations and liquor through Dan Murphy's and BWS, and because Queensland required liquor sellers to be hoteliers, it bought hundreds of hotels and came to operate over 10,000 poker machines. The Masters hardware venture with Lowe's contributed to a $1.235 billion loss in the 2015 to 2016 financial year and was shut down, and the liquor, hotel and gaming businesses were spun off as Endeavour Group, with the last shares sold by 2024. In January 2024 the company stopped selling Australia Day merchandise, citing falling demand, and opposition leader Peter Dutton called for a boycott while Brisbane stores were vandalized.

• Woolworths admitted underpaying its own staff by millions of dollars over several years.
• It was fined a million dollars for emailing customers who had opted out of marketing.
• Modern slavery audits sent third-party inspectors to Vietnamese seafood plants and traced West African cocoa.
• The company reimbursed recruitment fees to Myanmar migrant workers in its Malaysian supply network.
• Its petrol stations went to EG Group, and it is now buying into digital health and pet care.