The odds are pretty good that you’ve never heard of Bertie Felstead. And yet, when he died in 2001, the New York Times, the Economist and many British newspapers published articles about his life. Most folks who get famous do it when they’re young. Then they fade from view and we hear about them again only when » Read More
Category: History
Charles Bergstresser: Invisible Founder of Dow Jones
Charles Dow and Edward Jones met when both worked for the Providence RI Journal. In 1879, they moved to New York to work for John Kiernan’s News Agency, which was the only financial news service in the country at the time. Kiernan had been in business for a decade by then and amassed quite a fortune. But when Dow » Read More
The Daniel McCallum Lessons
Daniel McCallum was good at a lot of things. He was a good carpenter and an engineer who invented a truss used in wooden railroad bridges. We’re not sure how he learned all this because there’s very little on the record about him from when he dropped out of school at about the fifth grade until he turned up as » Read More
The Peshtigo Principle
Quick, what was the most devastating fire in American history? If you answered the Great Chicago Fire that started on August 8, 1871, you’re wrong. While that fire was burning, an even more awful fire was raging 250 miles to the north, around Peshtigo, Wisconsin. I say “around” Peshtigo, because » Read More
The Story of Norio Ohga
If it weren’t for a bout of pleurisy, there might have been no Walkman and the business world might have missed the person most like Steve Jobs. Norio Ohga was born in 1930, the middle child of seven. World War II was raging as he turned thirteen and he would have been assigned to work in a munitions factory » Read More