Business
Products, companies and how they came to be.
“Happy Birthday” was copyrighted until 2015
For decades, a company collected around $2 million a year in licensing fees for the world’s most-sung song. Then a court found the claim was never valid.
A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
In 2020 a man skateboarded to work drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac. The video sent “Dreams”, released in 1977, back into the US Top 20.
An 18-year-old’s failed medicine set off a fashion craze
In 1856 a student trying to make a malaria drug produced a purple stain instead, and within two years Europe was wearing mauve.
Leonardo’s math teacher wrote the first guide to accounting
The friar who taught Leonardo da Vinci mathematics also published the first printed guide to double-entry bookkeeping, the system nearly every company still uses.
The banana your grandparents ate is gone
Until the 1950s, the world’s export banana was the Gros Michel. A fungus wiped it out, and the Cavendish we eat today may face the same fate.
The Big Mac index
A 1986 joke in The Economist became one of the most cited ways to compare currencies, using the price of a hamburger.
The Post-it Note came from a failed glue
A 3M chemist made an adhesive that barely stuck. It took six years and a slipping hymn-book bookmark to find a use for it.
The snail in the ginger beer
A woman in Paisley, a bottle of ginger beer and a snail that was never proved to exist became the case on which the modern law of negligence rests.
When a measure becomes a target
Hospitals cut waiting times by not counting patients. Schools teach to the test. The same law explains both.