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DriveHistory

Harland Sanders was in his early sixties when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened, in Utah in 1952. At 65, after a new highway took the traffic away from his roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, he sold it and took to the road, selling his recipe to other restaurants.

Sanders had been frying chicken for travellers at his café and motel on a busy road in Corbin since the 1930s. He was never an army officer: in 1935 the governor of Kentucky made him an honorary Kentucky Colonel. His first franchisee was Pete Harman, who ran a large restaurant in South Salt Lake, and it was a sign painter hired by Harman who came up with the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. Franchisees paid Sanders four cents for every chicken sold. When the café closed, he lived on his savings and a $105 monthly Social Security pension while he drove from town to town. By 1963 there were more than 600 KFC restaurants. The next year, aged 73, he sold the company for $2 million and stayed on as its white-suited public face. A popular story says he was turned down 1,009 times; no reliable record confirms that number.

KFC and The New YorkerRead card

DriveTechnology

In Toyota's car factories, any worker who spots a fault can pull a cord to call for help and, if it cannot be fixed quickly, stop the whole production line.

The idea comes from Toyota's roots in weaving. In 1924 Sakichi Toyoda built an automatic loom that stopped itself the moment a thread broke, so no faulty cloth was made and one person could look after many machines. His son Kiichiro turned the family loom company towards cars in the 1930s, and engineers led by Taiichi Ohno later made the principle a pillar of the Toyota Production System. It is called jidoka, usually translated as automation with a human touch. The cord is known as an andon, after the Japanese word for a paper lantern, because pulling it lights up a signal board. The reasoning is simple: fixing a fault at once costs less than finding it later in finished cars.

ToyotaRead card

DriveTechnology

Post-it Notes grew from a weak, reusable glue that 3M chemist Spencer Silver made by accident in 1968 while trying to create a very strong one.

For years Silver's glue was a solution looking for a problem. In 1974 his colleague Art Fry, who sang in a church choir, wanted a bookmark that would stay in his hymn book without damaging the pages, and realised the glue could make notes that stick and peel off again. A 1977 test launch in four cities under the name Press 'n Peel sold poorly. In 1978 3M handed out free samples to offices in Boise, Idaho, and more than 90% of people who tried them said they would buy them. Post-it Notes went on sale across the United States in 1980, and in Canada and Europe in 1981. The famous canary yellow was chosen by chance: the lab next door had yellow scrap paper.

3M / USPTORead card

DriveMind

When Google studied what made its most effective teams work, the strongest factor was psychological safety: people felt they could ask questions, admit mistakes or disagree without being punished or embarrassed.

The study, called Project Aristotle, began in 2012 and compared more than 180 of Google's own teams. Who was on a team, from seniority to personality, mattered less than how its members worked together. Five dynamics stood out: psychological safety, dependability, clear structure and roles, work that felt meaningful, and a sense that the work made an impact. Psychological safety came first by a wide margin. The term had been defined in 1999 by the Harvard Business School researcher Amy Edmondson as a shared belief that a team is safe for personal risks, such as admitting an error. The findings became widely known through a 2016 New York Times Magazine article; Google did not publish its data as a peer-reviewed study.

Google re:WorkRead card

DriveTechnology

The standard shipping container lets goods travel from ship to train to lorry without being unpacked. Put to work at scale by Malcolm McLean in 1956, it made world trade far cheaper.

Before containers, cargo was loaded piece by piece: sacks, crates and barrels carried aboard by teams of dockworkers, while ships often waited in port for days. Malcolm McLean, an American trucking businessman, had a converted tanker, the Ideal X, carry 58 containers from Newark to Houston in April 1956. He estimated that loading loose cargo cost $5.86 a ton, against about 16 cents a ton by container. In the late 1960s international standards fixed the box sizes and the corner fittings that lock boxes to cranes, trucks and each other, so any port could handle any container. Ports needed far fewer dockworkers, and many cities built new container terminals away from their old harbours.

Smithsonian / National Inventors Hall of FameRead card

DriveHistory

Grameen Bank, founded by economist Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh, helped spread microcredit: very small loans, given without collateral, to poor people whom ordinary banks would not serve.

During the Bangladesh famine of 1974, Yunus, then an economics professor at Chittagong University, saw how people in the nearby village of Jobra were trapped by moneylenders over tiny debts. In 1976 he lent a total of US$27 from his own pocket to 42 villagers, many of them makers of bamboo stools. The project became Grameen Bank by government order in 1983. Instead of offering collateral, borrowers join small groups whose members support one another, and about 97% of them are women. Yunus and the bank shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Later research was more cautious: six randomised studies in different countries, published together in 2015, found modest benefits but no large fall in poverty.

Nobel PrizeRead card

DriveTechnology

M-Pesa, launched in Kenya in 2007, lets people send, store and withdraw money with an ordinary mobile phone, using local shops as cash points.

Pesa means money in Swahili. The mobile operator Safaricom and its part-owner Vodafone launched the service in March 2007, after a pilot partly funded by the UK government. A customer hands cash to an agent, often a shopkeeper who sells phone credit, and the money appears as a balance on their phone. They can send it by text message to someone hundreds of kilometres away, who collects it as cash from another agent. By the end of 2011 M-Pesa had about 17 million users in Kenya. A 2016 study in Science by Tavneet Suri and William Jack estimated that access to it had lifted about 194,000 households, 2% of Kenya's total, out of poverty, especially households headed by women.

World Bank / Harvard Kennedy SchoolRead card

DriveTechnology

A QR code, the black-and-white square your phone scans, was invented in Japan in 1994 to track car parts in factories.

Masahiro Hara led the small team at the Japanese car-parts company Denso Wave that created the QR code. An ordinary barcode held only about 20 characters, and workers had to scan several of them on each box of parts, so the team wanted a code that held far more and could be read quickly from any angle. Hara has said the grid of black and white squares was inspired by the stones on a Go board. The three large squares in the corners use a pattern of black and white bands chosen because it almost never appears in print, so a scanner can find the code instantly and tell which way up it is. Denso Wave chose not to enforce its patent for standard codes, so anyone could use them, and phone cameras later carried them onto menus, tickets and payment screens.

DENSO WAVERead card

DriveHistory

Mondragon, founded in the Basque Country of Spain in 1956, is one of the world's largest groups of worker cooperatives: many of its workers are also its owners.

It began with José María Arizmendiarrieta, a young Catholic priest who arrived in the town of Mondragón in 1941, when it was still poor after the Spanish Civil War. In 1943 he opened a technical school, and in 1956 five of its former students set up a small workshop called Ulgor, making paraffin heaters, as a cooperative. The group now works in industry, retail, finance and education, and in 2024 it had more than 70,000 workers, about 30,000 of them in the Basque Country. In its cooperatives each worker-member has one vote in the general assembly, which elects the governing council, and members share in profits and losses. Not everyone is a member, though: many staff, especially in companies abroad, are ordinary employees.

MONDRAGON Corporation / International Cooperative AllianceRead card

DriveTechnology

Mumbai's dabbawalas carry home-cooked lunches to offices by suburban train every working day and bring the empty boxes back, guided by codes painted on each box instead of addresses.

A dabba is a lunchbox, and a dabbawala is 'one who carries a box'. The service began in 1890, when Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started delivering lunches in Bombay with about a hundred men, for office workers who had long journeys and wanted food from home. Today 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas move between 175,000 and 200,000 lunchboxes a day. Each box passes through several hands: it is collected from a kitchen, sorted at a station, carried by train, sorted again and delivered, using letters, numbers and colours painted on the lid. A famous claim says they make one mistake in six or eight million deliveries, but it came from a Forbes journalist's extrapolation from the association president's estimate of 'maybe once every two months', not from any audit.

Harvard Business School / RICSRead card

DriveTechnology

A Repair Café is a free neighbourhood event where volunteers help people mend broken lamps, kettles, clothes and bikes. Things are fixed instead of thrown away, and owners learn repair skills along the way.

The first Repair Café was held in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009, organised by the Dutch journalist Martine Postma as a local sustainability project. It drew so many people that she set up a foundation to help others copy the idea, and there are now more than 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, from village halls to city libraries. Visitors bring a broken item and sit with a volunteer, such as an electrician, tailor or bike mechanic, to fix it together; the repair is free, though donations are welcome. Many cafés also record what came in and whether it could be fixed, building evidence about which products are hard to repair.

Repair Cafe movementRead card

WonderTrade

The Hanseatic League was an alliance of German merchant guilds and trading towns that dominated commerce in the Baltic and North Sea from the 13th to the 15th century, with Lübeck as its informal capital and trading posts from London to Novgorod.

The League grew in the late 12th century from a few north German towns and at its height took in nearly 200 settlements across what are now eight countries. It had no king, army or permanent government. Member towns sent delegates to occasional assemblies called Hansetage, shared trading privileges, and sometimes blockaded or even fought rivals, as in the war that defeated Denmark in 1370. Its great foreign offices, called kontors, stood in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod. As strong territorial states rose, the League faded; its last assembly met in 1669. Hamburg and Bremen still call themselves Free Hanseatic Cities.

Hanseatic LeagueRead card

WonderTrade

Shipping containers, steel boxes built to standard sizes, let cargo move from ship to lorry to train without being unpacked. Since the first container voyage in 1956, they have cut loading costs so sharply that they helped create today's global trade.

Before containers, dockworkers loaded ships one sack, crate and barrel at a time, and loading a ship could take days or weeks. The American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean changed that. On 26 April 1956 his converted tanker Ideal X sailed from Newark to Houston with 58 containers on deck. McLean calculated that loading cost about 16 cents a ton, against almost six dollars for cargo loaded piece by piece. International standards for container sizes and corner fittings followed in 1968–1970, so any box could fit any crane, ship or lorry. Ports changed, many dockworkers lost their jobs, and making goods far from where they are sold became cheap.

ContainerizationRead card

WonderTrade

From around the eighth century, camel caravans crossing the Sahara linked West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold north, salt south, and books, scholars and ideas in both directions.

Camels, which spread across the Sahara in the first centuries AD, made the crossing practical: they could go for days without water between wells and oases. Salt cut in desert mines such as Taghaza was in huge demand in the West African savanna, which had gold but little salt, and the gold of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires reached Mediterranean mints. Caravans could number thousands of camels. Timbuktu grew rich on this trade and, from the fourteenth century, became a centre of Islamic learning around mosques such as Sankore; many thousands of manuscripts from its libraries survive today. The same routes also carried enslaved Africans north across the desert.

Trans-Saharan tradeRead card

WonderTrade

From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons crossed the Pacific between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico, carrying Asian silk, porcelain and spices east and returning with American silver.

Usually only one or two galleons sailed each way a year. The westward run from Acapulco took about three months on the trade winds, but the return had to swing far north to catch westerly winds and could take four to six months, and scurvy and storms cost many lives. Much of the silver, mined at Potosí in today's Bolivia and at Zacatecas in Mexico, ended up in China, whose economy increasingly ran on silver. Chinese porcelain arriving in Mexico influenced the blue-and-white Talavera pottery of Puebla, and Manila grew into a meeting place for Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Japanese traders. Dozens of galleons were wrecked over the route's 250 years.

Manila galleon tradeRead card

WonderTrade

Cowrie shells, the glossy shells of small sea snails, served as money in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific for centuries, because they were durable, easy to count and carry, and hard to fake.

Cowries were used in China during the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, and the Chinese sign for 'shell' still appears inside many characters to do with money, such as those for 'goods' and 'buy'. Most of the cowries used in Asia and Africa came from the Maldive Islands. The traveller Ibn Battuta saw them used as currency in the Mali Empire in the 1350s, and from the sixteenth century European ships carried them to West Africa by the ton, often as ballast. There they paid for everyday goods and taxes, and they were also used to buy enslaved people in the Atlantic slave trade. As imports soared their value fell, and colonial currencies replaced them around 1900.

Cowrie shell moneyRead card

DriveTrade

Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) combined investment, shipping, military power and colonial trade to become one of history's first global corporations.

The Dutch parliament, the States General, gave the VOC a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, along with powers normally held by states: it could build forts, keep an army, wage war, sign treaties and mint coins. To raise money it sold shares to the public, and trading in those shares in Amsterdam made it one of the first companies with freely traded stock. From its Asian headquarters at Batavia, today's Jakarta, it dominated the spice trade, often by force: in 1621 its troops killed or expelled most of the people of the Banda Islands to control nutmeg. At its height it employed tens of thousands of people. Debt and corruption brought it down, and it was dissolved in 1799.

Dutch East India CompanyRead card

DriveTrade

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, six fairs a year in the Champagne region of north-eastern France were among the main meeting places of European trade, where Flemish cloth met Italian merchants, Mediterranean spices, credit and currency exchange.

The fairs rotated between four towns, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes, and each lasted several weeks, so that together they filled most of the year. The Counts of Champagne gave merchants safe conduct on the roads, and fair wardens enforced contracts and punished defaulters, so strangers from distant cities could trust each other. Deals were often settled on paper: debts run up at one fair were cleared at its end or carried over to the next, an early step towards modern banking. The fairs declined in the early fourteenth century. Champagne had passed to the French crown when its heiress married the future Philip IV in 1284; royal taxes rose, war disrupted Flemish trade, and Italian ships began sailing directly to Bruges.

Champagne fairsRead card

DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

Medici BankRead card

DriveEngineering

Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936 in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the Nevada–Arizona border, controls floods, stores water in Lake Mead and generates hydroelectric power for the American Southwest.

The dam was built during the Great Depression, when thousands of men came to the desert looking for work. By the official count, 96 workers died in accidents during construction. At 221 metres it was the tallest dam in the world when finished, and it created Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by capacity. Its water is shared among seven US states under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, and with Mexico under a 1944 treaty. So much of the river is now taken for cities and farms that it rarely reaches the sea. In 2022, after years of drought, Lake Mead fell to its lowest level since it was first filled.

Hoover DamRead card

DriveTrade

The Suez Canal in Egypt, opened in 1869, links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, so ships between Europe and Asia no longer have to sail around Africa. Dug partly by forced labour and later fought over by empires, it still carries a large share of world trade.

The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps led the company that dug the canal. In its early years tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants were made to work on it under the corvée, a system of compulsory unpaid labour, until the practice was stopped in 1864. Egypt's debts later forced it to sell its 44 per cent stake to Britain in 1875, and British troops stayed in the canal zone until 1956. That year President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal, and Britain, France and Israel invaded. International pressure, above all from the United States, forced them to withdraw, a turning point in the end of European empire in the Middle East. In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given ran aground and blocked the canal for six days.

Suez CanalRead card

WonderEngineering

Float glass, the flat glass in almost every modern window, is made by pouring molten glass onto a bath of molten tin. The glass spreads into an even sheet with smooth faces that need no grinding or polishing.

Before float glass, large clear sheets were made as plate glass: cast or rolled, then ground and polished on both sides, a slow and costly job. Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff of Pilkington Brothers developed the new method at the firm's works in St Helens, Lancashire, between 1953 and 1957. It works because glass is lighter than tin and does not mix with it: floating on the molten metal, the glass flattens under gravity and surface tension, then cools slowly as a continuous ribbon. The company announced the process in 1959, reached profitable full-scale sales in 1960 and licensed it around the world during the 1960s, when it replaced the older methods.

Float glassRead card

DriveEngineering

The Bessemer process, patented by Henry Bessemer in 1856, made steel by blowing air through molten iron to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. It made steel cheap enough to build railways, bridges and ships.

Bessemer's converter was a large pear-shaped vessel lined with heat-resistant brick. Air blown in from below burned away carbon, silicon and manganese, and the burning itself gave off so much heat that the iron stayed molten without any added fuel. Three to five tons could be turned into steel in 10 to 20 minutes, a job that had taken at least a full day of heating, stirring and reheating. The early process could not remove phosphorus, so it worked only with scarce phosphorus-poor ores until 1878, when Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and his cousin Percy Gilchrist introduced a converter with a basic, limestone-type lining. The price of steel fell from about £40 a ton to £6–7.

Bessemer processRead card

WonderDesign

Cut an A4 sheet in half across its length and you get two A5 sheets with exactly the same proportions. This works because the international paper standard ISO 216 sets the sides in a ratio of 1 to the square root of 2, about 1 to 1.414.

The idea is old. The German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg pointed out the advantages of the square-root-of-two ratio in a letter in 1786, and revolutionary France listed similar formats in a tax law of 1798. The modern system came from the German engineer Walter Porstmann, whose proposal became the German standard DIN 476 in the early 1920s and later the international standard ISO 216. The largest size, A0, has an area of one square metre; A1 is half of it, A2 half again, and so on down to A4 and beyond. Because every size has the same shape, a page can be enlarged or reduced on a photocopier without cropping. The main countries that still mostly use other sizes, such as Letter, are the United States and Canada.

ISO 216Read card