People Who Most Influenced Business

Copyright (c) 1999, LOS ANGELES TIMES. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
PEOPLE WHO MOST INFLUENCED BUSINESS THIS CENTURY: THE 50
by Ashley Dunn and others
Times Staff Writer
As the 20th century began, most people traveled by horse or train, long-distance
communications were handled by telegraph or letter, and the Dow Jones industrial average
stood at 68 points.
In a 100-year span that produced airplanes, the Model T, motion pictures with sound, fast
food, Social Security, television, junk bonds, nuclear weapons, the Internet, gene-spliced
drugs and international commerce that now takes place in the click of a computer key, just
who most influenced business in the 20th century?
As part of our millennium coverage, The Times' Business staff set out to pick the 50
figures or groups of people who most influenced business this century. The criteria were
simple: Those on the list not only had to have a phenomenal impact globally, but also on the
lives of Southern Californians as well.
Our staffers made their top 50 nominations. Editors plowed through lists of auto makers,
aviators, bankers, entertainment chieftains, labor leaders, electronic and computer wizards,
scientists, politicians, economists, telecommunication giants, financiers and gave thumbs up
or thumbs down. Most end-of-the-century lists tend to be heavily weighted toward recent
events, so we tried to be open-minded and include key business figures or events from early in
this century as well. Some people who had global influence, but not much influence to the
lives of Southern Californians, didn't make the final cut.
We then consulted with academics and narrowed our list again. More disagreements
followed. And eventually, with considerable hand-wringing, we came up with our top 50 list.
We enjoyed putting together this list, and we hope you enjoy it as well. Let us know what
you think of our selections by writing us at Influential 50, Business Section, Los Angeles
Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or send e-mail to
[email protected].
***
WITH TRANSISTOR, THEY SPARKED A REVOLUTION
1. WILLIAM SHOCKLEY (1910-1989), ROBERT N. NOYCE (1927-1990) AND JACK
S. KILBY (1923- )
Transforming Society with Transistors and Integrated Circuits
In the summer of 1948, a tiny electronic device called a transistor--the size of a pencil
eraser--was presented to the world at a press conference at the headquarters of Bell
Laboratories in New York City.
It wasn't much of a press conference and it failed to create a buzz over this invention. Even

the hometown paper, the New York Times, managed only a few paragraphs on the event in a
column about radio news, giving top billing that day to the radio show "Our Miss Brooks."
Who could have guessed that this invention would trigger a technological revolution that
would become one of the most sweeping in history?
From its creation in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley of
Bell Labs a few months before the press conference, the transistor and its direct descendant,
the integrated circuit, have brought about a stunning transformation of society.
Bardeen, a quiet, thoughtful scientist, and the ever-jovial Brattain had done almost all the
work developing the transistor. Shockley, their overbearing and arrogant boss, had seized
most of the credit.
But from that volatile mix sprang a unique invention that eventually turned room-sized
computers into hand-held devices, and hulking furniture-sized living room radios into
transistor radios, the first of an unceasing flood of portable electronic devices for consumers.
The transistor and the integrated circuit created whole new industries by packing electronic
components onto a single silicon chip the size of a fingernail. The versatility and tiny size of
the devices opened the way to the exploration of space and the construction of compact digital
computers, mobile phones and even Nintendo.
This technology has powered the great global postwar boom, lifting Japan out of the ashes
of World War II, turning a once unheralded swath of California, eventually named Silicon
Valley, into the center of the computing world and hoisting the U.S. into a position of
economic dominance. Along the way, the devices created so many ripples through society that
it is hard to say what has not been affected by them.
"The transistor is right up there [as] the single most important invention of our century,"
said futurist Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park, Calif.,
consulting firm that studies long-term trends in information technology. "It has made the
information revolution possible."
That so much could spring from a device with such modest origins is one of the quirks of
technological history. The transistor was developed to be a rugged, miniaturized replacement
for the vacuum tube, a device developed around the turn of century that acted as a valve for
electricity, allowing engineers to guide, amplify, shape and switch the flow of electrons.
The vacuum tube was a wonderfully versatile device, able to amplify radio signals, convert
electrical power into different forms and switch on and off at high speed--a crucial ability for
the development of computers. Unfortunately, the vacuum tube was also hot, bulky, powerhungry and temperamental in the extreme.
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, of Bell Labs, believed that a class of materials known as
"semiconductors"--substances such as germanium and silicon that can both conduct or inhibit
the flow of electricity--could be used as a replacement for vacuum tubes.
By touching a wire to a piece of germanium with slight impurities in it, the trio found they
could control how well the material conducted electricity. They named their invention the

"transistor," a word derived from the semiconductor's ability to amplify electrical signals that
were transferred through it. The three scientists won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their
discovery.
Shockley eventually became disenchanted with Bell Labs, where his reputation for being
overbearing and overly competitive prevented him from being promoted, according to the
book "Crystal Fire," which details the discovery of the transistor.
Shockley struck out on his own in 1955, forming the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
in Palo Alto, where he had spent most of his childhood. His lab was the first semiconductor
company in what would become Silicon Valley. He recruited the best and the brightest.
Among his first employees were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to co-found
Intel Corp. in 1968.
The first products that used the new transistors--about 1/200th the size of vacuum tubes-were exotic devices such as hearing aids and military equipment. But the introduction of the
first pocket-sized transistor radios in 1954 for $49.95 launched the device into the
mainstream. Soon, transistors were replacing vacuum tubes in everything from computers to
TVs.
But it became clear by the mid-1950s that the transistor alone was not a complete solution
to the problems of miniaturization. Each transistor had two or more wires coming out of it,
which had to be painstakingly soldered to a circuit board by hand.
The solution was separately conceived of in late 1958 and early 1959 by Jack S. Kilby of
Texas Instruments and Noyce. By then Noyce, with Moore, had left Shockley's company
because of his erratic behavior to create a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor.
Kilby was a 6-foot-6 Midwesterner who had served in Burma as an OSS radio technician
during World War II. Friends described him as reserved and modest, but a born tinkerer who
was always searching for problems to solve.
Noyce, the son of an Iowa minister, was an affable and confident physicist who had
emerged among Shockley's original group of young researchers as a natural leader.
Their idea was to construct the various components of a circuit--transistors, resistors and
capacitors--on a single piece of silicon called an "integrated circuit." Kilby built the first
device in 1958, but it was Noyce who came up with an inexpensive and efficient method to
make the devices in 1959.
These integrated circuits combined the power of transistors to control the flow of
electricity with the means to pack thousands--and ultimately, millions--of components onto a
tiny silicon chip.
William J. Kaiser, chairman of the electrical engineering department at UCLA, said that
just a few decades ago, even the most complex electronic devices had only a few hundred
components. Today, Intel's Pentium III microprocessor packs 9.5 million transistors on a
chip.
"Complexity became a possibility," Kaiser said.

Portable, battery-powered devices became possible for the first time, leading to a wide
range of products from cardiac pacemakers to hand-held calculators and PCs.
Joseph Schulman is the chief scientist for the Alfred E. Mann Foundation in Valencia, a
developer of medical electronic devices. He said the earliest pacemakers from 1958 had only
two transistors and were the size of hockey pucks. Today, the most advanced pacemakers are
about the size of a silver dollar and almost as thin. Inside are up to a million transistors that
allow the device to control the heart in a nearly natural manner.
"This is just something you couldn't make with vacuum tubes," Schulman said.
Transistors and silicon chips became the enablers of a revolution in production, in much
the same way that standardized nuts and bolts launched the era of mass production, said Hal
Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. These
electronic pieces, which cost less than real nuts and bolts, could be mixed to produce
wondrously different devices. Essentially, the same chips with different programming could
be used in computers, digital cameras and air conditioners.
Silicon Valley also spawned a burst of new millionaires, but among the original inventors
of the transistor and integrated circuit, only Noyce and Moore struck it rich as co-founders of
Intel.
Shockley's company never made a profit and in the 1960s he joined the faculty at Stanford
University, where he became a controversial figure for his outspoken view that intelligence
was determined by race. Shockley died in 1989.
Brattain retired from Bell Labs in 1967 and died in 1987. Bardeen later became a professor
of physics at the University of Illinois, turned his attention to superconductivity and in 1972
became the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics.
Kilby left Texas Instruments in 1970 to pursue his own inventions. He still lives in Dallas
and has more than 60 patents in his name, including the hand-held calculator.
"I never imagined it would have this impact," Kilby said of the integrated circuit. "I
thought it could be important for electronics, but what I didn't realize was how the price
decreases would expand the field. It's just been amazing."
Prices, in fact, plummeted, sometimes to mere fractions of a penny. The phenomena was
first noted by Gordon Moore, who wrote in 1965 that the price of integrated circuits appeared
to drop by half every year while the number of transistors on a silicon chip seemed to double
every year. Intel's chips have been a benchmark of "Moore's Law." In 1995, Intel's top of the
line Pentium processor sold for almost $700. Today, that same chip sells for less than $40.
All these factors have given the consumer an unprecedented power to communicate and
compute on their own, which in turn has forged new types of social and business connections.
Saffo said the problems of distance and geography that hindered the old world have begun to
be erased by the new age of portable and ubiquitous communications.
He said that perhaps the best sign of the success of the transistor and integrated circuit is

how invisible they have become, despite being used in every facet of life.
"It is the enabler of the technology of our times," Saffo said. "It is truly invisible
technology."--Ashley Dunn, Times Staff Writer
FORD OFFERED THE MASSES FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
2. HENRY FORD (1863-1947)
The Model T, Assembly Lines and Life on Wheels
"History is more or less bunk," said Henry Ford. "The only history that is worth a tinker's
dam is the history we make today."
There's no small measure of irony in the fact that Ford, who had little regard for the
judgments of history, completely altered society, lifestyles, commerce and history itself by
creating the Model T and selling it to the masses.
When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 he said, "I will build a motor car for the great
multitude." And he did. In the next 20 years Ford sold 17 million Model Ts, about half of all
the cars produced in the world during that time. The automobile became the fulcrum for a new
economy. It spurred travel, pushed the growth of cities outward and eventually helped create
suburban life.
"Most people had never been more than 20 miles from their homes prior to the
introduction of the Model T. It was a staggering change in the history of mankind. It changed
where people lived, where they worked," said another Ford, William Clay Ford Jr., Henry's
great-grandson and the first family member to lead Ford Motor Co. in nearly two decades.
Beyond the auto itself--the freedom of movement it affords us weighed against the price it
exacts in dirty air, traffic congestion and roadway fatalities--Ford's legacy also rests on his
application of the moving assembly line to mass production and his visionary conception of
the mass market.
Ford was not the first to build a horseless carriage. Nor was he the first to think of
mechanically delivering components to waiting workers. Rudimentary conveyor systems had
been employed for years in meatpacking and food canning.
But Ford was a gifted mechanic who had a knack for elevating good ideas to something
sublime. He also had the iron will, the supreme confidence in his ideas, to put them into
practice.
"Yes, he was a man who came along at the right time. But that's what we call vision today,"
said David Lewis, professor of business history at the University of Michigan.
Ford's vision had its roots in his Michigan farm upbringing, which inspired his early efforts
to build tractors. But recognizing that people were more interested in "something that would
travel on the road," he set out to build a car "large enough for the family but small enough for
the individual to run and care for [and] so low in price that no man making a good salary will
be unable to own one."

That car was the gasoline-powered Model T. It was a simple machine--rugged, durable,
basic, even ungainly--a mechanical extension of Ford himself. It cost $850 in 1908 and, as its
utilitarian-minded creator later said, "any customer can have a car painted any color he wants
so long as it is black."
At that price, the Model T was still beyond the reach of most workers. But by introducing
the moving assembly line to its manufacture in 1912-13 at his fabled Highland Park plant
outside Detroit, Ford was eventually able to cut the Model T's production time by 75% and
reduce the car's price to $260.
The final step in the revolution he instigated was perhaps the most dramatic of all. On Jan.
5, 1914, he announced the $5, eight-hour day--which more than doubled wages and reduced
the workday by 90 minutes.
Historian Lewis calls the $5 day the "most dramatic event in the history of wages." By
making it possible for the people who made cars to actually buy them, Ford created the mass
market he needed to sustain his company and its products.
"From that day forward," Lewis said, "Ford became the world's best-known and most
admired industrialist."
As the decades passed, with growing fame came growing criticism over Ford's autocratic
ways, his spying on his own employees and a series of vitriolic, anti-Semitic stories published
by his newspaper in Michigan. Ford was also slow to adapt to changing consumer tastes--such
as a choice in car colors and bigger engines--a fault that enabled rival General Motors Corp.
to supersede Ford Motor as the No. 1 auto maker. In 1927 Ford finally introduced a newer car,
the Model A. While it was popular, the car was outsold by GM's Chevrolet and Chrysler's
Plymouth.
But among engineers, Ford remains a revered figure who shaped a global industry that
today produces 50 million vehicles a year and, indeed, influenced all of modern
manufacturing.
Another key contribution was Ford's introduction of interchangeable parts, said A. Galip
Ulsoy, a professor of manufacturing at the University of Michigan.
"The tradition in craft manufacturing," Ulsoy explained, "was to build one car at a time,
methodically fitting one part to another." Ford's breakthrough idea was this: If the task was to
build 1,000 cars, then you needed 1,000 (or more) copies of every component required, each
separately gauged and precision-machined, to maximize efficiency and simplify assembly.
Mass customization, another concept derived from Ford's ideas, has been embraced by
today's auto makers as they create several models from the same basic underpinnings: one
chassis, common parts and mechanical systems, even the same engine. It is this approach that
allows Ford Motor today to employ a single platform to build--quite profitably--the Jaguar SType, the Lincoln LS and the forthcoming retro-styled version of its hallowed Thunderbird.
Henry would be pleased to know that 96 years after its founding, Ford Motor appears
poised to regain the No. 1 spot it ceded to GM long ago. His company today is riding high on

energetic new leadership, the arrival of a host of promising vehicles and $24 billion in cash
that enables it to indulge a dramatic appetite for acquisitions. Ford Motor's corporate umbrella
now covers not only its namesake brand and its Mercury and Lincoln branches but Britain's
Aston Martin and Jaguar, Sweden's Volvo and Japan's Mazda.
It seems only fitting that William Clay Ford Jr., Ford's chairman, be given the final word
on his great-grandfather: "Most people think of Henry Ford as an industrial figure. But there
is a social legacy as well. He made cars affordable, and he believed in treating people well.
And as we get further away from Henry Ford, that part of the equation fades."--Henry
Fuhrmann, Times Staff Writer
FDR MET SOCIAL NEEDS AND SAVED PROFIT SYSTEM
3. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (1882-1945)
Capitalism's Savior
To understand why President Franklin D. Roosevelt is among the 50 people who made the
biggest difference for business in this century, consider only the state of the economy on his
Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933.
Banks were closed in 36 of the 48 states, including New York and Illinois. Both the New
York Stock Exchange and the grain pits at the Chicago Board of Trade ceased operation on
March 4 out of fear and panic. The economy had ground to a halt.
That was when Roosevelt, then 51, began his inaugural address by declaring "my firm
belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Roosevelt saved capitalism and the principles of privately owned business for the U.S.
economy. So desperate was the country when he took office, that he could have done most
anything if it promised to ease the suffering.
At least 25% of the work force was unemployed. In 1932, ocean liners carried tens of
thousands of immigrant working people back to Europe.
The United States' gross domestic product that had totaled $103 billion in 1929--roughly
$1.2 trillion in today's dollars--had fallen by 1933 to $55 billion, almost 50% less.
Even businesspeople favored granting Roosevelt dictatorial powers. Barron's business
newspaper editorialized: "Of course we all realize that dictatorships in peacetime are contrary
to the spirit of American institutions and all that. And yet--well, a genial and lighthearted
dictator might be a relief."
But Roosevelt did not think in dictatorial or even anti-business terms. Amid speculation
that his administration would nationalize the banks, Roosevelt's emergency banking bill
extended government aid to help banks through the crisis.
The legislation stabilized the situation, depositors regained confidence and within a month,
seven out of 10 banks were open across the country.

In the harrowing years of the 1930s, Roosevelt's programs "rested on the assumption that a
just society could be secured by imposing a welfare state on a capitalist foundation," wrote
historian William E. Leuchtenberg in his 1963 book, "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal."
Roosevelt's New Deal reforms didn't challenge the system of private profit but sought to
regulate and channel it. Thus the Securities and Exchange Commission was set up in 1934 to
correct abuses of the financial markets and the National Labor Relations Board was created in
1935 to protect workers' rights to organize unions.
The federal government, adopting new ideas for the time, spent to create jobs in programs
with alphabet names, such as the NRA (National Recovery Administration), WPA (Works
Progress Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). Federal efforts reclaimed
farmland from swamp and transformed an entire section of the country through the Tennessee
Valley Authority.
In the New Deal there was a tug of war between those who favored a centrally planned
economy and those who believed that a reliance on small business and decentralized
economic power would bring about recovery. The decentralizers prevailed.
This belief in decentralized and democratic economic power characterized the most
important reform of the Roosevelt era: Social Security.
Social Security, by guaranteeing income to elderly retired Americans, established the
proposition that the individual has social rights.
But Roosevelt, against the advice of economic planners who would have made it solely a
relief program for the poor, insisted on adding responsibilities by funding Social Security
through taxes deducted from every wage earner's paycheck.
Roosevelt conceded that such payroll taxes did not make total economic sense. "But those
taxes were never a problem of economics," he told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. "They
are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the
contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment
benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security
program," Roosevelt said.
All of Roosevelt's shrewdness and combativeness are reflected in those words.
The scion of wealthy families who had built fortunes from sugar trading in Colonial times
and tea trading with China in the 19th century, Franklin Roosevelt was seen as a traitor to his
class. Businesspeople, led by the DuPonts of Delaware, formed organizations to oppose him.
At the posh Westchester Country Club outside New York City, Roosevelt's picture became the
target on a dartboard.
Yet he also had opponents on the left. The Communist "Daily Worker" in 1935 called his
Social Security program "one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the people of this
country."
Roosevelt made mistakes. Impatient with a Supreme Court that found some of his

economic programs unconstitutional, Roosevelt tried to enlarge the court in 1937 so that he
could "pack" it with his own appointees. He was roundly defeated in Congress and in public
opinion.
Meanwhile, the economy's annual output did not climb back to 1929's level until 1941,
when the industrial buildup for World War II had begun. But confidence in the system had
returned many years before and the nation survived the Great Depression with its economic-and political--institutions strengthened.
Roosevelt led that achievement as he then led the nation through most of World War II
before his death in April 1945.--James Flanigan, Times Staff Writer
UPON A MOUSE, HE BUILT AN EMPIRE
4. WALT DISNEY (1901-1966)
Animated Film Pioneer
Walter Elias Disney was to fantasy what J.P. Morgan was to finance or John D. Rockefeller
to oil.
But instead of building the foundation of his legacy on an derrick or a bank, Disney's
empire "started with a mouse," as he often put it.
Today, Disney's best-known legacy is the company that still bears his name, now a $20billion media colossus with a TV network, a film studio, a publishing house, Internet
operation and hundreds of stores worldwide. The world's best-known theme parks--in
Anaheim; Orlando, Fla.; Japan; and France--bear his name, with more to come, including one
possibly in China.
When Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955, it was such a unique entertainment
experience, compared with the carny-like atmosphere of previous amusement parks, that it
became an instant magnet for visitors and helped trigger Southern California's post-war tourist
boom.
But Disney's principal contribution was probably inventing an entire film genre in the
feature-length animated movie. His "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was the first ever,
released in 1937 to a world weary from the Great Depression and anxious from the tensions
that would eventually explode into World War II.
When he died in 1966 of cancer at age 65, headlines called him the modern-day Aesop, a
teller of traditional folk and fairy tales using the celluloid techniques he perfected and
refined.
The youngest of five children, Disney was born in 1901 in Chicago. His family moved to a
farm outside Kansas City, where he spent his early youth and first became enamored with
drawing. Disney liked to draw animals, later the inspiration for many of the characters in his
animated films.
After serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I, Disney worked briefly as a

commercial artist before moving to Southern California in 1923. He formed a partnership
with his brother, Roy, to try to build an animation business with such characters as Oswald the
Rabbit.
Barely surviving financially, Disney developed, with collaborator Ub Iwerks, the first
talking cartoon character in Mickey Mouse, who would be featured in the hit short film
"Steamboat Willie."
Disney would later claim that the idea for the early Mickey Mouse came to him on a train
ride from New York to Hollywood after a depressing business setback in which he lost rights
to the Oswald character. According to various accounts, it was inspired by a mouse that used
to scamper around his drawing board or was simply an outgrowth of the Oswald character.
Disney recognized the need to make the look of his cartoons more sophisticated, and to
blend music with his films to enhance the storytelling.
His "Silly Symphony" cartoons in the early 1930s used Technicolor for the first time in
animation. "Three Little Pigs" featured a popular song in "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad
Wolf?" Classic songs to emerge from Disney films included "Whistle While You Work" from
"Snow White," "When You Wish Upon a Star" from "Pinocchio" and "Chim Chim Cheree"
from "Mary Poppins."
Disney's masterpiece "Snow White" cost at the time an unheard-of $1.5 million. Prior to
release, skeptics dubbed it "Disney's Folly" and predicted it would sink the ambitious
animator.
Instead, it became one of the most profitable films of any genre ever released. During the
next five years, Disney was prolific in turning out animated classics, including "Bambi,"
"Pinocchio," "Dumbo" and his landmark "Fantasia," which combined classical music and
animation. A new "Fantasia 2000," featuring some scenes from the original along with new
segments, is scheduled for release in December, a project personally overseen by Disney's
nephew, company Vice Chairman Roy E. Disney.
"Snow White," along with other animated films Disney made, such as "101 Dalmatians"
and "Pinocchio," remain among the most profitable movies of all time, ones that generate a
huge batch of fresh profits each time a new technology brings a new way to showcase it. In
his recently settled breach-of-contract lawsuit against Disney, former studio chief Jeffrey
Katzenberg claimed that the video release of "Snow White" in 1994 generated an additional
$600 million in profits for the company. Hundreds of millions of additional profits could
potentially be generated when the film is released on digital videodisc, or when the day comes
when it can be accessed on demand at home by viewers using new technologies.
After World War II, Disney recognized the potential of television as the technology was
spreading into American homes, producing such popular shows as "The Mickey Mouse Club"
and "Zorro."
Disney himself became a television personality when, from his desk in Burbank, he hosted
"The Wonderful World of Disney," later "Wonderful World of Color," the first full-color
program. Long before entertainment moguls became enamored with the concept of synergy,
Disney used the show to promote the company's products, especially Disneyland.

A heavy smoker, Disney suffered from lung cancer, dying before one of his biggest
projects, Disney World in Florida, was finished. His brother, Roy, oversaw its completion.
In subsequent years, the Disney studio became an also-ran in Hollywood, to the point
where it came within a shade of being bought and carved up by corporate raiders in the early
1980s.
It took a push from nephew Roy, major investors such as the Bass family in Texas and
fresh management blood such as Chief Executive Michael Eisner, former studio chief
Katzenberg and the late Disney President Frank Wells, to revive the studio.
One of the key decisions was to rebuild the Disney animation legacy, which resulted in a
string of hits such as the classic tales "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" as
well as new stories such as "The Lion King." Those films, which spawned lucrative
merchandising and video sequel projects, are among the most profitable projects ever
developed by a studio.--James Bates, Times Staff Writer
'WOZ,' JOBS PLANTED SEEDS OF A REVOLUTION
5. STEVE WOZNIAK (1950- ), STEVE JOBS (1955- )
Personal Computer Pioneers
Once when the word "revolutionary" described a computer product, it was more than a
marketing cliche.
A quarter-century ago two friends working in a Silicon Valley garage began a business that
became Apple Computer, and it transformed the world's relationship to computing.
Steve Wozniak was a 25-year-old underappreciated engineering grunt at technology giant
Hewlett-Packard and a mainstay of a Silicon Valley hobbyist group called Homebrew
Computer Club.
He became friends with fellow club member Steve Jobs, a 20-year-old college dropout and
occasional employee of computer-game pioneer Atari.
"Woz," an unassuming engineering genius, found his efforts to build a personal computer
rebuffed by HP as unmarketable. Jobs had relatively pedestrian engineering skills but
understood that Woz's designs could become the first practical computer for individual users.
Working on a shoestring, they created the Apple I in 1976--a crude precursor to the PC-and sold it for $666 to computing zealots in the Bay Area. Apple sold only a handful of Apple
I's, but those sales funded a successor that would build a major corporation.
In 1977 the $1,295 Apple II was born. It was the first computer to display color images, the
first to come with a keyboard and the first to offer a "killer app"--Visicalc--a spreadsheet
program that automated routine tasks like budget planning and made personal computing a
business advantage for the first time.

By 1981, the company had sold 300,000 Apple IIs; by early 1985, about 2.5 million were
sold. As games and other software was written for the Apple II, it gained a huge share of fastgrowing markets for home users and schools and eclipsed offerings from its chief competitors
of the day, Radio Shack and Commodore.
Apple's success also forced mainframe computer giant IBM to release its own PC in 1981.
It became an instant success due to Big Blue's marketing muscle but did not match the Apple
II's capabilities.
When Apple made its initial offering of stock to the public in 1980, Jobs' shares were
worth $217 million and Wozniak saw his stake soar to $116 million. Three years later, Apple
joined the Fortune 500.
While Woz provided engineering elegance, Jobs contributed a contempt for convention.
His pursuit of innovation led to a 1979 visit to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, or
PARC.
Years before, PARC scientists had invented (or borrowed from Douglas Engelbart, a
pioneering scientist at the Stanford Research Institute) many of the underlying technologies
upon which the future of computing was built: The graphical interface, networking, the mouse
pointing device, the laser printer and the ability to display any shape, rather than just text and
numbers.
That visit dramatically altered Apple, and all computing. It sparked a five-year marathon to
produce a marketable improvement on PARC's ideas.
That race was the Macintosh project.
Jobs hammered his Macintosh team with the idea that they could save the world from the
colorless mediocrity of mainstream computing and create an experience that was both
functional and compelling.
He drove the developers relentlessly, alternating charismatic leadership--a quality that
ultimately fed a cultish movement of Macintosh devotees--with infamous tirades. He
castigated top engineers with obscenity-laced diatribes and alienated colleagues, partners and
customers alike.
Yet more than anyone else, Jobs ended the era of text-based systems, those obscure
number and letter commands that formed the basis of nearly all computing before the Mac.
Apple's mouse and point-and-click system of visual metaphors on the screen--the desktop,
folders, clocks--formed the basis of modern computing iconography, including that of the
Internet.
The new era was launched with a stunning attack on IBM via a TV commercial. A giant,
Orwellian head preached totalitarian propaganda to drone-like onlookers. It was shattered
with a sledgehammer as the narrator spoke: "On Jan. 24, Apple Computer will announce
Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."
Unfortunately, the pricey $2,495 Mac could run only a handful of software programs-compared to thousands for the Apple II and IBM PC--which by then had millions of buyers.

The Mac was saved by its own killer app: PageMaker. With the Macintosh and Apple's
LaserWriter printer, the program created desktop publishing, a simple method of composing
text and graphics on screen that irrevocably altered the publishing industry.
Mac sales rose rapidly, and Apple's graphical approach began to look like computing's
inevitable future.
Jobs and his successors believed that by keeping the Mac's design proprietary they could
corner the market on graphical computing. That assumption nearly buried the company.
After years of effort, Microsoft borrowed from the Mac's design and created a more usable
version of its own graphical software, called Windows, in 1991. Though widely viewed as
inferior knockoffs of Apple's technology, Windows-based computers easily outsold Macs
because Microsoft licensed its software to all comers.
Apple sued Microsoft, claiming copyright infringements. But long before Apple's suit
failed in 1995, Bill Gates was on his way to being the most powerful businessman of the
computer age.
Long before, Jobs had been ousted from Apple. In 1983 Jobs hired John Sculley from
PepsiCo. to improve Apple's marketing skills. Two years later, Jobs was ousted by Sculley.
Wozniak left Apple in 1981 while recovering from a plane crash. He returned to school to
earn his bachelor's degree in engineering and launched an abortive career as a rock-festival
promoter. Though Woz returned to Apple briefly, he ultimately became a grade-school
computer teacher and administrator.
In 1997 Jobs sold his firm, Next Computer, to Apple. Then the wayward founder returned
to save his old company--in steep decline after a succession of mediocre products.
Amazingly, Apple once again shamed the rest of the industry with its creativity and nerve.
Radical designs--most notably the fruit-colored iMac--broke new ground and again shattered
competitors' complacency, provoking many to strive for a form of computing that people can
love.--Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
HIS DREAM BROUGHT COMMUNICATIONS HOME
6. DAVID SARNOFF (1891-1971)
Radio & Television Giant
Rupert Murdoch may get the credit for using sports to build News Corp. into a global
media colossus. But David Sarnoff was the first to grasp the power of such programming,
using sports in the earliest days of broadcasting to prove radio's potency and to launch an
illustrious career.
To convince skeptical bosses at the Radio Corp. of America of the merits of a "radio music
box" for the home, Sarnoff borrowed a Navy transmitter for a blow-by-blow broadcast of the
1921 heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier.

Staged when radio transmissions were used mainly for messaging at sea, the experiment by
RCA's 30-year-old general manager created such a sensation among the nation's 200,000
amateur wireless operators that the company began manufacturing radios the next year,
making $11 million from their sale.
Sarnoff was elected vice president, and eventually president, leading RCA into the
technological vanguard over a 40-year period that ended with his retirement in 1970, at age
78. Credited with introducing the world's first home radio, the radio-phonograph console and
both black-and-white and color TV, Sarnoff was crowned the father of television and arguably
was the most influential figure in communications in the 20th century.
A dreamer as well as a doer, Sarnoff was rambling in his prophecies, predicting decades in
advance the miniaturization of electronics and the development of video cameras, VCRs and
satellites that would allow billions of people worldwide to watch the same program.
Owen D. Young, the first chairman of RCA, once described Sarnoff's passion for
technology as "the most amazing romance of its kind on record."
Born in Russia in 1891, Sarnoff came to the United States when he was 9 and supported
his family after the death of his father by selling Yiddish newspapers in New York. He poured
over technical manuals in his youth and bought a telegraph at age 15, becoming a radio
operator that year for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, where he picked up the
signals in 1912 from the Titanic, bringing the nation its only news of the disaster over a 72hour period.
When RCA was formed after World War I by combining interests of General Electric and
Marconi Wireless, the new company committed $2,000 to test Sarnoff's "radio music box,"
which Marconi management had dismissed six years earlier as "harebrained."
To fuel sales of radio sets, Sarnoff in 1926 convinced RCA to pay a group of stations to
play music, forming the National Broadcasting Co. as a subsidiary and the nation's first
broadcast network.
To douse complaints from the phonograph industry that radio was killing sales, RCA
bought the manufacturer of the Victrola in 1929 and married the two components in one home
console.
The emerging radio technology made Wall Street crazy for RCA, driving up the stock to a
high of $573.75 a share before the crash of 1929 sent the value plummeting to $2.25. When
Sarnoff became president the next year, in the depths of the Depression, he cut costs to sustain
research on television, which he had first outlined for the RCA board in 1923.
The payoff came years later at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, where Sarnoff unveiled
RCA's pavilion before a television camera and called the television "a new art" that would
affect all of society. Sarnoff soon set up a special NBC station to experiment with TV and in
1941, along with William Paley's rival CBS, started commercial telecasting in New York.
Development of television was slowed during World War II, but in 1946 RCA began
selling the first mass-produced TV set for about $375. By the late 1940s the number of
television stations across the country began to rise steadily, and in 1951 NBC was

broadcasting regular network service nationwide.
With television a postwar winner, RCA began investing in color, plowing $130 million into
research despite widespread doubt and protests from shareholders.
If Sarnoff was a master technologist and manufacturer, Paley's genius was programming.
CBS had distinguished itself in wartime as the pioneer of network news.
After the war, Paley decimated NBC's talent pool by raiding Sarnoff's biggest stars,
including Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Groucho Marx, George Burns and others. That helped
CBS pull ahead of NBC in programming and advertising.
In later years, some critics even blamed Sarnoff for surrendering the American consumer
electronics industry to the Japanese by licensing the technology to foreigners rather than
selling RCA sets internationally.
Upon Sarnoff's retirement in 1970, his son, Robert, rose to power, and Sarnoff died a year
later.--Sallie Hofmeister, Times Staff Writer
LEGITIMIZING JUNK BONDS WILL BE MILKEN'S LEGACY
7. MICHAEL MILKEN (1946- )
Junk Bond Impresario
In September 1989, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera staged the Puccini tragedy
"Tosca," in which an artist whose only crime is loyalty is destroyed by a brutal, envious
prosecutor.
To Michael Milken, seated in the audience, there seemed a poignant analogy to his own
career, he later remarked.
Milken, after all, considered himself an artist of finance, the man who used once-spurned
junk bonds to spark a corporate restructuring boom in the 1980s that revitalized American
business, unlocking vast efficiencies and profits that others lacked the vision to imagine.
Moreover, Milken was the target of a relentless federal prosecution that, according to his
many ardent defenders, was driven largely by envy of his riches and power, plus a desire for a
prominent scapegoat for the government's own economic policy failures.
Nonsense, Milken's opponents replied. His crimes undermined investor confidence in the
markets. His machinations spurred wasteful takeover wars that destroyed jobs and companies.
And with his 1987 earnings of $550 million, he embodied the Decade of Greed.
Literally speaking, the jury is not out on Michael Milken: It never got the case.
Seven months after "Tosca" and a year after being indicted on 98 federal felony charges,
the former junk-bond chief of Drexel Burnham Lambert pleaded guilty to six felony counts
including securities fraud and conspiracy. Among other things, Milken pleaded guilty to
conspiring with arbitrager Ivan F. Boesky and another colleague to violate tax and securities

laws through illegal stock trades and secret records.
Milken served 22 months in the federal prison camp at Pleasanton, Calif. and paid $1.1
billion in fines and penalties.
Yet debate over Milken's achievement rages still. One indisputable part of his legacy is the
legitimization of junk bonds. What was once an investment backwater is now a $1-trillion
market.
The son of an Encino accountant, Milken whizzed through Berkeley and the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School, then landed a job at Drexel, a Wall Street investment banking
firm with a distinguished pedigree but a fading franchise.
Milken gravitated to the nether world of junk bonds, considered too risky for conservative
investors because of doubts about the issuing companies' ability to pay interest and principal.
With the risk came high yields.
Because junk bonds were low-rated or even unrated by rating agencies, investors needed
the same kind of research into the issuing companies that equity analysts performed on stocks.
With his near-perfect memory and calculative skills, Milken became a junk-bond
encyclopedia, succeeding wildly as a salesman and trader.
His department became so important a profit center that by 1978 Milken could demand
that Drexel let him move the whole operation West to be near his and his wife's hometown
and relatives.
It was there, first in Century City and finally at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and
Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, that Milken reached the zenith of his power, directing his crew
of millionaire employees from the crux of a huge, X-shaped trading desk.
In the mid-1980s, a takeover wave unlike any the U.S. had seen before began to take
shape. Established firms such as Beatrice Cos., National Can, Hilton Hotels, TWA and Unocal
found themselves under attack, often by smaller upstarts armed with junk bonds.
Others may have realized that junk bonds could play a role in financing hostile takeovers,
but it was Milken who created the apparatus--the network of buyers and issuers--that made it
happen.
He worked 14-hour days, a phone at each ear, developing relationships not only with the
institutional investors who bought the bonds but also with the maverick entrepreneurs who
issued them, including corporate raiders such as T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Ronald
Perelman and James Goldsmith.
Many of their acquisitions were leveraged buyouts, or LBOs--outright purchases in which
the shareholders were bought out with a combination of junk bonds and cash. The surviving
company typically would restructure, ousting management and selling or closing operations
that were unprofitable or didn't mesh with the new, streamlined business plan.
Such "rationalization" cost thousands of jobs but arguably created thousands of others by
freeing companies of inefficient operations and managerial bureaucracy, enabling them to

grow profitably for years to come.
Taken to excess, the LBO could result in a company so weakened by bond-payment
obligations that it would eventually collapse. Under the weight of a slowing economy and
such ill-considered deals, the junk-bond market suffered a collapse in 1989.
Academic opinion is split on whether the debt-fueled takeover wave was ultimately
healthy for the U.S. economy. There is no doubt, however, that its impact was lasting.
With their attacks on entrenched managers and unproductive assets, these corporate raiders
helped usher in an era of greater shareholder activism, more linkage between stock
performance and executive pay, and increased attention to wringing maximum efficiencies
and profit from company assets.
Milken, barred from the securities industry for life, now divides his time among a variety
of business and charitable interests. He has launched a think tank, a computer-training firm, a
prostate-cancer research initiative and a variety of educational projects.--Thomas S. Mulligan,
Times Staff Writer
REBUILDING JAPAN WITH THE HELP OF 2 AMERICANS
8. DOUGLAS MACARTHUR (1880-1964) AND W. EDWARDS DEMING (1900-1993)
Retooling Japan
Japan's path from post-war devastation to export powerhouse has involved many important
factors, a lot of hard work and a bit of luck. But two Americans who played important parts in
the world's greatest economic recovery story--a story that has altered lifestyles around the
world and sent countless vehicles, VCRs and Walkmans into our homes--are Gen. Douglas
MacArthur and quality guru W. Edwards Deming.
MacArthur's principal contribution as supreme commander for the Allied Powers in Japan
(1945-1951)--a de facto dictator--was to break apart an outdated and ossified economic and
social structure, allowing Japan's inherent creativity to blossom. "This was all very important
for the development of Japan's post-war economy," said Masayoshi Tsurumi, an economics
professor and financial historian at Hosei University.
On the corporate front, MacArthur smashed the grip of Japan's family trusts, known as
"zaibatsum," which had dominated Japan's economy for decades and sent their avaricious
tentacles into every corner of economic life. Although some survived in modified form,
including Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, the retrenchment opened the field to a new breed
of innovators with names like Sony, Honda, Toyota and Panasonic that would over the next 30
years catapult Japan onto the global stage.
On the labor front, MacArthur encouraged trade unions, which further checked the
oligopolies, broadened Japan's wealth distribution and helped develop an increasingly affluent
middle class that would serve as a domestic base for exporters. And his farm reform policies,
arguably his most far-reaching achievement, blunted the sort of rural discontent that would
soon spring Mao Tse-Tung to power in neighboring China, argued MacArthur biographer
William Manchester in "American Caesar."

Although some insist that the Japanese labor movement was eventually co-opted, its
members enjoyed sharply expanded living standards, a far stronger voice in production
decisions than their American counterparts and, for many, lifetime employment. This spurred
tremendous company loyalty, a minimum of labor disputes and a companywide commitment
to quality.
In another important move, MacArthur brought from Detroit Joseph M. Dodge, a former
president of the American Bankers Assn., who overhauled Japan's budget, tightened monetary
policy and strengthened the banking system.
The general also ensured that a large number of war contracts went to Japan during the
Korean War. Those war orders gave cash-short companies the confidence to invest in plants
and equipment that would soon yield tremendous dividends as the nation's export machine
revved up.
As Japan's products started moving to overseas markets during the 1950s and early 1960s,
however, their quality was often a joke. "Made in Japan" had such a bad connotation initially
that some companies set up plants in the Japanese village of Usa, which allowed them to say
their products were "Made in USA." It's difficult to believe now, but even Japan's vaunted
autos flopped miserably when first introduced to the United States in the late 1950s.
Much of the credit for Japan's flight to quality and the making of its world-class reputation
goes to Deming. He urged companies to concentrate on constant improvements, improved
efficiency and doing it right the first time.
Deming was a professor of statistics at New York University when he was invited to Japan
in 1950 to run a seminar for business leaders. Since the 1930s, Deming was interested in
using statistics as a tool to achieve better quality control. Essentially, his idea was to record
the number of product defects, analyze why they happened, institute changes, then record how
much quality improved, and to keep refining the process until it is done right.
Deming owes at least part of his legendary status in Japan to a professor named Genichi
Taguchi, Japan's home-grown quality management expert, who credited many of the
American's ideas for his so-called Taguchi method. Taguchi and others would go on to
influence a generation of Japanese engineers who would become the backbone of the nation's
growing manufacturing prowess.
"I'm very impressed by the way the Japanese admire [Deming]," said Gregory Clark,
president of Japan's Tama University. "They keep on talking about him as if he's a god."
Scholars note that Japan was also receptive to Deming at a time when America was not, in
part because Deming's ideas dovetailed with many of Japan's own traditions. Japan had long
held hard work and quality craftsmanship as important virtues, and its technology even during
the war surprised many Americans. Deming preached that companies must treat workers as
associates, not hired hands, and he blamed management if workers were not motivated to
work well.
"We imported the system, but modified it to the Japanese style," said Naohiro Yashiro,
professor of economics at Sophia University.

When Japan hit its peak in the 1980s, forcing many U.S. industries to their knees and
prompting Americans to experiment with quality circles and low-inventory manufacturing
systems, many of Deming's ideas were rediscovered by the United States.
As Japan looks ahead, some argue that Japan could learn a thing or two again from the
likes of MacArthur and Deming. Japan needs to restructure, weaken the grip of the second
generation of huge companies and open the door for a new group of dynamic entrepreneurs.
Likewise, others argue, a decade-long recession, weaker confidence and the complacency
that springs from significant wealth may be undercutting Japan's legendary attention to
detail.--Mark Magnier, Times Staff Writer
A 40-YEAR-LONG DOGFIGHT FOR AIRCRAFT SUPREMACY
9. DONALD W. DOUGLAS (1892-1981), WILLIAM E. BOEING (1881-1956)
Fathers of Commercial Aviation
In the annals of titanic competitions between corporations, few during this century have
been waged with the intensity or longevity as the one between Boeing Co. and Douglas
Aircraft Co. for leadership of the commercial aircraft industry.
It pitted William Boeing against Donald Douglas, both of whom caught the fever for
aviation early in the century and who would become the two driving forces in the production
of ever more advanced aircraft.
Starting in 1920s, Boeing Co. and Douglas Aircraft fought for the next 40 years, repeatedly
leapfrogging each other with innovations and marketing successes as the industry matured
into one of critical national importance.
Although Douglas had thoroughly dominated Boeing at one point, the competition was
won by Boeing by the late 1960s, when Douglas lacked the product line and resources to go
head-to-head with the Seattle rival any longer. The Douglas facility in Long Beach was finally
purchased by Boeing, along with the rest of McDonnell Douglas in 1997.
William Boeing began his career as an aviation industrialist after he was given a flight over
Puget Sound by a barnstormer flying a seaplane. At the time, Boeing was helping to operate
his family's lucrative timber business in Seattle after dropping out of Yale University.
Not long after the flight, Boeing traveled to Southern California, where he learned to fly
and purchased his own seaplane from Glenn Martin, the aircraft builder who was operating in
a converted church in Santa Ana.
(Martin's own company played another dramatic role in the aerospace industry and today is
part of the Lockheed Martin Corp.)
Back in Seattle, Boeing began building his own seaplanes and by 1916 had incorporated
his new company as Pacific Aero Products Co., which sold its first plane to the government of
New Zealand for mail delivery. In 1917, the operation took on the name Boeing Airplane Co.

By the mid-1920s, Boeing had assembled a business that not only turned out innovative
aircraft but also had laid the foundation for an air carrier that later became United Airlines.
Boeing formed a holding company, and then exchanged stock with the holding company to
drive up prices--a then-legal investment similar to the capital manipulations that made J.P.
Morgan renowned. The deals multiplied Boeing's wealth into the stratosphere, but landed him
before a Senate investigating committee. Angered by the probe, Boeing sold all his aviation
stocks at age 52 and exited the industry. Ultimately, the company was forced to divest its
holdings.
Boeing retired, but he left a skilled management team in place.
Under the Boeing name, during the 1930s, the company helped lead the way to singlewing planes with more efficient aerodynamic designs, retractable landing gear and better
navigational aids. During the mobilization for World War II, the company was called on to
build the B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the most important bombers of the Allied effort.
Douglas, meanwhile, caught the aviation bug from the Wright Brothers in 1908 during a
U.S. Army flight demonstration. A brilliant engineer, Douglas graduated from MIT in two
years with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for Martin until 1920 and then left
to start his own aircraft company behind a barbershop in Los Angeles.
Douglas got one of his first big breaks from Jack Frye, Transworld Airlines chief, who in
1932 asked for a new, all-metal, three-engine aircraft that could carry 12 passengers. Douglas
designed a plane that could carry 14 passengers at a higher speed with only two engines-sealing the deal.
That plane, the DC-1, laid the groundwork for Douglas to become the dominant builder of
commercial aircraft. By 1934, Douglas was at work on the famous DC-3, the aircraft that
would revolutionize air travel for the next 20 years and cement his place in aviation history.
The first DC-3 flight was Dec. 17, 1935, the 32nd anniversary of the Wright Brothers first
flight. This reliable plane quickly caught on as airlines used DC-3s for their sleeper routes.
The DC-3 had 21 to 28 passenger seats, a cruising speed of 180 mph and it could fly 1,000
miles without refueling.
During World War II the plane became the workhorse of the U.S. military (the military
version was the C-47), and was used to tow gliders, drop paratroopers and haul cargo.
The DC-3 was more popular than Boeing's rival 247 plane, and by World War II, 80% of
the commercial aircraft in service were made by Douglas.
In all, Douglas built about 11,000 DC-3s and C-47s. Today, there are still about 500 DC-3s
in use by cargo companies and the military in some Third World nations and South America.
But the competition turned against Douglas by the early 1950s. With his son helping run
the company, Douglas hesitated in committing the resources to launch the DC-8 jetliner,
giving Boeing a key lead in developing its 707 jetliner, which first flew in 1954. The 707's
success allowed Boeing to swiftly reverse leadership in the industry, outselling Douglas and
grabbing the lead for good.

By the late 1960s, Douglas was struggling with the development of its DC-10, while
Boeing was moving ahead with its highly profitable 747. With a weak financial condition and
facing a bleak future, Donald Douglas reluctantly agreed to be bought out by James
McDonnell, the brash newcomer who had built a military aircraft business in St. Louis.-Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer
INTERNET VISIONARIES CONNECTED THE WORLD, LINK BY LINK BY LINK
10. J.C.R. LICKLIDER (1915-1990), LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934-), LARRY
ROBERTS (1937- ), TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955- ) ET AL
Internet and World Wide Web
No single person is responsible for creating the Internet, whose tentacles now embrace an
estimated 200 million worldwide. Likewise, there is no consensus about a single event that
marked its birth.
Instead, the Internet owes its existence to dozens of engineers who spent years pushing the
boundaries of computer science until it revolutionized personal and business communications
by removing some of the traditional barriers of time and space.
The original vision for the Internet came from a behavioral scientist. In the early 1960s,
J.C.R. Licklider described how a "galactic network" of computers could not only spit out data
but actually help people understand, analyze and solve problems. "He didn't know how to do
it, but he thought it was important to connect all the machines together," said Larry Roberts,
who succeeded Licklider as a director at the Defense Department's Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA).
Inspired by Licklider, Roberts devised a plan in 1967 for building such a network. The
Arpanet, as it was known, would allow researchers to share their computers at various college
campuses. A key part of the plan involved transferring computer data in small "packets" that
could move more efficiently along the least-congested routes. The notion of sending data in
packets came from Leonard Kleinrock.
In 1969, Kleinrock, a UCLA professor, took possession of a refrigerator-sized machine
made by Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) called an Interface Message Processor. The job of
the machine, known as an IMP, was to translate data from various computers into a common
network language. The IMP became the first outpost on the Arpanet.
By 1972, many more computers had been added to the network and its proud parents were
ready to show it off. Bob Kahn, responsible for the system design at BBN in Cambridge,
Mass., organized a large demonstration. Sitting in Washington, D.C., Kleinrock's team logged
onto a computer at BBN, shipped a program from Cambridge to Los Angeles, ran the program
on UCLA's computers and then had the results transmitted back to D.C. "[Computer
scientists] saw this happening for the first time, and there was a great deal of enthusiasm,"
Kleinrock said.
The other big event of 1972 was the birth of electronic mail. The Arpanet developers
needed a way to communicate with each other, so Ray Tomlinson at BBN created basic

programs to send and read text messages over the network. Roberts followed up with
programs that made e-mail easier to handle.
The Arpanet grew to become the most important computer network, but there were others.
Kahn wanted to make sure they could all "internetwork" with each other. After he became
ARPA's director of information processing techniques, he drafted Stanford professor Vint
Cerf, and in 1973 and 1974 they wrote the necessary computer protocols to send information
packets among the many networks that together comprised the Internet. To do this, Kahn and
Cerf devised a two-part solution. Their "Internet Protocol" made sure the information packets
arrived at their final destination, and their "Transmission Control Protocol" put them in order
after they arrived. The protocols, known as TCP/IP, still govern Internet transmissions today.
Meanwhile, at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Bob Metcalfe was looking for a way to
connect new desktop computers. He strung a mile of coaxial cable through the building and
connected all the computers to it. When computers wanted to communicate to each other they
would send out packets over the cable, but if the cable was already in use, his invention
allowed the computers to take turns getting onto the system. Metcalfe called his invention the
Ethernet, he said, because the computers "would blast their packets out into the ether." It is
now the primary networking technology on the Internet.
As the Internet demonstrated the benefits of computer networking, other government
agencies built networks of their own. Through much of the 1980s a few hundred thousand
academic and government researchers dominated the Internet, until the National Science
Foundation encouraged commercial use of its NSFnet.
Internet protocols had become the global standard by 1990, the year the Arpanet was
decommissioned due to the rise of commercial networks. But even with personal computer
prices falling, the network was still too cumbersome for most people to use. Even if they
could connect to the Internet, they weren't likely to find much interesting content there.
But a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva,
was about to change that. As a newcomer, British native Tim Berners-Lee had a hard time
remembering all the people, projects and computers at the lab, so he wrote a program to keep
track of the connections between them. That program evolved into a system of links to
different parts of the Internet. He called his creation the World Wide Web.
The Web got a major boost in 1993, when the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois made its graphical Web browser, Mosaic, available
for free. Nontechnical users could then use a mouse to point and click their way around the
colorful Web, opening up the Internet to the masses. Although America Online, CompuServe
and Prodigy had lured some consumers onto private computer networks to transfer files and
use e-mail, it was the Web that finally drew millions onto the Internet.
Today, people go online to communicate, do research, be entertained and shop. The
pioneers who made it all possible are still working to improve the network.
Kleinrock has started a handful of companies whose technologies make computer
networks more accessible to mo
ile users. In addition to his job as senior vice president for Internet architecture and
technology at MCI WorldCom, Cerf holds a post at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to

make Internet technologies suitable for interplanetary communication. Berners-Lee founded
the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT to coordinate the Web's development.
Many Internet pioneers say the network has morphed beyond their wildest expectations
and are loath to predict its future. "It's very hard to predict how things will look in 10 years,
much less 50 to 100 years out," Kahn said.--Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
11. ALFRED P. SLOAN JR. (1875-1966)
General Motors' Empire Builder
If the name Alfred P. Sloan Jr. is recognized today, it's likely because of his SloanKettering Institute, which does cancer research, or the Sloan School at MIT, or the Sloan
Foundation education grants. But in the world of business, the Sloan legacy lives on in the
professional discipline that came to be known as management. He invented it during a
remarkably long stint at the helm of General Motors, from 1920 to 1946, during which he
built it into the world's largest enterprise. Sloan was the first to systematically organize a big
company. It was reflected in GM's production of cars for every taste and pocketbook: from
Chevrolet to Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. He did so using a maximum of
interchangeable parts to turn out, in effect, five different automobiles at the cost of what
competitors would spend to produce one or two. Late in the century, of course, the GM model
hasn't fared well. But it is still the world's biggest auto maker. And for most of its history, GM
has been a masterpiece of industrial organization--a symbol, admirers said, of the success of
capitalism itself. Sloan laid out the story in "My Years With General Motors," a business
autobiography that has become a classic. He wrote it during retirement, but withheld it from
publication until all the other principals were dead, by which time he was 88. Sloan studied
electrical engineering at MIT, then worked for a roller bearing company that his father partly
owned. Sloan was put in charge of the company at age 26. He continued running the firm until
it was purchased by GM.
12. THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919)
Trustbuster
President Roosevelt (1901-09) revived the Sherman Antitrust Act by filing trustbusting
cases against 44 major corporations. The first big case came in 1902 when the Roosevelt
administration took on J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Co. for its monopoly of Western
railroads. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case in 1904; Northern Securities was
dissolved. Roosevelt also filed an unfair business practices case in 1906 against John D.
Rockefeller's vast Standard Oil Co.; the company later was broken up into 33 companies.
Roosevelt, appalled by unsanitary conditions in the meat industry portrayed in Upton
Sinclair's novel "The Jungle," also pushed Congress to pass the Meat Inspection and Food and
Drugs acts in 1906, the basis of modern consumer protection legislation. He also actively
campaigned for the Panama Canal treaty, arguing that access through Central America was
critical to speeding the U.S. naval fleet between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The U.S.
spent $380 million to build the Panama Canal, in the process shortening by 7,000 miles the
shipping distance between the Eastern and Western coasts of the U.S. (170 million short tons
of freight now pass through the Panama Canal annually). Roosevelt was the first president to
fly in a plane; in 1908 his War Department signed a deal with the Wright brothers to buy its
first military airplane.

13. GEORGE C. MARSHALL (1880-1959)
Marshall Plan
Architect of the successful $13-billion U.S. economic aid package to Europe after World
War II, which dramatically helped rebuild a war-ravaged economy. In 1947, as Harry S.
Truman's secretary of state, Marshall outlined his economic recovery plan to combat Europe's
chronic food and housing shortages and unemployment. Marshall's motive was political and
economic. Europe was impoverished and rebuilding its economy was critical to slowing the
growth of communism, he reasoned. Marshall also wanted Europe to again be a valuable
trading partner of the U.S. This flood of economic and technical aid to 16 European nations in
1948-52 boosted their gross national product by 25%. During World War II, Marshall was the
U.S. Army's chief of staff, responsible for mobilizing 8.2 million soldiers. He was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
14. JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN (1837-1913)
Financier and Power Broker
Morgan was the nation's most powerful business figure at the start of the 20th century. He
controlled U.S. Steel Corp., General Electric, AT&T and International Harvester as well as
numerous other corporations by arranging loans through his investment banking company. In
1901 Morgan bankrolled the creation of U.S. Steel, formed in part by purchasing Andrew
Carnegie's steel business. U.S. Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation, with 65% of
the nation's steel industry. After the 1907 stock market panic, Morgan led a group of bankers
who bailed out major banks and corporations, but this prompted concerns about the "House of
Morgan" and its deep influence across the U.S. economy. This led to the creation in 1913 of
the Federal Reserve System to serve as our centralized banking authority.
15. WILBUR WRIGHT (1867-1912) AND ORVILLE WRIGHT (1871-1948)
Airplane Inventors
The Wright brothers designed, built and successfully flew the first airplane in 1903. Their
invention would alter lifestyles and commerce worldwide. Self-taught tinkerers, they ran a
bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1896, they read about German Otto Lilienthal, who died
during a glider flight, prompting their interest in aviation. Unlike other would-be aviators of
the period, the Wrights realized the value of warping, or twisting, wings for lift. They also
built wind tunnels to test different designs. In winter, they closed their bike shop and traveled
to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to fly their own innovative gliders. After three years of glider flights, the
Wrights built a biplane with a homemade gas motor. A coin flip determined who flew first.
Orville Wright made the first successful airplane flight on Dec. 17, 1903, before five
witnesses. Flying distance: 120 feet. Flight time: 12 seconds. For years afterward, press
coverage of the Wrights was scant and doubting. The Wrights continued refining their plane
designs in anonymity. In 1908, Wilbur Wright flew a plane around the Statue of Liberty,
cementing their celebrity. The Wrights struck a deal that year to sell a plane to the U.S. War
Department. The brothers were soon overwhelmed by legal battles to protect their invention.
By the time of Wilbur's death, other plane makers had come up with more sophisticated
designs. Orville sold his stake in the Wright Co. in 1915.

16. VLADIMIR LENIN (1870-1924)
Father of Communism
Lenin established the first Communist nation in 1917, which triggered a wave of socialist
states from Asia to Europe and created a series of totalitarian, government-controlled
economies closed off from the Western world for most of this century. Lenin was enthralled
by the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx wrote that free enterprise would
destroy itself as business owners became rich at the expense of workers too poor to buy the
goods they produced. These workers would revolt, he said, take over factories and establish
an efficient government-planned system to ensure jobs and create a new classless society.
Lenin decreed that such a revolution would take place only if professional revolutionaries led
it. After Czar Nicholas II gave up the throne, Lenin returned from exile in 1917, with Russia
beset by strikes and food shortages. His party's slogan was "Bread, peace, land." Lenin
abolished private land ownership, required peasants to turn over most of their production and
set in place a rigid state bureaucracy to run Russian industries. He formed the Soviet Union
with neighboring republics in 1922. After Lenin's death, the Soviet Union remained intact for
decades. But communism was a woefully inefficient economic model, as state-regulated
prices failed to reflect the true costs of goods and workers had no incentive to be productive.
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, most Communist-run states had essentially gone
bankrupt.
17. DENG XIAOPING (1904-1997) AND MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (1931- )
Communist Reformers
Deng and Gorbachev were Communist leaders who triggered vast economic change,
ultimately opening the Chinese and Russian markets to foreign investment and world trade.
After Mao Tse-tung's death, Deng turned the world's most populous nation into a major
economic power by lessening rigid government control over businesses, opened the way for
privately owned firms and encouraged foreign investment in China. Last year, China's exports
to the U.S. climbed to $57 billion. Los Angeles-area firms export some $2.4 billion in goods
annually to China. Deng also led negotiations for the return of Hong Kong to China, while
planning to maintain the colony's booming capitalistic economy. Gorbachev took power in
1985 with the Soviet Union's economy severely weakened after decades of Cold War
spending. He shifted from a centralized, planned economy to a more decentralized, open
system. His reforms, called "perestroika," made Gorbachev popular overseas. Despite his
reforms, the Soviet economy continued to falter and the added freedoms triggered a wave of
social upheaval. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and Gorbachev accepted it. Two years
later, most of the Soviet republics broke away and Gorbachev resigned as the Soviet Union
formally ceased to exist. Under Boris Yeltsin, the Russian economy has run amok and some
estimate 50% of its economy is tied to organized crime. Gorbachev has embraced capitalism
somewhat, though, appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial last year.
18. OPEC
Oil Crisis
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries dramatically altered the world's

economy in the 1970s by suddenly raising oil prices. This led to gasoline shortages and
triggered a worldwide wave of inflation. It also prompted industries and governments to
conserve energy, develop alternative energy sources and produce more fuel-efficient
products--a movement that continues to this day. OPEC was formed in 1960 by Iran, Iraq,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (OPEC now has 11 members) to have a unified front in
negotiating prices with foreign oil companies who had operations in their countries. But as
demand for oil kept rising, OPEC shifted the balance of power in October 1973 by raising oil
prices 70%. OPEC nations were using oil as a political weapon in response to the Arab-Israeli
war. In December 1973, OPEC raised crude oil prices by another 130% and placed embargoes
on U.S. oil shipments, which led to long lines at the gas pumps. OPEC kept boosting prices
and by 1980 a barrel of crude oil cost $30, compared with $3 in 1973; some predicted that oil
prices would hit $100. But Western nations turned to coal, nuclear and solar power as
alternative sources of energy and businesses became more efficient and reduced their energy
needs. As Western nations weaned their dependence on imported oil, OPEC in 1983 cut its
prices. Since then, efforts by OPEC to set production quotas have often failed as some
member countries ignored the limits.
19. EIJI TOYODA (1913- )
Led Japanese Car Exporting
Toyoda, a family scion, helped lead Toyota Motor Corp.'s aggressive push into the U.S.
auto market. Toyota's exports inspired other Japanese car makers to follow, and their
collective success dramatically altered the American auto industry, reducing the dominance of
GM, Ford and Chrysler. Toyota also influenced assembly line manufacturing techniques with
its emphasis on production efficiency and quality control that turned out cars with few
defects. Toyota entered the American market after an executive, Shotaro Kamiya, visited the
U.S. and noted the popularity of the Volkswagen Beetle. Toyoda backed the plan and in
August 1957 the first Toyota was unloaded in Los Angeles: a pokey, four-door sedan called
the Toyopet Crown. Toyota's U.S. sales in its first year: 288. Last year: 1.4 million. The first
Toyotas sold here handled poorly when driven over 60 mph and tended to overheat in the
mountains or desert. But Toyota kept investing in new models while refining its qualitycontrol production methods. By the late '60s, its Toyota Corolla had developed a reputation
for reliability, low cost and fuel efficiency. The 1973 OPEC oil crisis cemented demand for
Toyota's economy cars and left Detroit's auto makers scrambling to make fuel-efficient
models. Toyoda served as Toyota president and chairman; he retired in 1994. His cousin
started the company as a loom factory; in 1935 it began making cars. Toyota Motor is now the
world's third-biggest auto maker with $92 billion in sales; its American work force numbers
28,000.
20. JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1883-1946)
Basis for Government Economic Intervention
Keynes was the most influential economist of this century. He advocated that governments
play an active role to stabilize their economies by using spending programs to reach full
employment and to avoid depressions. In the last 60 years his theories have been adopted by
most Western nations. Early in his career, Keynes worked for the British Treasury. His most
important work, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936), was
published during the Depression. Until then, most economists believed that a free market

would ultimately lead to prosperity. But this laissez-faire approach failed in the Great
Depression. Instead, Keynes wrote about the impact of total spending in an economy--from
businesses, public agencies and consumers. Consumers were limited by their income, he said,
and did not trigger business cycles; rather, the keys to business cycles were spending by
businesses and government agencies. Thus, in a depression, governments had to radically
boost public spending--to the point of running a deficit--to stimulate a rise in demand for
goods, to boost sales and to lead to full employment. Keynes was knighted in 1942. After his
death, Keynesian theory evolved into a series of government interventions to stabilize the
economy, such as boosting taxes and interest rates in boom periods to slow the economy and
avoid inflation. However, in the 1970s, as high inflation and unemployment spread across
Western nations, the Keynesian theory lost some of its gloss.
21. DRS. DONALD ROSS (1893-1981) AND CLIFFORD LOOS (1882-1960)
Fathers of Managed Health Care
Ross and Loos invented managed health care at their Los Angeles clinic in 1929 as a way
to provide affordable coverage for employees of the Department of Water and Power. The
Ross-Loos Clinic then charged $1.50 a month for a full range of medical services, including
hospitalization, transport by ambulance and physical therapy. Their idea, called prepaid health
care, was viewed as leftist and threatening by the mainstream medical establishment and the
two doctors were expelled from the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. But Loos, a
California-born surgeon, and Ross, a native Canadian who had worked as a doctor for the
Canadian-Pacific Railroad, fought the expulsion and were reinstated by the American Medical
Assn. "This form of medical service is here to stay, and there will be great expansion along
this line," Loos predicted in 1931. Their clinics did grow, and by 1935 enrollment exceeded
42,000. In 1933, another pioneering doctor, Sidney Garfield, set up a similar plan for
construction workers building the California Aqueduct. Garfield was later hired by steel
magnate Henry J. Kaiser to provide health care for his employees, and the Kaiser-Permanente
health system was born. Today, 23 million Californians are covered by various managed-care
health plans. The Ross-Loos clinics have had several owners, most recently MedPartners Inc.,
which exited the managed-care business after years of losses and sold the clinics to KPC
Medical Management of Long Beach.
22. HARRY WARNER (1881-1958) AND JACK WARNER (1892-1978)
Pioneers of Sound Films
Harry, Albert, Samuel and Jack Warner released the first talking picture, which
revolutionized the film industry and turned Warner Bros. into one of the dominant studios
during Hollywood's golden age. The Warners bought a nickelodeon in 1903 and in the next
two decades distributed and produced films. In 1923 they formed Warner Bros. Harry, who
was president, realized they were overly dependent on independent film distributors, so he
bought a distributor and eventually owned 500 theaters. Sam pushed the company into sound
films. Bell Labs had developed a sound technique, which other studios passed on. But Warner
Bros. worked with Western Electric to develop a sound-on-disc process for synchronized
sound. In "The Jazz Singer" (1927), Al Jolson spoke some dialogue, and audiences went wild.
The next year, Warner Bros. released the first complete sound film, "Lights of New York,"
which cost $40,000, but grossed $2 million. Jack was film production chief and Warner Bros.
thrived in the Great Depression by turning out gangster films and other features faster than its

rivals, while paying its stars (Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart) less than other
studios. Warner Bros. declined in the '50s with the advent of TV and a government-ordered
sale of its theaters. Jack was the last remaining brother when he sold his stake in 1967. Warner
Bros. is now part of Time Warner.
23. LOUIS B. MAYER (1885-1957)
Movie Studio Magnate
For three decades, Mayer ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and developed a stable of movie
stars that turned MGM into the most celebrated film studio of its time. Born in Russia, raised
in Canada, Mayer was running a junk business in Boston when he bought a struggling movie
theater in 1907. Within a few years he'd built a regional theater chain. He then began
producing films and in 1918 moved to Los Angeles to open Louis B. Mayer Pictures. By 1924
Loew's theater chain had bought three studios to create MGM and put Mayer in charge as vice
president and general manager. The studio thrived in the '30s as MGM turned out films with
expensive production values while Mayer created a storied roster of stars from Greta Garbo to
Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland. Mayer's taste for patriotic, escapist, family
films led to the Andy Hardy series, as well as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz."
At once ruthless and patriarchal, Mayer had 6,000 employees and at his peak was the nation's
highest-paid executive at $1.25 million a year. As television began to take hold and MGM's
fortunes dropped, Mayer was replaced in 1951 by his former assistant Dore Schary. Several
years later, Mayer failed in an attempt to win back control of the studio.
24. THOMAS WATSON SR. (1874-1956)
IBM'S Visionary Leader
Watson turned a mediocre key-punch card counting firm into one of the world's most
dominant corporations. The IBM name became synonymous with "Big Blue," the nickname
for Watson's army of well-trained salesmen who followed his strict dress code of dark suits
and white shirts. In 1914, Watson became president of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co.,
which made clocks, scales and tabulating machines. Watson saw its future in the machines
that calculated data by sorting key-punch cards. A former salesman, Watson built a highly
motivated, well-paid sales staff that emphasized customer service, not just product sales. The
company sold higher-priced, large, custom-built tabulating machines to government agencies
and bigger companies. By the mid-1920s, it had changed its name to International Business
Machines, and began selling the first electric typewriter. IBM benefited greatly from the
growth of the federal bureaucracy during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. In 1935, IBM
sold calculating machines to the new Social Security Administration. Also in the '30s, Watson
expanded IBM sales overseas. During World War II, IBM built the first large digital computer
for the military. When Watson died in 1956, IBM had grown to 60,000 employees--from 235
in 1914. Watson's son, Thomas Watson Jr., became IBM president in 1952 and led the
company's big push to develop computers for the business market. By the late '60s, IBM
controlled 65% of the U.S. computer industry. Watson Jr. retired in 1971.
25. AKIO MORITA (1921-1999)
Japanese Industrialist

Morita's Sony Corp. led the vanguard of Japan's dominance of the consumer electronics
industry. Morita and Masaru Ibuka started their firm in 1946 with $500. Their first product
was a rice cooker, which failed. Morita pushed the company into making new electronic
goods. Its first big seller in Japan was a tape recorder. In 1955, the company started making
compact radios, using newly developed transistors instead of bulky vacuum tubes. By 1958,
the company changed its name to Sony, derived from the Latin word for sound. In the late
'50s, Morita went to New York to begin selling Sony products in the U.S. He believed in the
value of brand recognition and refused to build products for other companies under contract.
He also invested heavily in technology, looking to develop innovative products. In 1968, Sony
began selling a state-of-the-art color TV set called the Trinitron, which helped cement its
reputation for excellent products. A decade later, Morita pestered his engineers to come up
with a tape player that could be used while exercising and in 1979 the Sony Walkman was
introduced. Another technological development came in 1982--with Philips Electronics--when
the compact disc was introduced, creating a new standard for music products.
26. RAY KROC (1902-1984)
Fast-Food Pioneer
Kroc turned McDonald's into a worldwide hamburger chain and triggered the explosive
growth of the fast-food industry. In the early '50s, Kroc was selling machines that mixed five
milkshakes at once; one customer owned eight mixers. So Kroc visited the place, a San
Bernardino drive-up hamburger restaurant owned by Dick and Mac McDonald. The
McDonalds had transformed their eatery into a speedy, assembly-line production center,
selling French fries, shakes and burgers at such a high volume that they cut hamburger prices
to 15 cents from 30 cents each. Impressed, Kroc set out to copy their format and build a fastfood chain and agreed to pay the McDonalds half a cent for every $1 in gross sales. Kroc
opened his first McDonald's in Illinois in 1955. By 1960, 228 McDonald's were generating
$37 million in sales. The next year, Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million.
Kroc began by setting up franchises outside urban areas, benefiting from the middle-class
move to suburbia. Kroc also advertised heavily to promote traffic at "the golden arches." In
time, the Big Mac, Egg McMuffin and Chicken McNuggets became part of the American
lexicon. Kroc was a stickler for details and uniformity, requiring restaurant operators to attend
a 19-day training course at his "Hamburger University" so that food at all McDonald's tasted
the same. Even chef Julia Child lauded their French fries. By 1970, McDonald's restaurants
were in all 50 states. Today, there are 25,000 McDonald's in 117 countries. Estimated 1999
revenue for McDonald's Corp: $13.4 billion.
27. WILLIAM LEVITT (1907-1994)
Suburban Housing Developer
Levitt built the first residential tract-housing subdivision after World War II in Levittown,
N.Y. Levitt transformed the housing business by using prefabricated parts and teams of
workers, who in assembly line fashion moved from house to house to do their jobs, which cut
costs. Levitt's family set up a construction firm during the Depression, and after World War II
he took advantage of the nation's housing shortage and a federal program that offered
mortgages to veterans. From 1947 to 1951, Levitt turned 1,200 acres of Long Island potato
farms into a community of 17,450 nearly identical two-bedroom homes that sold for about
$8,000 apiece. Levitt shipped pre-cut parts to the sites for quick assembly and contractors

with specific jobs--windows, roofs, doors, heating systems, etc.--shifted from house to house.
This construction technique saved about $1,000 per home. Levitt also built community
swimming pools, schools and recreation areas. His construction method was widely copied.
But Levittown quickly became a target for sociologists who complained that, by selling so
many homes in a narrow price range, Levitt had created an overly homogeneous community.
28. THEODORE VAIL (1845-1920)
Telephone Pioneer
In the early 1900s, Vail built AT&T into the nationwide, omnipotent, technologically
advanced phone company that would endure until its government-ordered breakup in 1984.
Vail worked at Bell Telephone (then AT&T's parent) from 1878 to 1889, but he retired when
investors didn't support his idea for creating a nationwide phone system. In 1907, after the
death of his wife and only child, Vail returned at age 62 to run AT&T at the request of
financier J.P. Morgan. AT&T was heavily in debt and the phone industry was chaotic.
Independent companies had more than 50% of the telephone market, and some communities
were served by rival companies whose phone systems were not connected. With Morgan's
help, Vail set out to build a monopoly by buying up financially troubled independents. He also
spent heavily to upgrade AT&T's phone service and technology, which became a worldwide
model. If Vail couldn't buy a rival firm, he'd charge them a fee so they could access AT&T's
increasingly sophisticated long-distance network. In 1915, the first transcontinental phone line
was established when Alexander Graham Bell in New York talked with his old colleague
Thomas Watson in San Francisco. That same year, AT&T sent the first radio message over
phone lines across the Atlantic. When Vail retired in 1919, AT&T had more than 10 million
phones in service, compared with just 3 million in 1907.
29. RALPH NADER (1934- )
Father of the Modern Consumer Movement
Nader's efforts led to seat belts, air bags and padded dashboards as standard equipment in
cars, plus federally mandated automobile recalls. "Nader's raiders" have investigated and
hounded all manner of industries, from meatpacking to pesticides, banking to baby food.
Nader also led a successful campaign for airlines to reimburse consumers when they overbook
seats. His support helped pass California's Proposition 103 auto-insurance rebate in 1988.
Nader made his reputation with the publication of "Unsafe at Any Speed" in 1965. His book
criticized the auto industry for what he considered a profits-before-safety mentality and
focused on the dangerous handling of General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair. GM hired private
detectives to follow Nader; this revelation embarrassed GM at congressional hearings. Nader's
book led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. He set
up the nonprofit Public Citizen Inc. and other public-interest groups, staffed largely by college
students and recent grads. Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and got
2% of the vote in California.
30. GEORGE MEANY (1894-1980) AND WALTER REUTHER (1907-70)
Union Builders
The pair created a unified national labor front. Meany and Reuther rose from blue-collar

jobs to achieve prominence in the U.S. labor movement during its heyday in the 1950s. They
helped institute eight-hour workdays, health benefits and pensions for millions of workers.
Meany, a plumber, was elected business agent of his local union in 1922 and became president
of the New York State Federation of Labor in 1934, where he helped promote the passage of
dozens of pro-labor bills. He became secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor
in 1939 and moved up to the presidency 13 years later. Reuther, a tool-and-die maker, became
shop foreman in a Detroit automobile plant before being fired in 1932 for his union activism.
After three years of travel in Europe, he returned to organize auto workers during a period of
extreme anti-union violence. He was elected president of the United Automobile Workers of
America in 1946, and in 1952 became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
In 1955, Meany and Reuther merged the two groups to create the labor behemoth, the AFLCIO, with Meany as president and Reuther as vice president. Despite disagreements in later
years over politics and civil rights, the two jointly continued to lead the federation until
Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970. Today, the AFL-CIO represents 68 unions with 13
million members.
31. JUAN TRIPPE (1899-1981)
International Aviation Pioneer
Trippe created the first international airline with Pan American World Airways and he
popularized air travel. Using his inheritance, Trippe bought World War I surplus planes to start
an airline on Long Island, N.Y. By 1927, he was running his third airline, which merged to
form Pan Am. That year, Trippe scheduled an eight-passenger flight for a 90-mile, over-water
trip between Key West, Fla., and Havana, Cuba, marking the first international airline flight.
By 1930, Trippe had government contracts to fly airmail routes to South America, which
financed his passenger service to Latin America. An innovator, Trippe bought flying boats for
long-distance flights and added new navigation gear to make flying safer. He signed Charles
Lindbergh as a consultant. By the '30s, Pan Am was flying mail and passengers from
California to Asia on the China Clipper. After World War II, Trippe wanted the federal
government to license Pan Am as a monopoly carrier to compete with foreign airlines. He was
turned down. Trippe was Boeing's first customer for the 707 jetliner, which moved Pan Am
into the jet age. By the '60s, Trippe had steered Pan Am into the hotel and real estate business,
while creating a Byzantine, 81,000-mile air route system servicing 85 countries. Trippe retired
as chief executive in 1968. By then, Pan Am was nearly bankrupt. Various executives kept
trying to right the company, but soaring fuel costs and deregulation were too much to handle.
Pan Am went out of business in 1991.
32. JAMES WATSON (1928- ) AND FRANCIS CRICK (1916- )
Fathers of Biotechnology
Watson and Crick discovered the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the
chemical strands that help form chromosomes in cells and contain the gene code that is the
basis of heredity. Their stunning discovery also led to the creation of a new industry,
biotechnology. In the early '50s, scientists knew that DNA played a factor in cells and
heredity, but its exact role was unclear. Crick, a British physicist, had worked on radar
technology during World War II. Watson was a young PhD from Indiana University. Working
together in England, Watson convinced Crick that if they could understand DNA's exact
structure they could solve its mysterious role. Using X-ray research on protein molecules

passed along by biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, Watson had the insight that DNA consisted not
of one but a pair of chemical strands. Watson and Crick clarified DNA's structure to be that of
a double helix--a shape resembling spiral staircases--and that if these strands were separated,
each would hold a set of chemicals identical to its former partner. This copying process
explained how genes are reproduced in dividing cells. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the
Nobel Prize in 1962. In the 1970s, scientists began inserting bits of DNA into bacterium to
create mini cell factories that reproduced specific proteins. This led to the creation of
biotechnology companies, such as Genentech and Amgen, whose gene-spliced drugs now
treat everything from AIDS to cancer.
33. PETER DRUCKER (1909- )
Father of Management Theory
Drucker created the field of modern management with a body of work dating back to the
1940s. He came up with the concepts of "privatization" and "knowledge workers" for a new
class of employees, and he cited the importance of nurturing employees both for society's
betterment and to enhance corporate profit. As Drucker put it, "An organization is a human, a
social, indeed a moral phenomenon." A Vienna native, Drucker was working as a journalist
when he first came to the U.S. in 1937. His breakthrough book "Concept of the Corporation"
(1946) was based on his first-hand observation of General Motors. He analyzed everything
from GM's top managers to its labor relations. His 1954 book, "The Practice of Management,"
was based on his study of General Electric. Before Drucker, business theory chiefly
concentrated on specific tasks such as accounting or engineering. But Drucker sought to make
management theory into a new discipline that covered everything from setting objectives to
risk taking. He hired himself out as a consultant to organizations ranging from the Girl Scouts
to Sears, Roebuck & Co., but Japanese businesses warmed to his theories quicker than did
American firms. In 1961, Drucker was one of the first to note the rising importance of Japan's
economy. Still active, Drucker has written 32 books and has taught at Claremont Graduate
University since 1971.
34. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890-1969)
Champion of Interstate Highways
During Eisenhower's presidency (1953-61), one pet project he shepherded through
Congress in 1956 was funding of the interstate highway system. Since then, a vast ribbon of
46,000 miles of interstate highways was built across the country at a cost of $130 billion,
clearing the way for all manner of commerce and civil transport. The interstates connect more
than 75% of U.S. cities with populations over 50,000, and they carry about 20% of the
nation's road traffic. Eisenhower, who led Allied forces during World War II, had seen
Germany's autobahns and was impressed by how the high-speed roads connected that country.
The first U.S. freeway opened in Pennsylvania in 1940. Four years later, Congress voted for
interstate roads to be selected, but construction languished until Eisenhower's bill was passed.
That measure committed the federal government to pay 90% of the cost, with states picking
up the rest.
35. TED TURNER (1938- )
Cable TV Pioneer

Turner popularized cable television by creating superstations with a basic programming
menu of sports, news and old movies. After his father's suicide in 1961, Turner took over
Turner Advertising Co., a struggling $1-million billboard firm. In 1970, Turner got into
television by merging with a small Atlanta UHF station. To boost his advertising revenue, in
1976 he started broadcasting his station's signal by satellite to reach cable systems nationwide.
To provide sports programming for his WTBS channel, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves
baseball team in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team in 1977. In 1980, Turner started
Cable News Network despite few advertisers seeing any potential in a 24-hour news network.
CNN then made its mark covering disasters such as the Challenger space shuttle explosion
and the Persian Gulf War. Turner Broadcasting System Inc. was heavily in debt, but Turner
kept expanding. In 1986, with the help of junk bond financing, he bought the MGM film
library, which led to the creation of another channel, Turner Network Television. In 1996,
Turner sold his company to Time Warner for $9 billion. Turner is now Time Warner's biggest
shareholder.
36. ROBERT W. WOODRUFF (1889-1985)
Made Coke a Worldwide Brand
Woodruff turned the red-and-white Coca-Cola trademark into a brand known worldwide as
an American product. Coca-Cola Co. was sold in 1919 for $25 million to a group of investors,
including Woodruff's father. Woodruff was installed as Coca-Cola's president in 1923 and he
directed the company until 1955. Under his leadership, Coke's popularity leapfrogged, thanks
to heavy spending on market research, production controls--so Coke tasted the same
everywhere it was sold--and catchy advertising such as "The Pause That Refreshes" (1929)
and "It's the Real Thing" (1941). Woodruff's predecessor marketed Coke to upscale audiences,
but Woodruff wanted Coke to be a drink for the masses, and the company launched
campaigns in the '50s aimed at black audiences. During World War II, Woodruff promised
he'd sell Coke for a token 5 cents a bottle to U.S. servicemen anywhere. Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower asked the company to provide Coke in Africa and Europe to boost the morale of
GIs. In the process, Woodruff won approval to open 64 overseas bottling plants. Woodruff's
successors have continued to make Coke ubiquitous; the soft drink is sold in about 200
countries.
37. ROBERT E. WOOD (1879-1969)
Pioneer of Modern Retailing
Wood catapulted Sears, Roebuck & Co. from a rural mail-order catalog firm into the
nation's biggest retail chain by selling everything from washing machines to TVs and baseball
gloves under one roof. Wood was an executive at rival Montgomery Ward in 1924 when he
jumped to Sears as vice president. Wood foresaw how the popularity of automobiles would
bring more rural customers to urban stores, so in 1925 Sears opened its first retail store in
Chicago. By the end of the decade, Sears had more than 300 stores and Wood was president
of the company. In 1931, Sears' retail store sales surpassed that of its mail-order business; that
same year Wood got into auto insurance by creating Allstate. As World War II ended, Wood
correctly anticipated an economic boom across the country and aggressively opened stores in
the Sun Belt. Sears was the first retail chain to set aside free parking areas next to its stores.
When World War II ended, Sears was only slightly bigger than Montgomery Ward; by 1954,

Sears' $3 billion in sales was triple that of its rival. Wood retired in 1954. In 1967, Sears was
the first retailer to hit $1 billion in monthly sales.
38. BELLA ABZUG (1920-1998), BETTY FRIEDAN (1921- ) AND GLORIA STEINEM
(1934- )
The Women's Movement
Like the Communist Manifesto a century before, the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan's
"The Feminine Mystique" launched a revolution that changed the world. Friedan's articulation
of women's entrapment and malaise struck a profound chord of independence, and the notion
of a career outside the home took hold. It also didn't hurt that the first safe and reliable form
of birth control--the Pill--had just come on the market, and that Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex
and the Single Girl" helped reinforce the idea of equality with men. Friedan's credo that the
personal is political led her, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and many others to found the
National Organization for Women, to pressure the courts and legislatures to enforce the antijob discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By the 1970s, Steinem had
begun Ms. magazine for those on the front lines of the movement--the millions of working
women pouring into the workplace. Abzug, a civil rights lawyer, was elected to Congress in
1970 with the slogan "A woman's place is in the House--the House of Representatives," and
helped pave the way for other women to enter politics. She also never gave up the charge to
pass the Equal Rights Amendment. But by 1982 ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states
proved an implacable obstacle--although 35 states had voted in favor of it. But by then the
women's movement had moved far beyond Friedan's urgings to women to compete in a man's
world; today, women comprise nearly 50% of the U.S. work force.
39. AMADEO P. GIANNINI (1870-1949)
Banking Innovator
Giannini laid the bedrock of modern banking. He built Bank of America into the world's
largest bank, set up the first branch bank network and opened lending practices to include
loans to ordinary individuals and installment payments. In 1904, he opened Bank of Italy in
San Francisco. Two years later, during the great San Francisco earthquake, Giannini hauled
out $80,000 in cash before his building burned down and soon after was making loans from a
counter top on the waterfront. Sensitive to the great distances his depositors traveled, he
bought a bank in San Jose in 1909 and opened his first branch. He kept buying banks
throughout California and in 1927 consolidated them into Bank of America of California.
Giannini envisioned that his field would be dominated by a handful of large banks, and in
1928 he set up a holding company called Transamerica. He purchased banks in New York,
Washington, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada. Bank of America began offering installment loans
on everything from real estate to used cars and home appliances, innovations that his
competitors would copy. Giannini was chairman of Transamerica until his death in 1949.
40. IDA TARBELL (1857-1944)
Muckraker, Trustbuster
A groundbreaking investigative journalist, Tarbell's reporting played a key role in breaking
up John D. Rockefeller's monopoly of the U.S. oil industry. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co.

controlled about 90% of the nation's oil-refining capacity, but much of his business was
hidden in a Byzantine maze of operations. Tarbell's book, "The History of the Standard Oil
Company" (1904), thoroughly documented the creation of this monopoly and caught the
attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, the government sued Standard Oil under
provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and in 1911, Standard Oil was broken up into 33
companies. Tarbell's father was a small-time oil producer.
41. FREDERICK SMITH (1944- )
Overnight-Delivery Innovator
With Federal Express, Smith created the overnight air delivery business. At Yale
University, Smith wrote a term paper about the need for overnight air freight; his teacher gave
him a C. Undaunted, Smith started Federal Express in 1971 with $91 million from venture
capitalists, plus his $4-million inheritance. Smith devised a hub system where all packages
would be picked up and flown to Memphis, Tenn., sorted at night, then flown to cities and
delivered by truck to the customer's door. To avoid federal shipping regulations, the company
owned its own planes. Service began in 1973 with 14 jets flying to 25 cities. In two years,
Federal Express lost about $29 million. As its reputation for reliability grew, by 1976 it was
profitable and the company was delivering blood, organs, documents and computer parts and
counted IBM and the federal government as customers. As more businesses relied on just-intime inventory systems, Federal Express kept growing; its revenue hit $1 billion in 1984. The
next year, Smith, worried about the growth in digital communications, offered ZapMail--the
delivery of documents by fax and courier within two hours. Federal Express lost $300 million
on ZapMail before abandoning it. Despite competition from UPS and other package delivery
concerns, FedEx and its parent company, FDX Corp., keep growing. It now delivers to 210
countries with 600-plus aircraft, 46,000 vehicles and 141,000 employees.
42. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1929-1968)
Civil Rights Activist
King eloquently inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. His work led to
passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, calling for equal opportunity in the workplace and
education, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. King also encouraged others to push for
more employment opportunities for minorities. King began his civil rights work in 1955 in
Montgomery, Ala., by leading a boycott of city buses after a black woman was arrested for
refusing to give up her seat on a bus. The next year, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery
to provide equal seating on its buses. In 1957, King set up the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference to protest racial segregation in schools, hotels and restaurants. King was often
jailed. To prod Congress into passing a civil rights bill, he organized a march in Washington
that drew more than 200,000 people. King also complained that poverty created social
injustice and he planned a campaign to help the poor in their battle for economic opportunity.
He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while supporting a strike by black garbage workers.
One King disciple, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, later created the Rainbow/PUSH coalition to
challenge corporations to include more African Americans and other minorities in their
operations.
43. HOWARD JARVIS (1902-1986)

Tax Rebel
Jarvis led the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which drastically cut California property
taxes and triggered a wave of grass-roots taxpayer initiatives across the country. A retired
businessman, Jarvis was a political gadfly who had managed regional campaigns for Dwight
D. Eisenhower's presidential races and later failed in his own U.S. Senate bid. By the late '70s,
runaway inflation and soaring California home prices had quadrupled property taxes for some
homeowners--while their personal incomes lagged--threatening some with loss of their
homes. Proposition 13, authored by Jarvis and retired Realtor Paul Gann, cut property taxes
58% by rolling them back to 1975 levels. Proposition 13 was opposed by Gov. Jerry Brown.
But with Jarvis' support, the measure passed by almost a 2-1 margin. Proposition 13 slashed
California property taxes by $6 billion and sent cities and counties scurrying for new revenues
as they dramatically boosted fees for local services and began to rely heavily on sales taxes.
Proposition 13 also hampered spending on public schools, as California's per-pupil spending
dropped from 18th in the nation in 1977 to 35th today.
44. RACHEL CARSON (1907-1964)
Environmental Inspiration
Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring," with its frightening descriptions of how pesticides can
kill wildlife and poison the food chain, helped usher in the modern environmental era. Carson
was a marine biologist and spent much of her life working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.
Carson's book blasted chemical companies as she unveiled the dangers of DDT and other
pesticides, whose residues pollute the environment as their toxins slowly work into the food
supply. She described poisoned robins falling out of trees and DDT-damaged eggshells
collapsing from the weight of nesting birds. Her book sold 500,000 hardcover copies and
triggered a storm of denials by the chemical industry. But President John F. Kennedy read her
work and ordered an investigation; his Science Advisory Committee backed Carson and
called for stricter pesticide controls. Carson died of cancer in 1964. Her book continues to
inspire environmentalists, and her work is credited with having an impact on everything from
the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 to the Greenpeace movement.
45. EDWARD C. JOHNSON III (1930- )
Mutual Fund Kingpin
Johnson turned the mutual fund group his father started, closely held Fidelity Investments,
into the industry's giant. Fidelity's current assets under management: $711 billion. Known as
"Ned," he took over as president in 1972 and, with famed stock picker Peter Lynch, lifted
Magellan and Fidelity's other funds into national prominence. Johnson turned Fidelity into
mainstream America's most familiar mutual fund family, especially in the 1980s, when the
middle class flocked to the stock and bond markets. He followed his father's strategy of
having his fund managers buy stocks with growth potential rather than blue-chip steadiness-with enormous success. He also helped pioneer such mutual fund practices as selling direct
rather than through brokers, offering discount brokerage services, forming a unit to handle big
institutional accounts and creating dozens of funds that specialize in specific industries or
geographic regions. He turned over most of his ownership of Boston-based Fidelity's parent,
FMR Corp., to his daughter, Abigail, in 1995. According to Forbes magazine, Johnson's net
worth is $2.2 billion. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 and joined Fidelity in 1957.

46. MILTON FRIEDMAN (1912- )
Leader of Conservative Economics
The most influential conservative economist of our time, Friedman argued against
governmental efforts to manage the economy, preferring a largely hands-off approach.
Friedman led opposition to Keynesian economic theory--popular since the 1930s--that calls
for governments to stabilize the economy by increasing spending in recessionary times and
boosting taxes in boom periods to slow the economy and halt inflation. Friedman insisted that
Keynesian economics doesn't work. Instead, for 40 years Friedman has argued that the supply
of money is the single most important influence on business and therefore the Federal Reserve
Board should pump a steady money supply of 4% into our economy, "month in and month
out, year in and year out." Friedman believes in free competition, opposes farm price supports
and supports enforcement of antitrust laws. The son of immigrants from Austria-Hungary,
Friedman developed his theories while teaching at the University of Chicago. He served as an
advisor to President Nixon. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in
1976.
47. PAUL VOLCKER (1927- ) AND ALAN GREENSPAN (1926- )
Inflation Tamers
As successive chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, Volcker and Greenspan helped lay
the financial groundwork for the nation's longest peacetime economic expansion. Volcker
(Fed chairman 1979-87) was appointed by President Carter at a time when inflation was
climbing 13% a year. To combat inflation, Volcker let interest rates rise, which triggered a
recession in 1982-83, but it slowed inflation and the economy began to rebound. When
Volcker turned down a third term, President Reagan appointed Greenspan as Fed chairman
(1987 to present). Greenspan was lauded for his handling of the October 1987 stock market
crash by ensuring that banks would have sufficient cash on hand. Throughout this decade
Greenspan has managed to keep a check on inflation and keep interest rates low, which have
helped fuel the ongoing surge in the nation's economy and stock market.
48. RONALD REAGAN (1911- )
Reaganomics
During Reagan's presidency (1981-89), the U.S. economy rebounded, inflation slowed,
employment rose and the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubled. The nation's
confidence also rebounded after years of rising inflation and a laggard economy. Reagan
entered politics after a long acting career, and he served two terms as California's governor.
Reagan won the Republican nomination for president in 1980, on his third try, and he defeated
Jimmy Carter in the fall election. Reagan believed in supply-side economics. So after taking
office, he pushed through a record tax cut, reduced non-defense spending and dramatically
increased military expenditures, saying the plan would trigger economic growth and balance
the federal budget. The results were mixed: While Reagan was in the White House, the
nation's budget deficit soared to record levels, but inflation dropped from 13% to 4% and the
economy began a lengthy recovery. Reagan also launched a major overhaul of the federal tax
code in 1986.

49. HOWARD F. AHMANSON (1906-1968)
Mortgage Lending Force
H.F. Ahmanson & Co.'s Home Savings of America provided more mortgage loans to the
masses than any other S&L during the home-building boom of the 1940s to 1960s. Ahmanson
set up a casualty insurance firm in 1927 and his wealth grew during the Depression because
he also dealt in foreclosures. As he quipped, "The worse it got, the better it was for me." But
in 1947 Ahmanson took his first step toward becoming a key mortgage lender when he bought
Home Savings of America for $162,000. At the time, Home Savings was a modest S&L with
less than $1 million in assets. But Ahmanson bought up 18 other institutions to create the
nation's biggest savings and loan. By 1961 Home Savings became the first S&L with more
than $1 billion in assets. Ahmanson's growth was fueled in part by the enormous population
surge in California. Ahmanson died of a heart attack in 1968. Last year H.F. Ahmanson & Co.
was purchased by Washington Mutual.
50. WILLIAM H. GATES III (1955- )
Software Magnate
As a co-founder of Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates created the globally dominant computer
software business--and that made him the world's wealthiest man, now worth an estimated
$85 billion. Gates built the empire pursuing one oft-repeated goal: "To have a computer on
every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software." An archetypal nerd, Gates
once designed a scheduling program for his Seattle high school so he could share classes with
the prettiest girls. He dropped out of Harvard as a sophomore in 1975 to start Microsoft with
Paul Allen. In 1980, they were hired to supply the operating system for IBM's first personal
computer. As the PC became the computing standard, Microsoft became a juggernaut.
Although Microsoft didn't invent the graphical user interface, spreadsheet program, word
processor or Internet browser, it managed to seize control of those markets. Today, Microsoft
software runs 90% of the world's personal computers, and Gates, who still owns 20% of his
company, is both revered and reviled as the symbol of Microsoft's dominance. He is a man
who has indicated he will give most of his fortune to charity, but he also has been portrayed as
a monopolist bully by competitors and federal prosecutors in an ongoing antitrust trial against
Microsoft. Gates says Microsoft's new challenge is keeping its software stronghold as
"customers start to move beyond the PC."
***
HONORABLE MENTIONS
JEFF BEZOS: In 1995, he opened Amazon.com, the first online bookstore, whose sales
have soared past $1 billion. His success led the way for a surge in "dot-com" companies and
e-commerce Web sites.
JOHN BOGLE: Founded the Vanguard Group, which popularized low-cost, no-load
mutual funds. Bogle also set up the first index mutual fund, which triggered a surge of
investor interest in indexing, instead of actively managed stock funds.

COCO CHANEL AND PIERRE CARDIN: French fashion designers who revolutionized
women's and men's clothing designs and helped popularize the modern fashion industry.
CESAR CHAVEZ: Helped found the United Farm Workers of America union; led a
nationwide boycott of California table grapes and became a symbolic representation for poor,
migrant laborers.
ALEXANDER FLEMING: In 1928, he discovered a green mold that killed bacteria, which
led to the development of the first antibiotic drug, penicillin.
HAROLD GREENE: Federal judge who presided over the antitrust case that broke up
AT&T's monopoly in 1984, clearing the way for open competition in the telecommunications
industry.
WILLIAM HEWLETT AND DAVID PACKARD: Started a tiny firm in 1939 with $538.
First product was sound-testing equipment. Later, HP moved into computers and hand-held
scientific calculators. The pair helped lay the groundwork for the Silicon Valley revolution.
CARL LAEMMLE: Early movie magnate; helped set up Universal in 1912, and three
years later opened a 230-acre studio site in Universal City.
LEE IACOCCA: Led Chrysler's great comeback in the 1980s after the company received
$1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees. Iacocca appeared in ads offering cash-back incentives
to customers who bought Chrysler's K-cars, thus setting the standard for the CEO as pitchman
and star.
ALFRED KAHN: As head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, he led the deregulation of the
U.S. airline industry, which led to lower air fares, consolidations, new airlines and record
complaints for poor service.
HENRY LUCE: Created an American publishing empire by starting magazines that were
widely copied, including Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and Fortune.
GUGLIELMO MARCONI: Inventor who in 1901 transmitted the first transatlantic
wireless radio communication. Marconi's work cleared the way for development of the radio
industry; awarded 1909 Nobel Prize in physics.
CRAIG MCCAW: A visionary who spurred the growth of the cellular phone industry by
building McCaw Cellular; in 1994, he sold the company to AT&T for $11.5 billion.
WILLIAM MCGOWAN: Founded MCI and led its long fight to bust up AT&T's telephone
monopoly; McGowan also prompted price wars in long-distance phone rates.
WILLIAM MULHOLLAND: Los Angeles' chief engineer, who designed an aqueduct that
in 1913 began carrying water into the city from Owens Valley, providing a major water source
to help L.A. grow.
RUPERT MURDOCH: Started out owning newspapers in Australia. His News Corp. is
now a worldwide media conglomerate with interests in satellites, publishing, movie
production and television.

ARTHUR C. NIELSEN: Devised the television ratings system by setting up sampling
boxes atop TVs in 1,200 homes, forever altering the TV industry. Nielsen built the largest
market research company, which studied consumer responses to everything from soap to
drugs.
PETE ROZELLE: As commissioner of the National Football League (1960-1989), Rozelle
turned a sleepy sports league into a mega-entertainment industry, setting the standard for
sports as big business. The Super Bowl and Monday Night Football became part of our
popular culture, and the NFL's television revenue skyrocketed from a few million dollars in
the early '60s to the first billion-dollar TV deal in 1982.
ARTHUR ROCK: Seminal Silicon Valley-area venture capitalist who coined the term
"venture capital." Rock financed start-ups Intel and Apple Computer, which helped create an
industry that would galvanize the nation's economy.
WILLIAM PALEY: Visionary who built Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) into a
radio and television empire, ruling it with an iron fist for half a century.
BUGSY SIEGEL: The gangster who saw the promise of a desert community called Las
Vegas as a gambling mecca. In 1946, he opened the first celebrated casino there, the
Flamingo.
SEN. ROBERT A. TAFT AND REP. FRED A. HARTLEY JR.: They sponsored TaftHartley Act legislation in 1947 that curbed union strikes and shifted power to management,
including delaying by 80 days the start of a strike that might trigger a national emergency and
outlaw the practice of hiring only union members.
WERNHER VON BRAUN: Nazi rocket scientist who helped develop the first liquid-fuel
rockets that traveled long distances and were used to attack England during World War II;
later he led NASA's rocket team that landed a man on the moon in 1969.
KEMMONS WILSON: Unhappy with the accommodations during a driving vacation with
his family, he set out to right the negative image of motels by opening the first Holiday Inn in
1952, which triggered the modern motel chain industry.
SAM WALTON: Founded Wal-Mart and built it into the nation's biggest retailer. Walton
revolutionized retailing by opening large retail stores in rural areas and offering discount
prices, with a sophisticated distribution system that kept his stores well stocked.