35 Incredible Facts About American Conglomerates – Part 2

The Kodak Company used a 13-month calendar from 1924 to 1989 and George Eastman pushed for its worldwide acceptance. It was a 28 day per month calendar.

27. In 1982 Xerox management watched a film of people struggling to use their new copier and laughed that they must have been grabbed off a loading dock. The people struggling were Ron Kaplan, a computational linguist, and Allen Newell, a founding father of artificial intelligence.

28. Programmers for Atari in the late 70s went to the CEO of the company asking for royalties and their names be included in the boxes. When he turned them down they went and formed their own company, Activision.

29. In 1930, two brothers created the first car radio which was called a “motorized victrola” which they shortened to Motorola.

30. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by Johnson & Johnson employee Earle Dickson for his wife Josephine, who frequently cut and burned herself while cooking.

Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Trivago, Travelocity, and Orbitz are all owned by the same company, Expedia Inc.

32. In 1965, Honeywell tried to sell a $10,000 ($75,000 in today's dollars) “Kitchen Computer” with a built-in cutting board. It included a two-week course on how to use it. They sold none.

33. The Kellogg’s cereal company has a royal warrant, in part because they make some of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite breakfast cereals.

34. The term ‘soap operas’ originated from daily 15 minute programs on the radio and were so-called because they were sponsored by soap companies, such as Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble. Soap operas were specifically engineered to appeal to women with the intention of increasing the sale of soap.

35. Halliburton once tried to patent patenting.