Before Koch and Meir floated out the Quest airlock on 18 October 2019, every single one of the 420 spacewalks performed in the history of human spaceflight had included at least one man, a streak that stretched unbroken from Alexei Leonov’s first walk in March 1965.

Resource Hubs: For more on funded company intelligence and decision-maker data, browse the Growth List database of recently funded startups, or read our other features on milestone moments in science and technology. Christina Koch and Jessica Meir clipped their tethers to the outside of the International Space Station in October 2019 and floated into vacuum … Read more

The Mars family controls one of America’s largest private companies and almost never gives an interview or appears at a public event, a tradition of invisibility Forrest Mars Sr. enforced for the rest of his life after one 1966 magazine profile enraged him

Resource Hubs: For more on founder-driven companies and the families behind them, see Growth List’s coverage of the largest private companies in America, multigenerational family businesses, and recently funded startups backed by founder capital rather than venture money. In 1966, Forrest Mars Sr. agreed to a single sit-down interview with Candy Industry & Confectioner’s Journal. … Read more

When cosmonauts and astronauts climb out of a Soyuz capsule on the Kazakh steppe, recovery crews have learned to expect the same reaction Doug Wheelock described after 163 days in orbit, a wave of grass and soil scent so intense that returning crew often have to sit down.

Explore more from the Growth List Resource Hubs: curated reads on startup data, founder behaviour, and the strange edges of human experience that intersect with how we work and build. Doug Wheelock spent time aboard the International Space Station, and when he climbed out of his Soyuz capsule onto the Kazakh steppe, the thing that … Read more

Coca-Cola’s formula could leak tomorrow and the company would lose almost nothing in enterprise value, because the 1885 trademark precedent set in an Atlanta courtroom is what every cent of the brand’s 90-billion-dollar valuation actually rests on

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Asa Candler walked into a Fulton County, Georgia courthouse in 1888 and within five years he had spent roughly $2,300 buying out every remaining claim to the formula a morphine-addicted pharmacist named John Pemberton had cooked up in a brass kettle in his Atlanta backyard. Candler didn’t care much about the syrup. He cared about … Read more

Bell Labs in Murray Hill ran on a rule Mervin Kelly built into the architecture — every researcher had to keep their office door open, and the hallway became the company’s real innovation engine

Close-up of 'Startup' written on a glass panel in an office setting.

Mervin Kelly, an executive who ran Bell Labs during the post-war era, made researchers walk to lunch. The dining room sat at the far end of a long corridor in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and the route was deliberate. A solid-state physicist heading for coffee would pass a metallurgist, a vacuum-tube engineer, a topologist working … Read more

Hedy Lamarr, between film shoots in 1941, sketched out a frequency-hopping signal system on the back of sheet music with composer George Antheil to help Allied torpedoes evade jamming, and that same patent now underpins the Bluetooth handshake in every pair of wireless earbuds.

Close-up of 'Startup' written on a glass panel in an office setting.

🗺 Part of the Growth List Startup Lists Collection All Startup Lists | By Funding Stage | Sales Outreach | Startup Intelligence Walk into any coffee shop and count the wireless earbuds. Pair a phone to a rental car. Tap a contactless card. Open a laptop and watch it scan for a network. Every one … Read more