Startups

Paul Julius Reuter founded the agency on carrier pigeons between Aachen and Brussels in 1850, and when Thomson Corporation bought Reuters for 17 billion dollars in 2008 not a single direct descendant held a journalism job to attend the announcement

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A serene image of two pigeons soaring in the blue sky, showcasing the freedom of flight.

Reuters is not a newspaper, has never owned a printing press, and began life as a flock of homing pigeons. In 1850 the birds carried closing stock prices across the roughly 76-mile gap between Aachen and Brussels, the point where the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines stopped short of each other. Paul Julius Reuter set … Read more

By the time the last Bombe was dismantled at Eastcote in 1959, around 211 of the bronze-drummed machines had been built and every one was broken up for scrap on Churchill’s orders, leaving the women who had operated them legally forbidden from explaining to their husbands what they had done during the war.

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A reflective woman poses elegantly with a typewriter in a black and white setting, evoking nostalgia.

By 1959, the last of them were gone. Around 211 Bombe machines had been built to break the German Enigma cipher, and on Winston Churchill’s orders every one was eventually reduced to scrap—drums, relays, miles of wiring, the whole apparatus melted down for the metal. The women who had spent their war running these machines … Read more

Octopuses taste with their suckers using about 10,000 chemoreceptor cells in each sucker, while most of their 500 million neurons sit in their arms, letting a detached arm reach, grasp, and reject food for nearly an hour after separation

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Vibrant octopus swims gracefully in Barcelona aquarium, showcasing marine life.

The arm is already moving when the dish lid comes off, curling, probing, pressing suckers against the glass, then pulling back from a taste it does not want. The octopus it belonged to is no longer attached. The central brain is no longer sending commands. The arm still has enough nervous system inside it to … Read more

Chad Hurley registered the YouTube domain on 14 February 2005 as a video-dating play called Tune In Hook Up, and the pivot to general uploads came after the team offered 20 dollars to any woman who would post a profile clip and got no takers

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Resource Hubs: Explore curated lists of newly funded startups, browse weekly funding rounds, and find verified decision-maker contacts for cold outreach campaigns. YouTube exists because three former PayPal engineers — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — could not convince a single woman to upload a video of herself to their dating site in … Read more

In 1879, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped a bright Martian patch as Nix Olympica, the Snows of Olympus, not realising the albedo mark sat over a shield volcano about 370 miles wide that Mariner 9 would finally resolve through dust 92 years later

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Resource Hubs: For more long-form science features, browse the Growth List blog. For weekly newly-funded startup data, see Growth List. In 1971, NASA’s Mariner 9 slipped into orbit around Mars in the middle of a planet-wide dust storm and waited. When the dust began to thin, the first high places to show through were the … Read more

Yvon Chouinard’s first business plan was a single sentence written in 1957 — make a piton that doesn’t break on the third placement — and that one constraint is what eventually produced a company doing 1.5 billion in annual revenue

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Detailed shot of hands using a carabiner while rock climbing indoors, conveying action and focus.

Explore more founder-origin features and newly-funded-startup intelligence in the Growth List Resource Hubs, where the editorial team tracks how today’s category leaders started — and who’s funding the next ones. Yvon Chouinard was a teenager in the late 1950s when he bought a coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers from a … Read more

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the Pioneer 10 plaque in 1972 with 14 pulsars etched as a galactic return address, and because those stellar clocks slow over time, the map also points back to the probe’s launch epoch

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A captivating cosmic scene with golden dust resembling stars against a deep black background.

Most people remember the Pioneer 10 plaque as a picture: two nude humans, a hydrogen atom, a small drawing of the Solar System. The picture is the easiest part to see. The stranger payload is the 14-line star chart on its left side, a galactic return address built from dead stars that tick. Carl Sagan … Read more

Concorde’s nose drooped on landing because at the angle of attack required to keep its delta wing aerodynamic below 250 knots, the pilots could not physically see the runway, a problem British and French engineers solved in 1965 by hinging the entire forward fuselage on hydraulic rams.

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🗺 Part of the Growth List Startup Lists Collection All Startup Lists | By Funding Stage | Sales Outreach | Startup Intelligence At Mach 2 the nose of Concorde was a needle, a long tapered fairing built to slip through a supersonic shockwave with as little drag as possible. On final approach into Heathrow that … Read more

Hyperion stands more than 380 feet tall somewhere inside Redwood National Park, and the National Park Service now treats the grove around the tallest known living tree as a closed area where visitors can face six months in jail and a $5,000 fine

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Explore a misty morning trail through a majestic redwood forest. Nature's serenity awaits.

Resource Hubs: For more long-form features on natural wonders, hidden places, and the science of human attention, browse the Growth List features library. A cathedral has a front door. Hyperion does not. The tallest known living tree on Earth stands somewhere in Redwood National Park, and the National Park Service will not tell visitors where … Read more

Before Eagle rose from the Sea of Tranquility on 21 July 1969, Michael Collins had spent about 27 hours alone in Columbia, circling behind the Moon in 47-minute radio silences while preparing for the possibility that Armstrong and Aldrin never came back

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Resource Hubs: For more on funded startups and verified decision-maker contacts, browse the Growth List weekly lists of newly-funded companies, sourced from Crunchbase. Michael Collins spent the most famous hours of Apollo 11 above the Moon, alone in the command module Columbia, while every photograph from the surface seemed to prove he was the one … Read more

John Paulson personally cleared nearly 4 billion dollars in 2007 shorting subprime mortgages his team had spent eighteen months modeling, then dumped his entire Sino-Forest stake four years later within two weeks of a short-seller’s fraud report, booking a loss reported at roughly 720 million dollars

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Flat lay showing coins, calculator, and charts on a red background for financial analysis and business concepts.

John Paulson walked into the offices of Goldman Sachs and asked the bank to manufacture something the cash market could not supply on its own: bespoke exposure to the riskiest tranches of subprime mortgage bonds, packaged into synthetic securities he could then bet against at scale. He bought credit default swaps referencing those bonds across … Read more

Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund that owns about 1.5 percent of every listed company on Earth from a headquarters in Oslo, follows a 2004 ethical rulebook that still bans Boeing and Airbus over nuclear weapons, and returned 13 percent in 2026 and 15 percent in 2026 anyway.

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🗺 Part of the Growth List Startup Lists Collection All Startup Lists | By Funding Stage | Sales Outreach | Startup Intelligence The retreat of ESG in the United States has quietly redrawn the map of who actually buys compliance, governance, and climate tooling. For B2B sales teams chasing funded startups, the high-intent buyers no … Read more