Innovation & Wealth
190 items and 330 connections. Innovators, entrepreneurs and fortunes, and how each wave of innovation changed society: who got rich, who got poorer, and why.
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Innovators & entrepreneurs
Companies & fortunes
Innovations & industries
Zoom in to reveal more detail, out for the big picture · click a dot to open it · click a ◆ on a line for how two items connect · +N = hidden details · drag to move · tap an era at the top to jump to it.■ innovator or entrepreneur⬢ company or fortune▲ innovation◎ idea or movement● event▮ law or policy
Ancient merchants & trade3000 BC – AD 500
Trade routes, coins and the first merchants.
Medieval & Renaissance money500 – 1600
Bankers, bookkeeping and the Medici and Fugger fortunes.
Trading companies & early capitalism1600 – 1760
Joint-stock companies, stock exchanges and the first bubbles.
Industrial revolution1760 – 1870
Steam, factories and railways: new fortunes and new hardships.
The Gilded Age1870 – 1914
Oil, steel and electricity; robber barons and trustbusters.
Mass production & the consumer age1914 – 1970
Assembly lines, the Depression, the middle class and Asian giants.
The information age1970 – 2007
Chips, PCs and the internet; globalization's winners and losers.
Platforms, mobile & AI2007 – today
Smartphones, platforms, electric cars and AI; record fortunes.
Every item as its own page (190)
Ancient merchants & trade
- Mesopotamian merchants, loans and interest
- Debt bondage and slavery in ancient economies
- Old Assyrian merchant firms of Kanesh
- Code of Hammurabi's rules on loans and trade
- Phoenician sea trade
- Phoenician alphabet
- First coins (Lydia)
- Solon's cancellation of debts in Athens
- King Croesus of Lydia
- Roman denarius and Mediterranean commerce
- Silk Road trade network
- Marcus Licinius Crassus, Rome's richest man
- Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices
Medieval & Renaissance money
- Islamic trade networks, cheques and partnerships
- Commercial Revolution of medieval Europe
- Paper money in Song China
- Merchant and craft guilds
- Church ban on usury
- Fibonacci's Liber Abaci brings Hindu-Arabic numerals
- Hanseatic League
- Double-entry bookkeeping
- Mansa Musa of Mali
- Black Death and the labor shortage
- Medici Bank
- Gutenberg's printing press
- Jakob Fugger 'the Rich'
- Age of Discovery and the Columbian Exchange
- Luca Pacioli, 'father of accounting'
- The Price Revolution
- The Fuggerei social housing estate
- Potosí silver and forced labor
- The joint-stock company
Trading companies & early capitalism
- English East India Company
- Mercantilism
- Amsterdam stock exchange
- Dutch East India Company (VOC)
- Patent law and the Statute of Monopolies
- Tulip mania
- Sugar plantations and the Atlantic slave trade
- Royal African Company
- Bank of England and the national debt
- Dojima Rice Exchange, an early futures market
- British Agricultural Revolution
- Calico Acts banning Indian cotton cloth
- Newcomen steam engine
- John Law and the Mississippi Bubble
- Bubble Act
- South Sea Company and its bubble
- East India Company rule in India
Industrial revolution
- Enclosure of common land
- The Industrial Revolution
- Cotton spinning machines (jenny, water frame, mule)
- James Watt and Matthew Boulton's steam engine
- Josiah Wedgwood
- The Rothschild banking family
- Richard Arkwright and Cromford Mill
- The factory system and industrial labor
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
- Child labor in mills and mines
- Eli Whitney's cotton gin
- Malthus and the population trap
- British Factory Acts
- Abolition of the slave trade and slavery
- Luddite machine-breaking
- Ricardo's comparative advantage
- Railways and the railway age
- Jardine Matheson and the opium trade
- Electric telegraph
- Railway Mania
- Repeal of the Corn Laws
- Marx, Engels and the critique of capitalism
- Limited liability company laws
- Bessemer steel process
- Cornelius Vanderbilt
The Gilded Age
- First globalization: trade, migration, empire
- John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil
- Meiji Japan and the zaibatsu
- Robber barons and the great trusts
- Second Industrial Revolution: steel, oil, electricity
- J. P. Morgan
- Andrew Carnegie
- Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone
- Thomas Edison and General Electric
- Mass migration to the Americas
- Frederick Taylor's scientific management
- Colonial empires and extraction
- George Westinghouse
- Labor unions and the AFL
- The automobile
- War of the currents: Westinghouse and Tesla vs Edison
- Nikola Tesla
- Progressive Era reform and trust-busting
- Sherman Antitrust Act
- Homestead Strike
- Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog
- U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar company
- Ida Tarbell's exposé of Standard Oil
- Henry Ford
- Standard Oil breakup
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
- Federal income tax (16th Amendment)
- Federal Reserve Act
- Moving assembly line
Mass production & the consumer age
- Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission
- Ford's $5 day
- IBM under Thomas J. Watson
- Mass production and the consumer economy
- General Motors under Alfred Sloan
- Walt Disney and the Disney company
- Soviet-style central planning
- Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression
- Glass–Steagall Act (bank separation and FDIC)
- The New Deal
- Redlining and federal mortgage exclusion
- Wagner Act: legal right to unionize
- John Maynard Keynes and the General Theory
- Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, child labor ban)
- Samsung (Lee Byung-chul)
- World War II mobilization and wartime research
- Bretton Woods system
- Postwar boom and the rise of the middle class
- Hyundai (Chung Ju-yung)
- Sony (Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka)
- Venture capital and Silicon Valley
- Levittown and the suburban boom
- Transistor (Bell Labs)
- Toyota Production System (lean manufacturing)
- East Asian economic miracles
- Ray Kroc and McDonald's
- Container shipping (Malcom McLean)
- Great Leap Forward famine
- Sam Walton and Walmart
- South Korea's export-led five-year plans
- Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
- Intel and Moore's law
The information age
- Friedman doctrine: business exists to make profits
- Microchips and the personal computer
- 1973 oil shock and the rise of OPEC
- Bill Gates and Microsoft
- John Bogle's index fund
- Steve Jobs and Apple
- Deindustrialization and the Rust Belt
- Michael Milken, junk bonds and buyouts
- Oracle (Larry Ellison)
- Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening
- Deregulation, privatization and 'shareholder value'
- Globalization and offshoring
- IBM PC and the MS-DOS deal
- The internet
- Breakup of AT&T
- Japan's asset bubble and the 'lost decades'
- TSMC (Morris Chang)
- Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web
- Fall of extreme global poverty
- Russian privatization and the oligarchs
- Nvidia (Jensen Huang)
- Jeff Bezos and Amazon
- BYD (Wang Chuanfu)
- Dot-com boom and bust
- Asian financial crisis
- Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin)
- Tencent (Pony Ma)
- United States v. Microsoft
- Alibaba (Jack Ma)
- Repeal of Glass–Steagall (Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act)
- Enron collapse
- The China shock
- Elon Musk: Tesla and SpaceX
- US housing bubble and subprime mortgages
- Facebook / Meta (Mark Zuckerberg)
Platforms, mobile & AI
- 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession
- iPhone and the smartphone platform economy
- Airbnb and short-term rentals
- Bank bailouts and TARP
- Bitcoin and the crypto boom
- Uber and the gig economy
- Dodd–Frank Act
- The billionaire boom and the inequality debate
- The AI boom: from deep learning to ChatGPT
- Zhang Yiming and ByteDance (TikTok)
- Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- OpenAI and ChatGPT
- Universal basic income debate
- Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse
- Antitrust cases against Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple
- China's tech crackdown (Ant Group IPO halted)
- COVID-19 shock, stimulus and remote work
- CHIPS Act and the chip race
- AI and the future-of-work debate
- AI data center building boom