Famous companies rarely started out doing what made them famous. A Kyoto card printer, a Minnesota mine that found the wrong rock, a book salesman giving away perfume, a spring that fell off a shelf. These tiles follow founders, names and first products back to the moment before anyone knew what the business would become, and correct a few stories that got polished along the way.
Every tile in a Brand Origins game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Unlikely Beginnings
nine stories
1Nintendo began as a Kyoto playing-card shop
On the tile: Nintendo1889
Nintendo's own corporate history opens in 1889, when Fusajiro Yamauchi began manufacturing and selling hanafuda, Japanese flower-pattern playing cards, in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto. The company records a second milestone for 1902: it started making and selling the first western playing cards in Japan. It stayed in that trade a long time. As late as 1968 it was automating the pasting of backing paper onto cards, and its first home video game machines, TV Game 15 and TV Game 6, arrived only in 1977.
Before the bulls and the scissor doors, Ferruccio Lamborghini built machines for farmers. In late 1947 he set out to make a cheap but powerful tractor, buying up inexpensive surplus war equipment and improving the engine and the fueling. The result, the Carioca, was shown to the public on February 3, 1948. Cars waited fifteen years: the 350 GTV prototype appeared at the Turin show in 1963, and the first production Lamborghini, the 350 GT, launched at Geneva in March 1964.
William Wrigley Jr. went to Chicago to sell soap for his father's company, and offered baking powder as a free premium with each box. Customers wanted the baking powder more than the soap, so he switched to selling baking powder. Hunting for a new premium, he turned to chewing gum, and in 1892 offered two brands, Lotta Gum and Vassar. Customers wanted the gum more than the powder. Wrigley took the same hint twice and eventually sold nothing else.
Five men incorporated the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company at Two Harbors in 1902: attorney John Dwan, meat market owner Hermon Cable, Dr. J. Danley Budd, and railroad executives William McGonagle and Henry Bryan. The plan was to mine corundum at Crystal Bay, the premier abrasive for grinding wheels and sandpaper. The corundum was not there. What was there was anorthosite, useless as an abrasive, and the discovery came after the company had run up a large debt.
On July 15, 1887, the principal of an elementary school in the remote city of Hamamatsu sent for a young watchmaker and medical equipment repairman named Torakusu Yamaha to fix the school's reed organ. He fixed it, then built a prototype of his own, and ten years later established Nippon Gakki, the company now called Yamaha. Keeping a homemade organ in tune turned out to be the hard part, and that struggle is why a tuning fork became the company emblem in 1898.
Tokuji Hayakawa and his brother ran a metal stationery factory, and in 1915 he fitted a new lead-thrusting device into a sturdy metal shaft and called it the Hayakawa Mechanical Pencil. Stationery wholesalers were unimpressed and it did not sell at all. Then the First World War created shortages in Europe, a Yokohama trading house placed a large order, and buyers abroad took to it. Renamed the Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil, it became known simply as the Sharp Pencil, and by the company's own account that is the origin of the name Sharp.
In 1837, 25-year-old Charles Lewis Tiffany and his friend John B. Young opened a store at 259 Broadway in New York on a thousand-dollar advance from Tiffany's father. It sold stationery and fancy goods, including costume jewelry. The first three days of sales came to $4.98. The business survived that start, and the name that now means diamonds began over a counter of writing paper and trinkets.
David McConnell sold books door to door and offered a small sample of perfume to housewives who would listen to his pitch. The perfume was the part they wanted. He gave up the books in 1886 and named the new venture the California Perfume Company, chosen to invoke images of the beauty and excitement of that state. The first woman to sell it door to door was Mrs. P. F. E. Albee of Winchester, New Hampshire. The firm is now called Avon.
The Harley-Davidson archives describe a wooden shed, 10 by 15 feet, built in 1903 in the Davidson family backyard in Milwaukee after Arthur Davidson's father asked the young men to move their project out of the house. The first machine sold went to a friend named Henry Meyer. Three motorcycles sold that first year. Within ten years the company was turning out just under 13,000 vehicles. Few firms can point to the exact square footage where they began.
Momofuku Ando had lost nearly everything when a credit union he directed went bankrupt in 1957, and he began again in a shed he built behind his home in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, chasing a noodle that would keep on a shelf and cook in hot water in minutes. By his company's account he worked alone for an entire year without a day off, sleeping four hours a night, a complete amateur at noodle-making, with tools he gathered himself. Chicken Ramen went on sale on August 25, 1958, when he was 48.
Sarah Breedlove was born in 1867 near Delta, Louisiana, to parents who had been enslaved. She worked for Annie Malone, another Black hair care entrepreneur, before developing her own products. After marrying Charles Joseph Walker she became known as Madam C. J. Walker, the name she also put on the products. By the late 1910s, the National Archives records, this daughter of former slaves owned and ran the largest Black-owned company in the United States.
Bette Nesmith Graham was an executive secretary for the chairman of a Texas bank, and an imperfect typist. Using her kitchen blender she mixed tempera water-based paint, tinting it to match her company's stationery, then bottled it with labels reading Mistake Out and handed it to friends. She started the Mistake Out Company from her home in 1956, later renamed the product Liquid Paper, and in 1979 sold the business to Gillette for $47.5 million.
Ruth Handler got the idea watching her own daughter play with paper cutout dolls, but the body came from somewhere else. The doll she worked from was a West German novelty made for adults, named Bild Lilli, which she came across on a trip abroad. Mattel showed its redesigned version at the American International Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959, and later settled with Lilli's German creators out of court by buying their patent and copyright.
Elizabeth Magie was issued patent number 748,626 for the Landlord's Game in January 1904, three decades before Monopoly reached stores under another name. She built it with two sets of rules, one rewarding shared wealth and one rewarding domination, to argue that the first was better. Parker Brothers later bought the Landlord's Game rights from her for $500 with an agreement to manufacture it, and published Charles Darrow's version instead.
Milton Hershey traveled to Philadelphia in May 1876 looking for a shop to rent, and found one at 935 Spring Garden Street. Besides confections he sold fruit and nuts, and he made ice cream. The trouble, his own archives say, was that the volume of candy produced was too small to make much of a profit. After six years the business collapsed in bankruptcy. The Lancaster Caramel Company, which finally worked, opened in 1886.
Long before the motorcycles, Soichiro Honda made piston rings. He set up Tokai Seiki Heavy Industry in 1936, and of the fifty rings he submitted to Toyota for quality control, only three met the required standards. He did not close the business. He spent nearly two more years visiting universities and steelmaking companies around Japan to study manufacturing, until the company could supply Toyota and Nakajima Aircraft in quantity and employed more than 2,000 people. One of the roughly 100 patents Honda received was for a piston design.
The Bissells sold crockery and glassware in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and their stock arrived packed in sawdust and straw, leaving a mess on the carpet that was hard to clean up. Melville built a better mechanical carpet sweeper and patented it in 1876. He died of pneumonia in 1889 at 45, and Anna Bissell, a widow with four children, stepped in to lead the company. The Henry Ford calls her the first female CEO in the United States.
On May 20, 1873, Jacob W. Davis received patent number 139,121 for an improvement in fastening pocket openings. The improvement, in the patent's own words, was the employment of a metal rivet or eyelet at each edge of the pocket opening to prevent the ripping of the seam at those points. Davis was a tailor; Levi Strauss was his partner on the patent. Less than a year later the two filed suit against infringers.
George Eastman wanted a name that belonged to no language. In Kodak's own telling he explained that the letter K had been a favorite with him, because it seemed a strong, incisive sort of letter, and that it became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with K. Kodak was the result, trademarked in 1888. The company insists it was invented out of thin air.
In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, master carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen turned his hand to wooden toys and small household items. A new line of work needed a new name, and for a perfectionist that proved harder than expected. He settled on the Danish words leg godt, meaning play well, squeezed into one simple word: LEGO. It first appeared in company documents in early 1936 and officially became the company's name that January. He had nearly chosen LEGIO instead, for the long legions of toys he pictured.
IKEA is an acronym and nothing more. The I and K are Ingvar Kamprad; the E is Elmtaryd, the farm where he grew up; the A is Agunnaryd, the village nearby. He first registered it as a trading company on July 28, 1943, when he was just 17. Furniture was not the idea. In his early years he imported things like pens, watches and nylon stockings, and did not add furniture to the range until 1948.
Carolyn Davidson had started at Portland State as a journalism major and taken a design course. In a hallway a tall man in a suit walked up and asked whether she was the one who could not afford to take oil painting. The man was Phil Knight. She began doing design work for him, and for the piece that became the Swoosh she billed him $35. Her own university now tells the story about one of its alumni.
The tire man was unveiled at the first Paris Motor Show in 1898, drawn by the cartoonist Marius Rossillon, who worked as O'Galop. Above him ran a line borrowed from the Roman poet Horace: Nunc est Bibendum, now is the time to drink. The story goes that at the Paris-Amsterdam-Paris race the driver Léon Théry spotted André Michelin and shouted there is Bibendum, long live Bibendum. Michelin says he apparently named the character by accident.
Emil Jellinek, born in Leipzig in 1853, was an automobile entrepreneur rather than an engineer. He had already entered a race under the pseudonym Mercedes, his daughter's name. By 1900 he had commissioned Wilhelm Maybach to design a new car, and it was delivered that December under the same name. Two years after the car went into mass production, Mercedes was trademarked and legally added to Jellinek's own surname. From then on he signed himself E. J. Mercédès, a man who had taken his daughter's name.
Shojiro Ishibashi founded his tire company in Kurume, Japan, in 1931. Translated literally, Ishibashi means stone bridge, which became the origin of the company's name. By Bridgestone's own account he did not like the sound of Stone Bridge, so he flipped the two words and got Bridgestone. He chose an English name deliberately, to make the company's products easier to accept in overseas markets. His surname has been hiding on the sidewall ever since.
In July 1936 the automobile department of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works marked its first passenger car with a public design competition for a logo. Some 27,000 entries arrived from all over Japan, and the winner set the name in Japanese characters inside a circle. The spelling had shifted, though. Toyota was preferred over the founding family's Toyoda partly because its eight-stroke count was associated with wealth and good fortune. The design was registered in April 1937.
John S. Pemberton made the syrup in 1886. His partner and bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, supplied the name, thinking, in the company's telling, that the two Cs would look well in advertising. Robinson then wrote it out himself, experimenting with an adaptation of the elaborate Spencerian script, a form of penmanship characteristic of that day. The lettering on a bottle today began as one bookkeeper's idea of good business handwriting.
On June 26, 1974, a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, made the first retail scan of a Universal Product Code. The first shopper was Clyde Dawson, head of research and development for Marsh; the cashier was Sharon Buchanan. By the usual account the item was a multipack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit. That pack is often said to sit in the Smithsonian. Smithsonian magazine has corrected its own record: the museum did not collect the gum, and a facsimile was once on display.
In 1968 Spencer Silver, a senior scientist at 3M working on new classes of adhesives, discovered an acrylic one that gripped lightly and let go again. It solved no known problem. For years he talked it up at 3M's internal technical forums, hoping another department would find a use for it. One listener, the researcher Art Fry, coated paper with the adhesive and made notes that could be repositioned. Post-it Notes were introduced nationally in 1980.
Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes set out in 1957 to make a textured wallpaper with an eye on the Beat generation. They ran two pieces of plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine and got plastic film studded with trapped air bubbles, which disappointed them at first. They founded Sealed Air in 1960 to keep developing it. The rescue came from IBM, which had just introduced its 1401 computer and needed a way to ship the delicate machine undamaged.
Kutol Products of Cincinnati contracted with Kroger in 1933 to manufacture wallpaper cleaner, a non-toxic malleable compound of water, salt and flour. The Strong museum reckons it was in homes for at least twenty years before anyone considered it a plaything. Around 1955 Joseph McVicker's sister-in-law Kay Zufall, a schoolteacher, convinced him to think of the product as a handicraft. He set up Rainbow Crafts in 1956, and by 1957 Play-Doh came in red, yellow and blue.
5The first television commercial cost nine dollars
On the tile: Bulova1941
On July 1, 1941, the first day of commercial television in America, WNBT in New York carried a Brooklyn Dodgers game against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field. With it came the spot now counted as the first television commercial: a Bulova clock over a plain map of the United States, and the announcer Ray Forrest saying, "America runs on Bulova time." Bulova was billed $9.00. By an Ad Age count, about 4,000 television sets existed in all of New York that year.
Earle Dickson bought cotton for Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He married Josephine Frances Knight in 1917 and found she was often cutting her fingers in the kitchen, and that the bandages he used to dress the cuts were too large and clumsy. So he folded gauze into a narrow pad, laid it on a strip of surgical tape, and covered the tape with crinoline so it would not stick to itself. By 1924 the company was making them by machine in several sizes.
Arthur Guinness was born near Celbridge, County Kildare, in 1725. He was just 34 when he signed the lease on a then-disused brewery site at St James's Gate in Dublin, on December 31, 1759. The term was nine thousand years, the rent £45 a year, the site four acres. Nobody knew yet whether the beer would sell. The paperwork assumed it would, and he spent the rest of his working life on those four acres.
In 1943 the mechanical engineer Richard James was designing a device the Navy could use to secure equipment on ships that rocked at sea. He dropped the coiled wires he was tinkering with and watched them tumble end over end across the floor. In 1944 his wife Betty scoured the dictionary and settled on slinky, meaning sleek and sinuous in movement. At a Philadelphia department store in 1945, 400 of them sold in under two hours at a dollar each.
The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, Edwin Binney's wife, who had been a teacher in the Bronx. She combined the French words craie, meaning chalk, and oleagineux, meaning oily. The first box, introduced in 1903, held eight colors: black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow and green. It sold for five cents. Every box since has been a variation on a schoolteacher's bilingual pun.