The shipping container is a plain steel box. Its inventor was an impatient truck driver. The box is the reason a T-shirt from Bangladesh costs what it does.

Clarence Birdseye did not discover freezing in a lab. He saw it on a frozen lake in Labrador, and then asked the one question nobody else had.

For three decades an American department store sold complete homes by mail order. The pieces arrived in boxcars. It is the best lesson in bundling I know.

Decades before radio, a Hungarian inventor ran a daily news and music service over telephone wires to thousands of homes. Every streaming service today is a copy of it.