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The methodology of mass production became widespread in the twentieth century, but it is based, for the most part, on nineteenth century ideas. It is a phenomenon that, although its origins were mostly American, changed the entire world. The innovation of the use of interchangeable parts, the feasibility of which was demonstrated by the Cadillac Motor Car Company in 1908, was instrumental in making mass production possible.

After several years of evolution and development, the British Broadcasting Company, Ltd., a private company, was rechartered in late 1926 as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). On January 1, 1927, the new entity officially came into being. The new BBC, however, was not a radical departure from what had previously existed. Rather, the new public corporation was a logical outcome of various social, cultural, institutional, and political developments established long before the founding of the private company in 1922.

On May 10, 1893, the New York Central Railroad's Empire State Express became the first locomotive to reach the then-unheard-of speed of 112.5 miles per hour.

Walt Disney believed Song of the South would be his masterpiece. Instead, it is one of the most controversial films Disney Studios ever produced, so much so that since 1986 it has not be seen commercially in its entirety anywhere.

In 1953, John Backus and a team of programmers from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) started a project to develop a high-level language for its 700 series of computers. By 1954, the name FORTRAN was adopted as an abbreviation for IBM’s FORmula TRANslating System. The FORTRAN I compiler was developed in 1957 for the IBM 704 computer. It had most of the features of later FORTRAN compilers, including variables, arrays, and functions. FORTRAN was primarily developed to support scientific programming with applications coming from areas such as matrix algebra, linear programming, and differential equations.

Intel Corporation was the original microprocessor company. Robert Norton Noyce, who founded the company with Gordon E. Moore, was one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. Intel employee Marcian Edward Hoff, Jr., invented the microprocessor when he recognized that the logical development of the integrated circuit was to place the entire circuitry of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) onto a single piece of silicon. This discovery made the microcomputer revolution possible.

The opening of EPCOT Center marked the fulfillment of Walt Disney’s final dream, although it was a dream that had changed greatly since Disney first envisioned the project in 1965. EPCOT (for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) had its origins in Disney’s work for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, for which his company designed several attractions, including Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, the Carousel of Progress, and It’s a Small World. These attractions later became staples at Disneyland, Disney’s California amusement park, but the experience led Disney to think about ways to solve the problems of urban living in the United States. He became convinced that a Disney-designed and -operated city dedicated to the happiness of its residents could elevate urban living in the same way Disneyland had transformed the old-fashioned amusement park into the modern theme park.

The graphical user interface (GUI), first used on Apple’s Macintosh computer, changed fundamentally the way most people interact with computers. Earlier use of punch cards had gradually been replaced by interfacing with computers by means of the “command line.” Working with a black screen on which fuzzy, crudely formed characters appeared, users had to memorize countless arcane text strings and type them error free in order to control their computers. Word processing required inserting extra characters to specify formatting, footnotes, and other functions. File names were limited to only eight presuffix characters and so were often enigmatic. This cumbersome system was distracting and had a steep learning curve. The brilliant, dedicated, and youthful team that created the Macintosh, or Mac, utilized nearly five decades of visionary thinking to change all this.

The microelectronics industry began shortly after World War II with the invention of the transistor. During the war, it was discovered while radar was being developed that certain crystalline substances, such as germanium and silicon, possessed unique electrical properties that made them excellent signal detectors. This class of materials became known as semiconductors, because they were neither conductors nor insulators. Immediately after the war, Bell Telephone Laboratories began to conduct research on semiconductors in the hope that they might yield some benefits for communications. The Bell physicists learned to control the electrical properties of semiconductor crystals by “doping” them with minute impurities. When two thin wires for current were attached to this material, a crude device was obtained that could amplify voice. The transistor, as this device was called, was developed late in 1947. The transistor duplicated many functions of vacuum tubes, but was smaller, required less power, and generated less heat. The three Bell Labs scientists who headed its development—William Shockley, Walter H. Brattain, and John Bardeen—won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The computer revolution, which began shortly after the end of World War II, seemed to have reached a state of maturity by the late 1960’s. At that time, International Business Machines (IBM) dominated the field, producing large machines called mainframes used primarily by government agencies and major corporations. IBM’s chief rivals in the mainframe business were Burroughs, Univac, National Cash Register, Control Data, Honeywell, Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and General Electric. On the horizon were such significant Japanese companies as NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi. The industry’s attention was concentrated on IBM, its rivals, and mainframes.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is a large multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company that operates out of Shenzhen, China. Its many subsidiaries market a broad range of internet-related products and services around the world. Tencent is perhaps best known as the company behind the popular social media, instant messaging, and mobile payment app WeChat. It is also recognized as the largest company in the video game industry on the basis of its many investments in that market. As a whole, Tencent’s range of offerings is diverse, running the gamut from video gaming and social media to cloud services, streaming, advertising, digital content, financial services, artificial intelligence, transport, retail, education, and health care. Tencent’s success is driven in part by a corporate culture that stresses critical values like integrity, proactivity, collaboration, and creativity.

In 1910, Charles Ranlett Flint created Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR). Flint was a colorful promoter who had earlier created American Woolen, United States Rubber, and American Chicle; he was also a founder of the Automobile Club of America. Today CTR would be called a conglomerate, given that its divisions were largely unrelated to one another. International Time Recording manufactured workplace time clocks and time cards onto which workers punched their hours of arrival and departure. The Computing Scale Company of America’s primary product was a scale that came equipped with a chart enabling a clerk to calculate the price of an item from its weight and price per pound. Tabulating Machine Company produced machines used to tabulate results from the 1890 census and the cards on which information was punched.

In 1925, Robert E. Wood, then vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, was responsible for the company’s entering retailing. In 1906, Richard W. Sears wrote that his company did little business in cities and that he believed that cities were not the company’s territory. Nineteen years later, Wood proved that cities were part of Sears territory.

The Boring Company is a civil engineering company founded by Elon Musk. The company’s stated goal is to create high-speed underground transportation systems. Musk initially claimed that these systems would utilize innovative pods to transport passengers hundreds of miles between major population centers. He said the systems would use high-speed pods and carry passengers at high speeds, but completed tunnels instead moved modified electric vehicles at up to 40 miles per hour.

The original business concept behind McDonald’s restaurants emerged in 1948 with the first such restaurant, in San Bernardino, California. At this hamburger, french fries, and milkshake stand, brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald implemented their revolutionary “Speedee Service System,” the basic format of the modern fast-food restaurant. This self-service, assembly-line system eliminated the need for waiters, carhops, dishwashers, and bus boys. Paper plates and plastic utensils replaced dishware, glassware, and silverware.

Swiss Family Robinson is a family film that tells the story of a family that, while en route to a new life in New Guinea to evade Napoleon’s influence on Switzerland, is shipwrecked on an unsettled island and their adventures battling pirates and building a new home. The film was based on the 1812 novel Der Schweizerische Robinson ("The Swiss Robinson"), written by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss, who crafted the story as a lesson in self-sufficiency for his four sons. The 1960 Walt Disney film is only loosely based on the story, tweaking the original by adding a female love interest for the boys, as well as the pirates who attack the island.

Ernst & Young Global Limited is a privately held company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Ernst & Young Global Limited is the guiding organization for the network of professional services firms that together make up Ernst & Young, or EY. Ernst & Young firms offer audit, tax, technology, and advisory services around the world. The company formed in 1989 when two of the world’s largest accounting firms—which had started in the late 1800s and early 1900s—merged. By 2022, Ernst & Young firms employed more than 359,400 people around the world.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is a privately held company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is the guiding organization of the Deloitte organization, which is made of numerous member firms. Member firms offer business services such as consulting, auditing, financial advisory, and tax services. By 2022, Deloitte employed more than 415,000 employees.

The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG) is a publicly held business consulting company headquartered in the United States. BCG provides management consulting services to other companies to help them improve their operations and performance. When it was founded in the 1960s, BCG helped develop the field of management consulting, eventually becoming an industry leader. Management principles that were developed at BCG, such as its growth share matrix, have become commonly used management tools. The company is also known as one of the “big three” management consulting companies because of its size and popularity.

Mahindra & Mahindra is a large manufacturing and design company that was originally founded in Ludhiana, India, in 1945. Though the company was created as a steel trading firm, it quickly established itself by manufacturing automobiles. Over time, Mahindra & Mahindra expanded into a wide variety of industries. Most notably, the company grew into one of the largest agricultural equipment and tractor manufacturers in the world. Though its automobile offerings are most popular in Indian and European markets, Mahindra & Mahindra opened a manufacturing plant in the United States in 2017. It launched its first commercial offering in North America the following year.

Founded by the government of India in 1981, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, formerly Maruti Udyog Limited, is a holding company involved in automobile manufacturing, sales, and related ventures headquartered in New Delhi, India. The following year it merged with Suzuki Motor Corporation as a minor partner and soon after opened its first manufacturing facility. The government divested its share to the Japanese automotive manufacturer in 2003. As of 2023, the company was a 56.38-percent subsidiary of Suzuki Motor.

Tata Motors Limited is an automotive manufacturer headquartered in Mumbai, India. Among its automobile brands are Altroz, Tiago, and Tigor; its sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are Punch, Nexon, Harrier, and Safari. Commercial products include load and passenger transportation such as construction vehicles and buses. Its subsidiary Tata Technologies works with a dozen original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the aerospace sector and manufactures tracked and wheeled combat vehicle platforms for India’s defense forces. These include light armored vehicles and troop carriers as well as containers used for command posts and missile launchers. The company’s experience with defense manufacturing dates to the 1940s when it produced armored steel during World War II.

MetLife, Inc. is a widely recognized insurance firm that provides insurance, annuities, and employee benefits programs to approximately 100 million customers around the world. Also known as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MLIC), MetLife is counted among the world’s twenty-five largest insurance companies. Originally founded in 1868 and headquartered in New York, MetLife is one of the oldest insurance companies in North America and has long been considered a leader in the financial services market. As of 2023, MetLife operates in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and more than fifty nations around the world.

The Rolls-Royce Corporation was founded during the first decade of the twentieth century, the result of the efforts of Charles Stewart Rolls (1877-1910), Henry Royce (1863-1933), and Claude Johnson (1864-1926). With the exception of a brief interlude during World War I, the firm was recognized for the excellence of its very finely designed, engineered, and crafted automobiles, including the Silver Ghost and Phantom models. Beginning in 1929, however, the firm began making sophisticated and powerful piston airplane engines as well as cars. Rolls-Royce’s Aero Division activities intensified on the eve of World War II, culminating in the famous Merlin engine design. It was the Merlin engine, in Spitfires and Hurricanes, that proved decisive during the 1940 Battle of Britain. As the war progressed, Rolls-Royce refined the Merlin, making it far more powerful and thus enabling fighters to increase their top speeds dramatically. Thanks to the efforts of Frank Whittle, the company’s staff also began developing jet engines.

The Sony Walkman was the result of the convergence of two technologies: the transistor, which enabled miniaturization of electronic components, and the compact cassette, a worldwide standard for magnetic recording tape. The smallest tape player devised up to that time, the Walkman was based on a systems approach that made use of advances in several unrelated areas, including improved loudspeaker design and reduced battery size. The Sony Corporation brought them together in an innovative product that found a mass market in a remarkably short time.

Chrysler Corporation’s fall from grace was not sudden, nor were its financial difficulties in the late 1970’s unexpected. In 1976, Chrysler lost $282 million. It had a brief resurgence of profitability but in 1978 lost $205 million. Unable to sell the line of big cars it produced during the 1973 gas crunch and caught with insufficient medium-sized and large models when customers turned to them later in the decade, and also plagued by recalls and poor quality control, Chrysler had replaced the American Motors Corporation as the industry’s nominee for the automobile manufacturer most likely to go out of business.

In the early seventeenth century, British East India Company merchants were drawn to the Bay of Bengal, where traditions of maritime trade with Southeast Asia reached back for centuries. For European shipping, however, this coast presented problems. From Cape Comorin to Orissa, the coastline stretched north in an almost unbroken line of sandy beaches upon which giant waves beat incessantly. There were virtually no safe anchorages, and with the wind blowing incessantly landward, no ship could safely anchor close to shore during the fury of the monsoon. The only significant port on the entire east coast was Masulipatam, at the mouth of the Godavari River in the domain of the sultan of Golconda.

Establishment of the first American Tobacco Company (dissolved in 1911) and passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act occurred almost simultaneously in 1890. The two events revealed the two principal sides of the unprecedented thrust of the United States toward the premier position among the world’s industrial and financial giants. One side, manifested initially by evolution of the country’s great railroad empires during the last third of the nineteenth century and then by the trustification of scores of enterprises (tobacco among them), reflected individual as well as national pride in sheer size, productivity, power, and economic freedom, attended by all of their social, political, and economic consequences. The other side registered widespread populist inclinations and the fears of interest groups that perceived corporate trusts and monopolies as threats to themselves and to the U.S. economic system and its spirit of free competition.

In early February of 1900, the first shipments of a new small box camera called the Brownie reached Kodak dealers in the United States and Great Britain. Eager to put photography within the reach of everyone, George Eastman had directed Frank Brownell to design a small camera that could be inexpensively manufactured but still take good photographs. Advertisements for the new Brownie camera proclaimed that everyone—even children—could take good pictures with it. The Brownie was aimed directly at the children’s market, a fact indicated by its packaging, which was decorated with drawings of imaginary elves called “Brownies” created by the Canadian illustrator Palmer Cox . Moreover, the camera cost only one dollar.

The quickening pace of American life achieved a new momentum during the early national period. The westward movement acquired a national character as New Englanders pushed into the Ohio Valley and Virginians filled up Kentucky and Tennessee. The eastern seaboard, with its cities and port facilities, turned to the West for its food, and the grain-producing hinterland responded with increased production. Improved forms of transportation were required to bring the produce of the interior to the coast. Enterprising businessmen, pooling their capital resources, engaged in canal building and railroad construction. Private initiative, in the absence of a consistent government policy of promoting public works, laid the foundation of a national transportation system. This transportation system began with canals, but regions without navigable waterways had to find another method. Railroads provided the answer.

Coca-Cola’s new soft-drink formula. In the early 1980’s, the Coca-Cola Company began experimenting with different sweeteners to produce a new, diet version of Coke. This research continued in 1983, as Coca-Cola sought to develop a sweeter cola to rival Pepsi and increase its market share among teenagers. In January, 1985, operating under extreme security, marketing executives began to develop an advertising campaign for the new, sweeter cola. Hastily, two research companies conducted market research regarding the new formula. Preliminary blind taste tests indicated that Americans preferred the new, sweeter cola. However, only 20 percent of the taste tests conducted used the final formula. Nonetheless, these results guided Coca-Cola management’s decision to market the new formula.

FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslating system)—the first widely accepted, high-level computer language—was delivered by John Backus and colleagues at IBM in April, 1957. It was designed to support programming in a mathematical language natural to scientists and engineers and has achieved unsurpassed success in scientific computation.

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, James Buchanan (Buck) Duke (1856-1925) began steering the American Tobacco Company (ATC) into creating a monopoly of American tobacco products that was modeled after John D. Rockefeller’s (1839-1937) Standard Oil Trust. A group of farmers in the Black Patch of southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee who depended on tobacco for their livelihood reacted by forming the Night Riders, a vigilante group that sought to drive out farmers affiliated with ATC. It was, however, the Supreme Court that ended the Duke monopoly by finding both Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and forcing both companies to break up. By the mid-twentieth century, increasing knowledge of the link between cigarette smoking and diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure completed the downfall of ATC. American Tobacco was acquired by the British American Tobacco Company in the 1990s.

AmerisourceBergen Corporation is a drug wholesaling company based in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania. Its roots may be traced through numerous druggists and entrepreneurs back to 1871, and some of its most important developmental steps occurred in 1947 and 1969, but the company in its modern form and name began in 2001. That year, existing pharmaceutical companies Bergen Brunswig and AmeriSource merged to form AmerisourceBergen. Prior businesses added to the conglomerate over its long development include Wheelock-Finlay, the Brunswig Drug Company, Bergen Drug Company (founded 1947), The Drug House, and Alco Standard Corporation.

The first European contact with the Cree occurred in 1611, but it was fully a hundred years before extensive contacts between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Cree created one of the most lucrative settler-Indian partnerships for a colonial economy in North America. The arrangement initially had advantages for the Cree as well. When the Hudson’s Bay Company first established contacts and trading posts on the shores of Hudson Bay, they planted themselves in the center of Cree territory. The Cree dominated all contact with the White traders by controlling the waterways from the lands west of the bay, allowing only their allies the Assiniboine to have equal contact with the Europeans. The fame of the Cree comes from their essential role as a “middleman” in relations with Indians far to the west of Hudson Bay itself. According to Leonard Mason, the history of Cree-settler contact can be divided roughly into three periods: the period of the Cree initiating contact with settlers (1610–1690), the period of settlers initiating contact with the Cree (1690–1820), and Indian rehabilitation (1820–1940). Cree

“Dymaxion” was a word that R. Buckminster Fuller liked. Developed through an interaction between Fuller and an advertising specialist, this word became the hallmark of some of his most famous inventions, including the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, and the Dymaxion Map. He once defined “dymaxion”—a combination of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion”—as “maximum gain of advantage from minimum energy input,” and the word came to mean technologies that provided maximum performance from available knowledge.

On July 26, 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company. His declaration that evening, during a speech in the port city of Alexandria, surprised the world. It also set in motion a train of events that soon led to a coordinated British, French, and Israeli attack on Egypt that some saw as the last of British and French colonialism. The repercussions were widespread, and many people were deprived of life, freedom, home, property, or country as events unfolded.

When the U.S. Congress created Amtrak on October 30, 1970, by passing the Rail Passenger Service Act, it took one in a series of steps increasing government involvement in railroad transportation. Railroads had an important role in the development of the United States. Trains carried passengers and supplies to the frontier and brought back food, lumber, and minerals to the population centers of the East. The federal government encouraged the growth of railroads by giving their builders enormous land grants, including not only rights-of-way but millions of acres on both sides of the tracks. This land increased tremendously in value because of the presence of the railroad.

The first permanent English colony in America was established at Jamestown , Virginia, in 1607. By 1618, the colony had neither prospered greatly nor realized the full expectations of the London Company (also known as the Virginia Company of London), which had been responsible for its founding. Twice, the London Company had been reorganized in unsuccessful efforts to make the Virginia venture turn a profit, but by 1618, it was again on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1617, as an inducement to settlement, the company had sanctioned the introduction of private land tenure and the creation of particular plantations, which had resulted in widely scattered settlements and confused land titles.

Strategic bomber designed and built by Boeing Company. When the B-52 entered U.S. Air Force(USAF) service in 1955, it began a career that continued into the twenty-first century. At a time when the Soviet Union lacked an intercontinental bomber, the B-52 gave the United States an advantage in strategic nuclear strike capacity. The bomber enabled the USAF to strike targets in the Soviet Union from bases within the continental United States. Because of its ability to do so, the B-52 also became a psychological weapon and helped allay some of the Cold War fears of the American public.

On January 10, 1870, the oil refining partnership of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler dissolved and reconstituted itself as the Standard Oil Company, a joint-stock corporation organized under the laws of the state of Ohio. The founders did not intend to sell stock to the public but planned to use stock to pay for acquiring other refineries while maintaining control in the hands of John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, and Henry M. Flagler.

Almost from the beginning, incompatible hardware and software had been the bane of the microcomputer industry. In its early days, there were dozens of companies, each with its own proprietary architecture. Changing computers often required one to laboriously retype all of one’s existing data. The introduction of the International Business Machines (IBM) personal computer (PC) in 1981 and the subsequent development of IBM compatibles, or “clones,” created a de facto standard throughout much of the computer industry. However, when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, it chose to develop a completely different standard.

When International Business Machines (IBM) decided to develop computers for use by businesses in the 1950’s, it faced a problem that had troubled the earliest computer designers: how to store data reliably and inexpensively both during immediate processing and for later use. In the early 1940’s, during the early days of electro-mechanical computation, the English inventor Andrew D. Booth produced spinning paper disks on which he stored data by means of punched holes, only to abandon the idea because of the insurmountable engineering problems he foresaw. To work reliably, such disks would have to rotate quickly and in a stable fashion; in order to record enough data to be efficient and therefore economically feasible, the read/write head—the device that would encode and decode data on the spinning disk—would have to hover very close to the disk surface without actually touching it. The project was abandoned when these requirements were deemed impossible.

Produced by the Ford Motor Company and sometimes called the Ford Edsel, the Edsel became synonymous with a marketing and branding failure. The Edsel was introduced in 1957 to huge amounts of fanfare, bolstered by a “teaser” advertising campaign that showed the car blurred or hidden under wrap, but by 1959, the decision was made to cease production of the car. The car boasted several new innovations, including its “rolling dome” speedometer and its “teletouch” transmission shifting system on the center of the steering wheel.

Before World War II, two-seater sports cars were essentially the toys of the rich and mostly restricted to European roadways. During the late 1940’s, however, imports such as the Jaguar XK-120 and MG-TD became increasingly visible in metropolitan America. The most expensive cars were still purchased largely by the wealthy, but the relatively affordable MGs revealed an appetite for fun-to-drive sports cars in middle-class America.

McKinsey & Company, colloquially known as McKinsey, is an international management consulting firm headquartered in New York City. McKinsey is a private corporation owned by high-level employees. It is considered one of the “big three” management consulting firms and the first firm to offer such services. As a management consulting firm, McKinsey advises other companies, giving suggestions that will help them improve profitability and growth. McKinsey also offers some services to help implement its advice.

Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company focused on technology. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, it was formed by the restructuring of tech giant Google in 2015. The move made Google a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., along with some entities that were previously subsidiaries of Google. At its creation, Alphabet ranked among the top five technology companies in the United States, along with Facebook (which became Meta), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

Meta is a digital services provider primarily focused on social media. The company, founded by entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, began as Facebook. Its flagship product was initially a social media website that allowed for simple communication between members of Harvard. However, it was quickly expanded to include all colleges and universities across the United States, then to all adults over the age of thirteen.

Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese-language internet services company known for its search engine, Baidu. Baidu, Inc.’s products include the Baidu search engine app as well as Baidu Baike, Baidu Maps, Baidu Health, DuerOS, Hoakan, Quanmin, and dozens of others. The company’s search engine provides multiple searches—image, top, video, and web—as well as news and a web dictionary. Baidu also provides advertising and online marketing services and AI Cloud. Its chief competitors globally are Meta Platforms Inc. in the United States and three Chinese companies, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Xiaomi Corp., and Meituan. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—another internet and technology company—are China’s three largest companies; the trio is often referred to as BAT.

Business Person. Sumner Redstone was born Sumner Murray Rothstein in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the older of Max and Belle Rothstein’s sons. In 1940, the family surname was changed to Redstone. Sumner Redstone grew up in a public housing project apartment in a Jewish community in the west end of Boston. His father, proud to be a second-generation American, sold linoleum and wholesale liquor before becoming an owner of drive-in theaters and nightclubs. During his childhood, Redstone was required to study hard and work diligently. In 1940, Redstone graduated from Boston Latin School, earning the highest grade point average ever recorded at the school. Over the next two years Redstone earned the credits necessary to obtain a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard University. His foreign language studies and participation in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) led Redstone to receive a special invitation to join a team of U.S. Army cryptographers that decoded Japanese messages during World War II. After the war, Redstone’s final military assignment was overseeing entertainment for Army hospitals. His father’s nightclub connections greatly assisted in this endeavor. [c]Business Executives;Sumner Redstone[Redstone] Redstone, Sumner Rand, Ayn Business;film theaters Film theaters;Sumner Redstone[Redstone]