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By ASHLEY DUNN, LA Times Staff Writer

In the summer of 1948, a tiny electronic device called a transistor--the size of a pencil eraser--was presented to the world at a press conference at the headquarters of Bell Laboratories in New York City. It wasn't much of a press conference and it failed to create a buzz over this invention. Even the hometown paper, the New York Times, managed only a few paragraphs on the event in a column about radio news, giving top billing that day to the radio show "Our Miss Brooks."

Who could have guessed that this invention would trigger a technological revolution that would become one of the most sweeping in history? From its creation in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Labs a few months before the press conference, the transistor and its direct descendant, the integrated circuit, have brought about a stunning transformation of society.

Bardeen, a quiet, thoughtful scientist, and the ever-jovial Brattain had done almost all the work developing the transistor. Shockley, their overbearing and arrogant boss, had seized most of the credit. But from that volatile mix sprang a unique invention that eventually turned room-sized computers into hand-held devices, and hulking furniture-sized living room radios into transistor radios, the first of an unceasing flood of portable electronic devices for consumers.

The transistor and the integrated circuit created whole new industries by packing electronic components onto a single silicon chip the size of a fingernail. The versatility and tiny size of the devices opened the way to the exploration of space and the construction of compact digital computers, mobile phones and even Nintendo.

This technology has powered the great global postwar boom, lifting Japan out of the ashes of World War II, turning a once unheralded swath of California, eventually named Silicon Valley, into the center of the computing world and hoisting the U.S. into a position of economic dominance. Along the way, the devices created so many ripples through society that it is hard to say what has not been affected by them.

"The transistor is right up there [as] the single most important invention of our century," said futurist Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park, Calif., consulting firm that studies long-term trends in information technology. "It has made the information revolution possible." That so much could spring from a device with such modest origins is one of the quirks of technological history. The transistor was developed to be a rugged, miniaturized replacement for the vacuum tube, a device developed around the turn of century that acted as a valve for electricity, allowing engineers to guide, amplify, shape and switch the flow of electrons.

The vacuum tube was a wonderfully versatile device, able to amplify radio signals, convert electrical power into different forms and switch on and off at high speed--a crucial ability for the development of computers. Unfortunately, the vacuum tube was also hot, bulky, power-hungry and temperamental in the extreme. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, of Bell Labs, believed that a class of materials known as "semiconductors"--substances such as germanium and silicon that can both conduct or inhibit the flow of electricity--could be used as a replacement for vacuum tubes.

By touching a wire to a piece of germanium with slight impurities in it, the trio found they could control how well the material conducted electricity. They named their invention the "transistor," a word derived from the semiconductor's ability to amplify electrical signals that were transferred through it. The three scientists won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

Shockley eventually became disenchanted with Bell Labs, where his reputation for being overbearing and overly competitive prevented him from being promoted, according to the book "Crystal Fire," which details the discovery of the transistor.
Shockley struck out on his own in 1955, forming the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto, where he had spent most of his childhood. His lab was the first semiconductor company in what would become Silicon Valley. He recruited the best and the brightest. Among his first employees were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to co-found Intel Corp. in 1968.

The first products that used the new transistors--about 1/200th the size of vacuum tubes--were exotic devices such as hearing aids and military equipment. But the introduction of the first pocket-sized transistor radios in 1954 for $49.95 launched the device into the mainstream. Soon, transistors were replacing vacuum tubes in everything from computers to TVs. But it became clear by the mid-1950s that the transistor alone was not a complete solution to the problems of miniaturization. Each transistor had two or more wires coming out of it, which had to be painstakingly soldered to a circuit board by hand.

The solution was separately conceived of in late 1958 and early 1959 by Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments and Noyce. By then Noyce, with Moore, had left Shockley's company because of his erratic behavior to create a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Kilby was a 6-foot-6 Midwesterner who had served in Burma as an OSS radio technician during World War II. Friends described him as reserved and modest, but a born tinkerer who was always searching for problems to solve. Noyce, the son of an Iowa minister, was an affable and confident physicist who had emerged among Shockley's original group of young researchers as a natural leader.

Their idea was to construct the various components of a circuit--transistors, resistors and capacitors--on a single piece of silicon called an "integrated circuit." Kilby built the first device in 1958, but it was Noyce who came up with an inexpensive and efficient method to make the devices in 1959. These integrated circuits combined the power of transistors to control the flow of electricity with the means to pack thousands--and ultimately, millions--of components onto a tiny silicon chip.

William J. Kaiser, chairman of the electrical engineering department at UCLA, said that just a few decades ago, even the most complex electronic devices had only a few hundred components. Today, Intel's Pentium III microprocessor packs 9.5 million transistors on a chip. "Complexity became a possibility," Kaiser said.
Portable, battery-powered devices became possible for the first time, leading to a wide range of products from cardiac pacemakers to hand-held calculators and PCs.
Joseph Schulman is the chief scientist for the Alfred E. Mann Foundation in Valencia, a developer of medical electronic devices. He said the earliest pacemakers from 1958 had only two transistors and were the size of hockey pucks. Today, the most advanced pacemakers are about the size of a silver dollar and almost as thin. Inside are up to a million transistors that allow the device to control the heart in a nearly natural manner.

"This is just something you couldn't make with vacuum tubes," Schulman said.
Transistors and silicon chips became the enablers of a revolution in production, in much the same way that standardized nuts and bolts launched the era of mass production, said Hal Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. These electronic pieces, which cost less than real nuts and bolts, could be mixed to produce wondrously different devices. Essentially, the same chips with different programming could be used in computers, digital cameras and air conditioners.

Silicon Valley also spawned a burst of new millionaires, but among the original inventors of the transistor and integrated circuit, only Noyce and Moore struck it rich as co-founders of Intel. Shockley's company never made a profit and in the 1960s he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he became a controversial figure for his outspoken view that intelligence was determined by race. Shockley died in 1989. Brattain retired from Bell Labs in 1967 and died in 1987. Bardeen later became a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, turned his attention to superconductivity and in 1972 became the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics. Kilby left Texas Instruments in 1970 to pursue his own inventions. He still lives in Dallas and has more than 60 patents in his name, including the hand-held calculator.

"I never imagined it would have this impact," Kilby said of the integrated circuit. "I thought it could be important for electronics, but what I didn't realize was how the price decreases would expand the field. It's just been amazing." Prices, in fact, plummeted, sometimes to mere fractions of a penny. The phenomena was first noted by Gordon Moore, who wrote in 1965 that the price of integrated circuits appeared to drop by half every year while the number of transistors on a silicon chip seemed to double every year. Intel's chips have been a benchmark of "Moore's Law." In 1995, Intel's top of the line Pentium processor sold for almost $700. Today, that same chip sells for less than $40.

All these factors have given the consumer an unprecedented power to communicate and compute on their own, which in turn has forged new types of social and business connections. Saffo said the problems of distance and geography that hindered the old world have begun to be erased by the new age of portable and ubiquitous communications.

He said that perhaps the best sign of the success of the transistor and integrated circuit is how invisible they have become, despite being used in every facet of life.
"It is the enabler of the technology of our times," Saffo said. "It is truly invisible technology."

Ford Offered the Masses Freedom of Movement
2. Henry Ford (1863-1947)
The Model T, Assembly Lines and Life on Wheels

By HENRY FUHRMANN, Times Staff Writer

"History is more or less bunk," said Henry Ford. "The only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today." There's no small measure of irony in the fact that Ford, who had little regard for the judgments of history,

completely altered society, lifestyles, commerce and history itself by creating the Model T and selling it to the masses. When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 he said, "I will build a motor car for the great multitude." And he did. In the next 20 years Ford sold 17 million Model Ts, about half of all the cars produced in the world during that time. The automobile became the fulcrum for a new economy. It spurred travel, pushed the growth of cities outward and eventually helped create suburban life.

"Most people had never been more than 20 miles from their homes prior to the introduction of the Model T. It was a staggering change in the history of mankind. It changed where people lived, where they worked," said another Ford, William Clay Ford Jr., Henry's great-grandson and the first family member to lead Ford Motor Co. in nearly two decades.

Beyond the auto itself--the freedom of movement it affords us weighed against the price it exacts in dirty air, traffic congestion and roadway fatalities--Ford's legacy also rests on his application of the moving assembly line to mass production and his visionary conception of the mass market.

Ford was not the first to build a horseless carriage. Nor was he the first to think of mechanically delivering components to waiting workers. Rudimentary conveyor systems had been employed for years in meatpacking and food canning.
But Ford was a gifted mechanic who had a knack for elevating good ideas to something sublime. He also had the iron will, the supreme confidence in his ideas, to put them into practice.

"Yes, he was a man who came along at the right time. But that's what we call vision today," said David Lewis, professor of business history at the University of Michigan. Ford's vision had its roots in his Michigan farm upbringing, which inspired his early efforts to build tractors. But recognizing that people were more interested in "something that would travel on the road," he set out to build a car "large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for [and] so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one."
That car was the gasoline-powered Model T. It was a simple machine--rugged, durable, basic, even ungainly--a mechanical extension of Ford himself. It cost $850 in 1908 and, as its utilitarian-minded creator later said, "any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black."

At that price, the Model T was still beyond the reach of most workers. But by introducing the moving assembly line to its manufacture in 1912-13 at his fabled Highland Park plant outside Detroit, Ford was eventually able to cut the Model T's production time by 75% and reduce the car's price to $260. The final step in the revolution he instigated was perhaps the most dramatic of all. On Jan. 5, 1914, he announced the $5, eight-hour day--which more than doubled wages and reduced the workday by 90 minutes.

Historian Lewis calls the $5 day the "most dramatic event in the history of wages." By making it possible for the people who made cars to actually buy them, Ford created the mass market he needed to sustain his company and its products.
"From that day forward," Lewis said, "Ford became the world's best-known and most admired industrialist."

As the decades passed, with growing fame came growing criticism over Ford's autocratic ways, his spying on his own employees and a series of vitriolic, anti-Semitic stories published by his newspaper in Michigan. Ford was also slow to adapt to changing consumer tastes--such as a choice in car colors and bigger engines--a fault that enabled rival General Motors Corp. to supersede Ford Motor as the No. 1 auto maker. In 1927 Ford finally introduced a newer car, the Model A. While it was popular, the car was outsold by GM's Chevrolet and Chrysler's Plymouth. But among engineers, Ford remains a revered figure who shaped a global industry that today produces 50 million vehicles a year and, indeed, influenced all of modern manufacturing.

Another key contribution was Ford's introduction of interchangeable parts, said A. Galip Ulsoy, a professor of manufacturing at the University of Michigan.
"The tradition in craft manufacturing," Ulsoy explained, "was to build one car at a time, methodically fitting one part to another." Ford's breakthrough idea was this: If the task was to build 1,000 cars, then you needed 1,000 (or more) copies of every component required, each separately gauged and precision-machined, to maximize efficiency and simplify assembly.

Mass customization, another concept derived from Ford's ideas, has been embraced by today's auto makers as they create several models from the same basic underpinnings: one chassis, common parts and mechanical systems, even the same engine. It is this approach that allows Ford Motor today to employ a single platform to build--quite profitably--the Jaguar S-Type, the Lincoln LS and the forthcoming retro-styled version of its hallowed Thunderbird.

Henry would be pleased to know that 96 years after its founding, Ford Motor appears poised to regain the No. 1 spot it ceded to GM long ago. His company today is riding high on energetic new leadership, the arrival of a host of promising vehicles and $24 billion in cash that enables it to indulge a dramatic appetite for acquisitions. Ford Motor's corporate umbrella now covers not only its namesake brand and its Mercury and Lincoln branches but Britain's Aston Martin and Jaguar, Sweden's Volvo and Japan's Mazda.

It seems only fitting that William Clay Ford Jr., Ford's chairman, be given the final word on his great-grandfather: "Most people think of Henry Ford as an industrial figure. But there is a social legacy as well. He made cars affordable, and he believed in treating people well. And as we get further away from Henry Ford, that part of the equation fades."

FDR Met Social Needs and Saved Profit System
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Capitalism's Savior

By JAMES FLANIGAN, Times Staff Writer

To understand why President Franklin D. Roosevelt is among the 50 people who made the biggest difference for business in this century, consider only the state of the economy on his Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933. Banks were closed in 36 of the 48 states, including New York and Illinois. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the grain pits at the

Chicago Board of Trade ceased operation on March 4 out of fear and panic. The economy had ground to a halt. That was when Roosevelt, then 51, began his inaugural address by declaring "my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Roosevelt saved capitalism and the principles of privately owned business for the U.S. economy. So desperate was the country when he took office, that he could have done most anything if it promised to ease the suffering.
At least 25% of the work force was unemployed. In 1932, ocean liners carried tens of thousands of immigrant working people back to Europe. The United States' gross domestic product that had totaled $103 billion in 1929--roughly $1.2 trillion in today's dollars--had fallen by 1933 to $55 billion, almost 50% less.

Even businesspeople favored granting Roosevelt dictatorial powers. Barron's business newspaper editorialized: "Of course we all realize that dictatorships in peacetime are contrary to the spirit of American institutions and all that. And yet--well, a genial and lighthearted dictator might be a relief. . . . "

But Roosevelt did not think in dictatorial or even anti-business terms. Amid speculation that his administration would nationalize the banks, Roosevelt's emergency banking bill extended government aid to help banks through the crisis.
The legislation stabilized the situation, depositors regained confidence and within a month, seven out of 10 banks were open across the country. In the harrowing years of the 1930s, Roosevelt's programs "rested on the assumption that a just society could be secured by imposing a welfare state on a capitalist foundation," wrote historian William E. Leuchtenberg in his 1963 book, "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal."

Roosevelt's New Deal reforms didn't challenge the system of private profit but sought to regulate and channel it. Thus the Securities and Exchange Commission was set up in 1934 to correct abuses of the financial markets and the National Labor Relations Board was created in 1935 to protect workers' rights to organize unions.

The federal government, adopting new ideas for the time, spent to create jobs in programs with alphabet names, such as the NRA (National Recovery Administration), WPA (Works Progress Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). Federal efforts reclaimed farmland from swamp and transformed an entire section of the country through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the New Deal there was a tug of war between those who favored a centrally planned economy and those who believed that a reliance on small business and decentralized economic power would bring about recovery. The decentralizers prevailed.

This belief in decentralized and democratic economic power characterized the most important reform of the Roosevelt era: Social Security.
Social Security, by guaranteeing income to elderly retired Americans, established the proposition that the individual has social rights.

But Roosevelt, against the advice of economic planners who would have made it solely a relief program for the poor, insisted on adding responsibilities by funding Social Security through taxes deducted from every wage earner's paycheck.
Roosevelt conceded that such payroll taxes did not make total economic sense. "But those taxes were never a problem of economics," he told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. "They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program," Roosevelt said.

All of Roosevelt's shrewdness and combativeness are reflected in those words.
The scion of wealthy families who had built fortunes from sugar trading in Colonial times and tea trading with China in the 19th century, Franklin Roosevelt was seen as a traitor to his class. Businesspeople, led by the DuPonts of Delaware, formed organizations to oppose him. At the posh Westchester Country Club outside New York City, Roosevelt's picture became the target on a dartboard. Yet he also had opponents on the left. The Communist "Daily Worker" in 1935 called his Social Security program "one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the people of this country."

Roosevelt made mistakes. Impatient with a Supreme Court that found some of his economic programs unconstitutional, Roosevelt tried to enlarge the court in 1937 so that he could "pack" it with his own appointees. He was roundly defeated in Congress and in public opinion.

Meanwhile, the economy's annual output did not climb back to 1929's level until 1941, when the industrial buildup for World War II had begun. But confidence in the system had returned many years before and the nation survived the Great Depression with its economic--and political--institutions strengthened.
Roosevelt led that achievement as he then led the nation through most of World War II before his death in April 1945.

Upon a Mouse, He Built an Empire
4. Walt Disney (1901-1966)
Animated Film Pioneer

By JAMES BATES, Times Staff Writer

Walter Elias Disney was to fantasy what J.P. Morgan was to finance or John D. Rockefeller to oil. But instead of building the foundation of his legacy on an derrick or a bank, Disney's empire "started with a mouse," as he often put it.
Today, Disney's best-known legacy is the company that still bears his name, now a $20-billion media colossus with a TV network, a film studio, a publishing house, Internet operation and hundreds of Classifiedss worldwide. The world's best-known theme parks--in Anaheim; Orlando, Fla.; Japan; and France--bear his name, with more to come, including one possibly in China.

When Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955, it was such a unique entertainment experience, compared to the carny-like atmosphere of previous amusement parks, that it became an instant magnet for visitors and helped trigger Southern California's post-war tourist boom.

But Disney's principal contribution was probably inventing an entire film genre in the feature-length animated movie. His "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was the first ever, released in 1937 to a world weary from the Great Depression and anxious from the tensions that would eventually explode into World War II.
When he died in 1966 of cancer at age 65, headlines called him the modern-day Aesop, a teller of traditional folk and fairy tales using the celluloid techniques he perfected and refined.

The youngest of five children, Disney was born in 1901 in Chicago. His family moved to a farm outside Kansas City, where he spent his early youth and first became enamored with drawing. Disney liked to draw animals, later the inspiration for many of the characters in his animated films.

After serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I, Disney worked briefly as a commercial artist before moving to Southern California in 1923. He formed a partnership with his brother, Roy, to try to build an animation business with such characters as Oswald the Rabbit.

Barely surviving financially, Disney developed, with collaborator Ub Iwerks, the first talking cartoon character in Mickey Mouse, who would be featured in the hit short film "Steamboat Willie." Disney would later claim that the idea for the early Mickey Mouse came to Disney on a train ride from New York to Hollywood after a depressing business setback in which he lost rights to the Oswald character. According to various accounts, it was inspired by a mouse that used to scamper around his drawing board or was simply an outgrowth of the Oswald character.
Disney recognized the need to make the look of his cartoons more sophisticated, and to blend music with his films to enhance the storytelling.

His "Silly Symphony" cartoons in the early 1930s used Technicolor for the first time in animation. "Three Little Pigs" featured a popular song in "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" Classic songs to emerge from Disney films included "Whistle While You Work" from "Snow White," "When You Wish Upon a Star" from "Pinocchio" and "Chim Chim Cheree" from "Mary Poppins."

Disney's masterpiece "Snow White" cost at the time an unheard-of $1.5 million. Prior to release, skeptics dubbed it "Disney's Folly" and predicted it would sink the ambitious animator. Instead, it became one of the most profitable films of any genre ever released. During the next five years, Disney was prolific in turning out animated classics, including "Bambi," "Pinocchio," "Dumbo" and his landmark "Fantasia," which combined classical music and animation. A new "Fantasia 2000," featuring some scenes from the original along with new segments, is scheduled for release in December, a project personally overseen by Disney's nephew, company Vice Chairman Roy E. Disney.

"Snow White," along with other animated films Disney made, such as "101 Dalmatians" and "Pinocchio," remain among the most profitable movies of all time, ones that generate a huge batch of fresh profits each time a new technology brings a new way to showcase it. In his recently settled breach-of-contract lawsuit against Disney, former studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg claimed that the video release of "Snow White" in 1994 generated an additional $600 million in profits for the company. Hundreds of millions of additional profits could potentially be generated when the film is released on digital videodisc, or when the day comes when it can be accessed on demand at home by viewers using new technologies.
After World War II, Disney recognized the potential of television as the technology was spreading into American homes, producing such popular shows as "The Mickey Mouse Club" and "Zorro."

Disney himself became a television personality when, from his desk in Burbank, he hosted "The Wonderful World of Disney," later "Wonderful World of Color," the first full-color program. Long before entertainment moguls became enamored with the concept of synergy, Disney used the show to promote the company's products, especially Disneyland. A heavy smoker, Disney suffered from lung cancer, dying before one of his biggest projects, Disney World in Florida, was finished. His brother, Roy, oversaw its completion.

In subsequent years, the Disney studio became an also-ran in Hollywood, to the point where it came within a shade of being bought and carved up by corporate raiders in the early 1980s. It took a push from nephew Roy, major investors such as the Bass family in Texas and fresh management blood such as Chief Executive Michael Eisner, former studio chief Katzenberg and the late Disney President Frank Wells, to revive the studio. One of the key decisions was to rebuild the Disney animation legacy, which resulted in a string of hits such as the classic tales "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" as well as new stories such as "The Lion King." Those films, which spawned lucrative merchandising and video sequel projects, are among the most profitable projects ever developed by a studio.

Wozniak, Jobs Planted Seeds of a Revolution
5. Steve Wozniak (1950- ), Steve Jobs (1955- )
Personal Computer Pioneers

By CHARLES PILLER, Times Staff Writer

Once when the word "revolutionary" described a computer product, it was more than a marketing cliche. A quarter-century ago two friends working in a Silicon Valley garage began a business that became Apple Computer, and it transformed the world's relationship to computing. Steve Wozniak was a 25-year-old underappreciated engineering grunt at technology giant Hewlett-Packard and a mainstay of a Silicon Valley hobbyist group called Homebrew Computer Club.
He became friends with fellow club member Steve Jobs, a 20-year-old college dropout and occasional employee of computer-game pioneer Atari.

"Woz," an unassuming engineering genius, found his efforts to build a personal computer rebuffed by HP as unmarketable. Jobs had relatively pedestrian engineering skills but understood that Woz's designs could become the first practical computer for individual users. Working on a shoestring, they created the Apple I in 1976--a crude precursor to the PC--and sold it for $666 to computing zealots in the Bay Area. Apple sold only a handful of Apple I's, but those sales funded a successor that would build a major corporation. In 1977 the $1,295 Apple II was born. It was the first computer to display color images, the first to come with a keyboard and the first to offer a "killer app"--Visicalc--a spreadsheet program that automated routine tasks like budget planning and made personal computing a business advantage for the first time.

By 1981, the company had sold 300,000 Apple IIs; by early 1985, about 2.5 million were sold. As games and other software was written for the Apple II, it gained a huge share of fast-growing markets for home users and schools and eclipsed offerings from its chief competitors of the day, Radio Shack and Commodore.
Apple's success also forced mainframe computer giant IBM to release its own PC in 1981. It became an instant success due to Big Blue's marketing muscle but did not match the Apple II's capabilities.

When Apple made its initial offering of stock to the public in 1980, Jobs' shares were worth $217 million and Wozniak saw his stake soar to $116 million. Three years later, Apple joined the Fortune 500.

While Woz provided engineering elegance, Jobs contributed a contempt for convention. His pursuit of innovation led to a 1979 visit to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. Years before, PARC scientists had invented (or borrowed from Douglas Engelbart, a pioneering scientist at the Stanford Research Institute) many of the underlying technologies upon which the future of computing was built: The graphical interface, networking, the mouse pointing device, the laser printer and the ability to display any shape, rather than just text and numbers.

That visit dramatically altered Apple, and all computing. It sparked a five-year marathon to produce a marketable improvement on PARC's ideas. That race was the Macintosh project. Jobs hammered his Macintosh team with the idea that they could save the world from the colorless mediocrity of mainstream computing and create an experience that was both functional and compelling. He drove the developers relentlessly, alternating charismatic leadership--a quality that ultimately fed a cultish movement of Macintosh devotees--with infamous tirades. He castigated top engineers with obscenity-laced diatribes and alienated colleagues, partners and customers alike.

Yet more than anyone else, Jobs ended the era of text-based systems, those obscure number and letter commands that formed the basis of nearly all computing before the Mac. Apple's mouse and point-and-click system of visual metaphors on the screen--the desktop, folders, clocks--formed the basis of modern computing iconography, including that of the Internet.

The new era was launched with a stunning attack on IBM via a TV commercial. A giant, Orwellian head preached totalitarian propaganda to drone-like onlookers. It was shattered with a sledgehammer as the narrator spoke: "On Jan. 24, Apple Computer will announce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."
Unfortunately, the pricey $2,495 Mac could run only a handful of software programs--compared to thousands for the Apple II and IBM PC--which by then had millions of buyers.

The Mac was saved by its own killer app: PageMaker. With the Macintosh and Apple's LaserWriter printer, the program created desktop publishing, a simple method of composing text and graphics on screen that irrevocably altered the publishing industry. Mac sales rose rapidly, and Apple's graphical approach began to look like computing's inevitable future.

Jobs and his successors believed that by keeping the Mac's design proprietary they could corner the market on graphical computing. That assumption nearly buried the company. After years of effort, Microsoft borrowed from the Mac's design and created a more usable version of its own graphical software, called Windows, in 1991. Though widely viewed as inferior knockoffs of Apple's technology, Windows-based computers easily outsold Macs because Microsoft licensed its software to all comers.

Apple sued Microsoft, claiming copyright infringements. But long before Apple's suit failed in 1995, Bill Gates was on his way to being the most powerful businessman of the computer age. Long before, Jobs had been ousted from Apple. In 1983 Jobs hired John Sculley from PepsiCo to improve Apple's marketing skills. Two years later, Jobs was ousted by Sculley.

Wozniak left Apple in 1981 while recovering from a plane crash. He returned to school to earn his bachelor's degree in engineering and launched an abortive career as a rock-festival promoter. Though Woz returned to Apple briefly, he ultimately became a grade-school computer teacher and administrator.

In 1997 Jobs sold his firm, Next Computer, to Apple. Then the wayward founder returned to save his old company--in steep decline after a succession of mediocre products. Amazingly, Apple once again shamed the rest of the industry with its creativity and nerve. Radical designs--most notably the fruit-colored iMac--broke new ground and again shattered competitors' complacency, provoking many to strive for a form of computing that people can love.

His Dream Brought Communications Home
6. David Sarnoff (1891-1971)
Radio & Television Giant

By SALLIE HOFMEISTER, Times Staff Writer

Rupert Murdoch may get the credit for using sports to build News Corp. into a global media colossus. But David Sarnoff was the first to grasp the power of such programming, using sports in the earliest days of broadcasting to prove radio's potency and to launch an illustrious career. To convince skeptical bosses at the Radio Corp. of America of the merits of a "radio music box" for the home, Sarnoff borrowed a Navy transmitter for a blow-by-blow broadcast of the 1921 heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. Staged when radio transmissions were used mainly for messaging at sea, the experiment by RCA's 30-year-old general manager created such a sensation among the nation's 200,000 amateur wireless operators that the company began manufacturing radios the next year, making $11 million from their sale.

Sarnoff was elected vice president, and eventually president, leading RCA into the technological vanguard over a 40-year period that ended with his retirement in 1970, at age 78. Credited with introducing the world's first home radio, the radio-phonograph console and both black-and-white and color TV, Sarnoff was crowned the father of television and arguably was the most influential figure in communications in the 20th century.

A dreamer as well as a doer, Sarnoff was rambling in his prophecies, predicting decades in advance the miniaturization of electronics and the development of video cameras, VCRs and satellites that would allow billions of people worldwide to watch the same program.

Owen D. Young, the first chairman of RCA, once described Sarnoff's passion for technology as "the most amazing romance of its kind on record." Born in Russia in 1891, Sarnoff came to the United States when he was 9 and supported his family after the death of his father by selling Yiddish newspapers in New York. He poured over technical manuals in his youth and bought a telegraph at age 15, becoming a radio operator that year for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, where he picked up the signals in 1912 from the Titanic, bringing the nation its only news of the disaster over a 72-hour period.

When RCA was formed after World War I by combining interests of General Electric and Marconi Wireless, the new company committed $2,000 to test Sarnoff's "radio music box," which Marconi management had dismissed six years earlier as "harebrained." To fuel sales of radio sets, Sarnoff in 1926 convinced RCA to pay a group of stations to play music, forming the National Broadcasting Co. as a subsidiary and the nation's first broadcast network. To douse complaints from the phonograph industry that radio was killing sales, RCA bought the manufacturer of the Victrola in 1929 and married the two components in one home console.

The emerging radio technology made Wall Street crazy for RCA, driving up the stock to a high of $573.75 a share before the crash of 1929 sent the value plummeting to $2.25. When Sarnoff became president the next year, in the depths of the Depression, he cut costs to sustain research on television, which he had first outlined for the RCA board in 1923. The payoff came years later at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, where Sarnoff unveiled RCA's pavilion before a television camera and called the television "a new art" that would affect all of society. Sarnoff soon set up a special NBC station to experiment with TV and in 1941, along with William Paley's rival CBS, started commercial telecasting in New York.

Development of television was slowed during World War II, but in 1946 RCA began selling the first mass-produced TV set for about $375. By the late 1940s the number of television stations across the country began to rise steadily, and in 1951 NBC was broadcasting regular network service nationwide. With television a postwar winner, RCA began investing in color, plowing $130 million into research despite widespread doubt and protests from shareholders. If Sarnoff was a master technologist and manufacturer, Paley's genius was programming. CBS had distinguished itself in wartime as the pioneer of network news.

After the war, Paley decimated NBC's talent pool by raiding Sarnoff's biggest stars, including Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Groucho Marx, George Burns and others. That helped CBS pull ahead of NBC in programming and advertising. In later years, some critics even blamed Sarnoff for surrendering the American consumer electronics industry to the Japanese by licensing the technology to foreigners rather than selling RCA sets internationally. Upon Sarnoff's retirement in 1970, his son, Robert, rose to power, and Sarnoff died a year later.

Legitimizing Junk Bonds Will Be Milken's Legacy
7. Michael Milken (1946- )
Junk Bond Impresario

By THOMAS S. MULLIGAN, Times Staff Writer

In September 1989, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera staged the Puccini tragedy "Tosca," in which an artist whose only crime is loyalty is destroyed by a brutal, envious prosecutor. To Michael Milken, seated in the audience, there seemed a poignant analogy to his own career, he later remarked. Milken, after all, considered himself an artist of finance, the man who used once-spurned junk bonds to spark a corporate restructuring boom in the 1980s that revitalized American business, unlocking vast efficiencies and profits that others lacked the vision to imagine.

Moreover, Milken was the target of a relentless federal prosecution that, according to his many ardent defenders, was driven largely by envy of his riches and power, plus a desire for a prominent scapegoat for the government's own economic policy failures.

Nonsense, Milken's opponents replied. His crimes undermined investor confidence in the markets. His machinations spurred wasteful takeover wars that destroyed jobs and companies. And with his 1987 earnings of $550 million, he embodied the Decade of Greed. Literally speaking, the jury is not out on Michael Milken: It never got the case. Seven months after "Tosca" and a year after being indicted on 98 federal felony charges, the former junk-bond chief of Drexel Burnham Lambert pleaded guilty to six felony counts including securities fraud and conspiracy.

Among other things, Milken pleaded guilty to conspiring with arbitrager Ivan F. Boesky and another colleague to violate tax and securities laws through illegal stock trades and secret records. Milken served 22 months in the federal prison camp at Pleasanton and paid $1.1 billion in fines and penalties.
Yet debate over Milken's achievement rages still. One indisputable part of his legacy is the legitimization of junk bonds. What was once an investment backwater is now a $1-trillion market.

The son of an Encino accountant, Milken whizzed through Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, then landed a job at Drexel, a Wall Street investment-banking firm with a distinguished pedigree but a fading franchise.

Milken gravitated to the nether world of junk bonds, considered too risky for conservative investors because of doubts about the issuing companies' ability to pay interest and principal. With the risk came high yields. Because junk bonds were low-rated or even unrated by rating agencies, investors needed the same kind of research into the issuing companies that equity analysts performed on stocks. With his near-perfect memory and calculative skills, Milken became a junk-bond encyclopedia, succeeding wildly as a salesman and trader. His department became so important a profit center that by 1978 Milken could demand that Drexel let him move the whole operation West to be near his and his wife's hometown and relatives.

It was there, first in Century City and finally at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, that Milken reached the zenith of his power, directing his crew of millionaire employees from the crux of a huge, X-shaped trading desk. In the mid-1980s, a takeover wave unlike any the U.S. had seen before began to take shape. Established firms such as Beatrice Cos., National Can, Hilton Hotels, TWA and Unocal found themselves under attack, often by smaller upstarts armed with junk bonds.

Others may have realized that junk bonds could play a role in financing hostile takeovers, but it was Milken who created the apparatus--the network of buyers and issuers--that made it happen. He worked 14-hour days, a phone at each ear, developing relationships not only with the institutional investors who bought the bonds but also with the maverick entrepreneurs who issued them, including corporate raiders such as T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Ronald Perelman and James Goldsmith.

Many of their acquisitions were leveraged buyouts, or LBOs--outright purchases in which the shareholders were bought out with a combination of junk bonds and cash. The surviving company typically would restructure, ousting management and selling or closing operations that were unprofitable or didn't mesh with the new, streamlined business plan.

Such "rationalization" cost thousands of jobs but arguably created thousands of others by freeing companies of inefficient operations and managerial bureaucracy, enabling them to grow profitably for years to come. Taken to excess, the LBO could result in a company so weakened by bond-payment obligations that it would eventually collapse. Under the weight of a slowing economy and such ill-considered deals, the junk-bond market suffered a collapse in 1989.

Academic opinion is split on whether the debt-fueled takeover wave was ultimately healthy for the U.S. economy. There is no doubt, however, that its impact was lasting. With their attacks on entrenched managers and unproductive assets, these corporate raiders helped usher in an era of greater shareholder activism, more linkage between stock performance and executive pay, and increased attention to wringing maximum efficiencies and profit from company assets.

Milken, barred from the securities industry for life, now divides his time among a variety of business and charitable interests. He has launched a think tank, a computer-training firm, a prostate-cancer research initiative and a variety of educational projects.

2 Who Aided Recovery From Devastation
8. Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) and W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993)
Rebuilding Japan

By MARK MAGNIER, Times Staff Writer

Japan's path from post-war devastation to export powerhouse has involved many important factors, a lot of hard work and a bit of luck. But two Americans who played important parts in the world's greatest economic recovery story--a story that has altered lifestyles around the world and sent countless vehicles, VCRs and Walkmans into our homes--are Gen. Douglas MacArthur and quality guru W. Edwards Deming.

MacArthur's principal contribution as supreme commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (1945-1951)--a de facto dictator--was to break apart an outdated and ossified economic and social structure, allowing Japan's inherent creativity to blossom. "This was all very important for the development of Japan's post-war economy," said Masayoshi Tsurumi, an economics professor and financial historian at Hosei University.

On the corporate front, MacArthur smashed the grip of Japan's family trusts, known as zaibatsu, which had dominated Japan's economy for decades and sent their avaricious tentacles into every corner of economic life. Although some survived in modified form, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, the retrenchment opened the field to a new breed of innovators with names like Sony, Honda, Toyota and Panasonic that would over the next 30 years catapult Japan onto the global stage.

On the labor front, MacArthur encouraged trade unions, which further checked the oligopolies, broadened Japan's wealth distribution and helped develop an increasingly affluent middle class that would serve as a domestic base for exporters. And his farm reform policies, arguably his most far-reaching achievement, blunted the sort of rural discontent that would soon spring Mao Tse-Tung to power in neighboring China, argued MacArthur biographer William Manchester in "American Caesar."

Although some insist that the Japanese labor movement was eventually co-opted, its members enjoyed sharply expanded living standards, a far stronger voice in production decisions than their American counterparts and, for many, lifetime employment. This spurred tremendous company loyalty, a minimum of labor disputes and a companywide commitment to quality.

In another important move, MacArthur brought from Detroit Joseph M. Dodge, a former president of the American Bankers Assn., who overhauled Japan's budget, tightened monetary policy and strengthened the banking system. The general also ensured that a large number of war contracts went to Japan during the Korean War. Those war orders gave cash-short companies the confidence to invest in plants and equipment that would soon yield tremendous dividends as the nation's export machine revved up.

As Japan's products started moving to overseas markets during the 1950s and early 1960s, however, their quality was often a joke. "Made in Japan" had such a bad connotation initially that some companies set up plants in the Japanese village of Usa, which allowed them to say their products were "Made in USA." It's difficult to believe now, but even Japan's vaunted autos flopped miserably when first introduced to the United States in the late 1950s.

Much of the credit for Japan's flight to quality and the making of its world-class reputation goes to quality guru W. Edwards Deming. Deming urged companies to concentrate on constant improvements, improved efficiency and doing it right the first time.

Deming was a professor of statistics at New York University when he was invited to Japan in 1950 to run a seminar for business leaders. Since the 1930s, Deming was interested in using statistics as a tool to achieve better quality control. Essentially, his idea was to record the number of product defects, analyze why they happened, institute changes, then record how much quality improved, and to keep refining the process until it is done right.

Deming owes at least part of his legendary status in Japan to a professor named Genichi Taguchi, Japan's home-grown quality management expert, who credited many of the American's ideas for his so-called Taguchi method. Taguchi and others would go on to influence a generation of Japanese engineers who would become the backbone of the nation's growing manufacturing prowess.
"I'm very impressed by the way the Japanese admire [Deming]," said Gregory Clark, president of Japan's Tama University. "They keep on talking about him as if he's a god."

Scholars note that Japan was also receptive to Deming at a time when America was not, in part because Deming's ideas dovetailed with many of Japan's own traditions. Japan had long held hard work and quality craftsmanship as important virtues, and its technology even during the war surprised many Americans. Deming preached that companies must treat workers as associates, not hired hands, and he blamed management if workers were not motivated to work well.
"We imported the system, but modified it to the Japanese style," said Naohiro Yashiro, professor of economics at Sophia University.

When Japan hit its peak in the 1980s, forcing many U.S. industries to their knees and prompting Americans to experiment with quality circles and low-inventory manufacturing systems, many of Deming's ideas were rediscovered by the United States.

As Japan looks ahead, some argue that Japan could learn a thing or two again from the likes of MacArthur and Deming. Japan needs to restructure, weaken the grip of the second generation of huge companies and open the door for a new group of dynamic entrepreneurs.

Likewise, others argue, a decade-long recession, weaker confidence and the complacency that springs from significant wealth may be undercutting Japan's legendary attention to detail.

A 40-Year-Long Dogfight for Aircraft Supremacy
9. Donald W. Douglas (1892-1981), William E. Boeing (1881-1956)
Fathers of commercial aviation

By RALPH VARTABEDIAN, Times Staff Writer

In the annals of titanic competitions between corporations, few during this century have been waged with the intensity or longevity as the one between Boeing Co. and Douglas Aircraft Co. for leadership of the commercial aircraft industry.
It pitted William Boeing against Donald Douglas, both of whom caught the fever for aviation early in the century and who would become the two driving forces in the production of ever more advanced aircraft.

Starting in 1920s, Boeing Co. and Douglas Aircraft fought for the next 40 years, repeatedly leapfrogging each other with innovations and marketing successes as the industry matured into one of critical national importance. Although Douglas had thoroughly dominated Boeing at one point, the competition was won by Boeing by the late 1960s, when Douglas lacked the product line and resources to go head-to-head with the Seattle rival any longer. The Douglas facility in Long Beach was finally purchased by Boeing, along with the rest of McDonnell Douglas in 1997.

William Boeing began his career as an aviation industrialist after he was given a flight over Puget Sound by a barnstormer flying a seaplane. At the time, Boeing was helping to operate his family's lucrative timber business in Seattle after dropping out of Yale University. Not long after the flight, Boeing traveled to Southern California, where he learned to fly and purchased his own seaplane from Glenn Martin, the aircraft builder who was operating in a converted church in Santa Ana. (Martin's own company played another dramatic role in the aerospace industry and today is part of the Lockheed Martin Corp.)

Back in Seattle, Boeing began building his own seaplanes and by 1916 had incorporated his new company as Pacific Aero Products Co., which sold its first plane to the government of New Zealand for mail delivery. In 1917, the operation took on the name Boeing Airplane Co. By the mid-1920s, Boeing had assembled a business that was not only turning out innovative aircraft but also had laid the foundation for an air carrier that later became United Airlines.

Boeing formed a holding company, and then exchanged stock with the holding company to drive up prices--a then-legal investment similar to the capital manipulations that made J.P. Morgan renowned. The deals multiplied Boeing's wealth into the stratosphere, but landed him before a Senate investigating committee. Angered by the probe, Boeing sold all his aviation stocks at age 52 and exited the industry. Ultimately, the company was forced to divest its holdings.
Boeing retired, but he left a skilled management team in place.

Under the Boeing name, during the 1930s, the company helped lead the way to single-wing planes with more efficient aerodynamic designs, retractable landing gear and better navigational aids. By the mobilization for World War II, the company was called on to build the B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the most important bombers of the Allied effort.

Douglas, meanwhile, caught the aviation bug from the Wright Brothers in 1908 during a U.S. Army flight demonstration. A brilliant engineer, Douglas graduated from MIT in two years with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for Martin until 1920 and then left to start his own aircraft company behind a barbershop in Los Angeles.

Douglas got one of his first big breaks from Jack Frye, Transworld Airlines chief, who in 1932 asked for a new, all-metal, three-engine aircraft that could carry 12 passengers. Douglas designed a plane that could carry 14 passengers at a higher speed with only two engines--sealing the deal. That plane, the DC-1, laid the groundwork for Douglas to become the dominant builder of commercial aircraft. By 1934, Douglas was at work on the famous DC-3, the aircraft that would revolutionize air travel for the next 20 years and cement his place in aviation history.

The first DC-3 flight was Dec. 17, 1935, the 32nd anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. This reliable plane quickly caught on as airlines used DC-3s for their sleeper routes. The DC-3 had 21 to 28 passenger seats, a cruising speed of 180 mph and it could fly 1,000 miles without refueling.
During World War II the plane became the workhorse of the U.S. military (the military version was the C-47), and was used to tow gliders, drop paratroopers and haul cargo.

The DC-3 was more popular than Boeing's rival 247 plane, and by World War II, 80% of the commercial aircraft in service were made by Douglas.
In all, Douglas built about 11,000 DC-3s and C-47s. Today, there are still about 500 DC-3s in use by cargo companies and the military in some Third World nations and South America.

But the competition turned against Douglas by the early 1950s. With his son helping run the company, Douglas hesitated in committing the resources to launch the DC-8 jetliner, giving Boeing a key lead in developing its 707 jetliner, which first flew in 1954. The 707's success allowed Boeing to swiftly reverse leadership in the industry, outselling Douglas and grabbing the lead for good.

By the late 1960s, Douglas was struggling with the development of its DC-10, while Boeing was moving ahead with its highly profitable 747. With a weak financial condition and facing a bleak future, Donald Douglas reluctantly agreed to be bought out by James McDonnell, the brash newcomer who had built a military aircraft business in St. Louis

Cultivators of a Vision Reaped the Revolutionary Internet
10. J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990), Leonard Kleinrock (1934- ), Larry Roberts (1937- ), Tim Berners-Lee (1955- ) et al
Internet and World Wide Web

By KAREN KAPLAN, Times Staff Writer

No single person is responsible for creating the Internet, whose tentacles now embrace an estimated 200 million worldwide. Likewise, there is no consensus about a single event that marked its birth. Instead, the Internet owes its existence to dozens of engineers who spent years pushing the boundaries of computer science until it revolutionized personal and business communications by removing some of the traditional barriers of time and space.

The original vision for the Internet came from a behavioral scientist. In the early 1960s, J.C.R. Licklider described how a "galactic network" of computers could not only spit out data but actually help people understand, analyze and solve problems. "He didn't know how to do it, but he thought it was important to connect all the machines together," said Larry Roberts, who succeeded Licklider as a director at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

Inspired by Licklider, Roberts devised a plan in 1967 for building such a network. The Arpanet, as it was known, would allow researchers to share their computers at various college campuses. A key part of the plan involved transferring computer data in small "packets" that could move more efficiently along the least-congested routes. The notion of sending data in packets came from Leonard Kleinrock.
In 1969, Kleinrock, a UCLA professor, took possession of a refrigerator-sized machine made by Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) called an Interface Message Processor. The job of the machine, known as an IMP, was to translate data from various computers into a common network language. The IMP became the first outpost on the Arpanet.

By 1972, many more computers had been added to the network and its proud parents were ready to show it off. Bob Kahn, responsible for the system design at BBN in Cambridge, Mass., organized a large demonstration. Sitting in Washington, D.C., Kleinrock's team logged onto a computer at BBN, shipped a program from Cambridge to Los Angeles, ran the program on UCLA's computers and then had the results transmitted back to D.C. "[Computer scientists] saw this happening for the first time, and there was a great deal of enthusiasm," Kleinrock said.

The other big event of 1972 was the birth of electronic mail. The Arpanet developers needed a way to communicate with each other, so Ray Tomlinson at BBN created basic programs to send and read text messages over the network. Roberts followed up with programs which made e-mail easier to handle.
The Arpanet grew to become the most important computer network, but there were others. Kahn wanted to make sure they could all "internetwork" with each other. After he became ARPA's director of information processing techniques, he drafted Stanford professor Vint Cerf, and in 1973 and 1974 they wrote the necessary computer protocols to send information packets among the many networks that together comprised the Internet. To do this, Kahn and Cerf devised a two-part solution. Their "Internet Protocol" made sure the information packets arrived at their final destination, and their "Transmission Control Protocol" put them in order after they arrived. The protocols, known as TCP/IP, still govern Internet transmissions today.

Meanwhile, at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Bob Metcalfe was looking for a way to connect new desktop computers. He strung a mile of coaxial cable through the building and connected all the computers to it. When computers wanted to communicate to each other they would send out packets over the cable, but if the cable was already in use, his invention allowed the computers to take turns getting onto the system. Metcalfe called his invention the Ethernet, he said, because the computers "would blast their packets out into the ether." It is now the primary networking technology on the Internet.

As the Internet demonstrated the benefits of computer networking, other government agencies built networks of their own. Through much of the 1980s a few hundred thousand academic and government researchers dominated the Internet, until the National Science Foundation encouraged commercial use of its NSFnet.

Internet protocols had become the global standard by 1990, the year the Arpanet was decommissioned due to the rise of commercial networks. But even with personal computer prices falling, the network was still too cumbersome for most people to use. Even if they could connect to the Internet, they weren't likely to find much interesting content there.

But a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, was about to change that. As a newcomer, British native Tim Berners-Lee had a hard time remembering all the people, projects and computers at the lab, so he wrote a program to keep track of

the connections between them. That program evolved into a system of links to different parts of the Internet. He called his creation the World Wide Web.
The Web got a major boost in 1993, when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois made its graphical Web browser, Mosaic, available for free. Nontechnical users could then use a mouse to point and click their way around the colorful Web, opening up the Internet to the masses. Although America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy had lured some consumers onto private computer networks to transfer files and use e-mail, it was the Web that finally drew millions onto the Internet.

Today, people go online to communicate, do research, be entertained and shop. The pioneers who made it all possible are still working to improve the network.
Kleinrock has started a handful of companies whose technologies make computer networks more accessible to mobile users. In addition to his job as senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology at MCI WorldCom, Cerf holds a post at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make Internet technologies suitable for interplanetary communication. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT to coordinate the Web's development.

Many Internet pioneers say the network has morphed beyond their wildest expectations and are loathe to predict its future. "It's very hard to predict how things will look in 10 years, much less 50 to 100 years out," Kahn said.

11. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1875-1966)
General Motors' empire builder

If the name Alfred P. Sloan Jr. is recognized today, it's likely because of his Sloan-Kettering Institute, which does cancer research, or the Sloan School at MIT, or the Sloan Foundation education grants. But in the world of business, the Sloan legacy lives on in the professional discipline that came to be known as management.

He invented it during a remarkably long stint at the helm of General Motors, from 1920 to 1946, during which he built it into the world's largest enterprise. Sloan was the first to systematically organize a big company. It was reflected in GM's production of cars for every taste and pocketbook: from Chevrolet to Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. He did so using a maximum of interchangeable parts to turn out, in effect, five different automobiles at the cost of what competitors would spend to produce one or two. Late in the century, of course, the GM model hasn't fared well. But it is still the world's biggest auto maker. And for most of its history, GM has been a masterpiece of industrial organization--a symbol, admirers said, of the success of capitalism itself.

Sloan laid out the story in "My Years With General Motors," a business autobiography that has become a classic. He wrote it during retirement, but withheld it from publication until all the other principals were dead, by which time he was 88. Sloan studied electrical engineering at MIT, then worked for a roller bearing company that his father partly owned. Sloan was put in charge of the company at age 26. He continued running the firm until it was purchased by GM.

12. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Trustbuster

President Roosevelt (1901-09) revived the Sherman Antitrust Act by filing trustbusting cases against 44 major corporations. The first big case came in 1902 when the Roosevelt administration took on J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Co. for its monopoly of Western railroads. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case in 1904; Northern Securities was dissolved.

Roosevelt also filed an unfair business practices case in 1906 against John D. Rockefeller's vast Standard Oil Co.; the company later was broken up into 33 companies. Roosevelt, appalled by unsanitary conditions in the meat industry portrayed in Upton Sinclair's novel "The Jungle," also pushed Congress to pass the Meat Inspection and Food and Drugs acts in 1906, the basis of modern consumer protection legislation.

He also actively campaigned for the Panama Canal treaty, arguing that access through Central America was critical to speeding the U.S. naval fleet between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The U.S. spent $380 million to build the Panama Canal, in the process shortening by 7,000 miles the shipping distance between the Eastern and Western coasts of the U.S. (170 million short tons of freight now pass through the Panama Canal annually). Roosevelt was the first president to fly in a plane; in 1908 his War Department signed a deal with the Wright brothers to buy its first military airplane.

13. George C. Marshall (1880-1959)
Marshall Plan

Architect of the successful $13-billion U.S. economic aid package to Europe after World War II, which dramatically helped rebuild a war-ravaged economy. In 1947, as Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Marshall outlined his economic recovery plan to combat Europe's chronic food and housing shortages and unemployment. Marshall's motive was political and economic.

Europe was impoverished and rebuilding its economy was critical to slowing the growth of communism, he reasoned. Marshall also wanted Europe to again be a valuable trading partner of the U.S. This flood of economic and technical aid to 16 European nations in 1948-52 boosted their gross national product by 25%. During World War II, Marshall was the U.S. Army's chief of staff, responsible for mobilizing 8.2 million soldiers. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

14. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913)
Financier and power broker

Morgan was the nation's most powerful business figure at the start of the 20th century. He controlled U.S. Steel Corp., General Electric, AT&T and International Harvester as well as numerous other corporations by arranging loans through his investment banking company. In 1901 Morgan bankrolled the creation of U.S. Steel, formed in part by purchasing Andrew Carnegie's steel business.

U.S. Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation, with 65% of the nation's steel industry. After the 1907 stock market panic, Morgan led a group of bankers who bailed out major banks and corporations, but this prompted concerns about the "House of Morgan" and its deep influence across the U.S. economy. This led to the creation in 1913 of the Federal Reserve System to serve as our centralized banking authority.

15. Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) Orville Wright (1871-1948)
Airplane inventors

The Wright brothers designed, built and successfully flew the first airplane in 1903. Their invention would alter lifestyles and commerce worldwide. Self-taught tinkerers, they ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1896, they read about German Otto Lilienthal, who died during a glider flight, prompting their interest in aviation. Unlike other would-be aviators of the period, the Wrights realized the value of warping, or twisting, wings for lift. They also built wind tunnels to test different designs.

In winter, they closed their bike shop and traveled to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to fly their own innovative gliders. After three years of glider flights, the Wrights built a biplane with a homemade gas motor. A coin flip determined who flew first. Orville Wright made the first successful airplane flight on Dec. 17, 1903, before five witnesses. Flying distance: 120 feet. Flight time: 12 seconds. For years afterward, press coverage of the Wrights was scant and doubting. The Wrights continued refining their plane designs in anonymity.

In 1908, Wilbur Wright flew a plane around the Statue of Liberty, cementing their celebrity. The Wrights struck a deal that year to sell a plane to the U.S. War Department. The brothers were soon overwhelmed by legal battles to protect their invention. By the time of Wilbur's death, other plane makers had come up with more sophisticated designs. Orville sold his stake in the Wright Co. in 1915.

16. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
Father of communism

Lenin established the first Communist nation in 1917, which triggered a wave of socialist states from Asia to Europe and created a series of totalitarian, government-controlled economies closed off from the Western world for most of this century. Lenin was enthralled by the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx wrote that free enterprise would destroy itself as business owners became rich at the expense of workers too poor to buy the goods they produced. These workers would revolt, he said, take over factories and establish an efficient government-planned system to ensure jobs and create a new classless society.

Lenin decreed that such a revolution would take place only if professional revolutionaries led it. Lenin returned from exile in 1917 after Czar Nicholas II gave up the throne, with Russia beset by strikes and food shortages. His party's slogan was "Bread, peace, land." Lenin abolished private land ownership, required peasants to turn over most of their production and set in place a rigid state bureaucracy to run Russian industries. He formed the Soviet Union with neighboring republics in 1922. After Lenin's death, the Soviet Union remained intact for decades. But communism was a woefully inefficient economic model, as state-regulated prices failed to reflect the true costs of goods and workers had no incentive to be productive. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, most Communist-run states had essentially gone bankrupt.

17. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) Mikhail Gorbachev (1931- )
Communist reformers

Deng and Gorbachev were Communist leaders who triggered vast economic change, ultimately opening the Chinese and Russian markets to foreign investment and world trade. Deng, after Mao Tse-tung's death, turned the world's most populous nation into a major economic power by lessening rigid government control over businesses, opened the way for privately owned firms and encouraged foreign investment in China. Last year China's exports to the U.S. had climbed to $57 billion.

Los Angeles-area firms export some $2.4 billion in goods annually to China. Deng also led negotiations for the return of Hong Kong to China, while planning to maintain the colony's booming capitalistic economy. Gorbachev took power in 1985 with the Soviet Union's economy severely weakened after decades of Cold War spending. He shifted from a centralized, planned economy to a more decentralized, open system. His reforms, called perestroika, made Gorbachev popular overseas. But despite his reforms, the Soviet economy continued to falter and the added freedoms triggered a wave of social upheaval.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and Gorbachev accepted it. Two years later most of the Soviet republics broke away and Gorbachev resigned as the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Under Boris Yeltsin, the Russian economy has run amok and some estimate 50% of its economy is tied to organized crime. Gorbachev has somewhat embraced capitalism, though, appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial last year.

18. OPEC Oil crisis

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries dramatically altered the world's economy in the 1970s by suddenly raising oil prices. This led to gasoline shortages and triggered a worldwide wave of inflation. It also prompted industries and governments to conserve energy, develop alternative energy sources and produce more fuel-efficient products--a movement that continues to this day.

OPEC was formed in 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (OPEC now has 11 members) to have a unified front in negotiating prices with foreign oil companies who had operations in their countries. But as demand for oil kept rising, OPEC shifted the balance of power in October 1973 by raising oil prices 70%. OPEC nations were using oil as a political weapon in response to the Arab-Israeli war. In December 1973, OPEC raised crude oil prices by another 130% and placed embargoes on U.S. oil shipments, which led to long lines at the gas pumps. OPEC kept boosting prices and by 1980 a barrel of crude oil cost $30, compared to $3 in 1973; some predicted that oil prices would hit $100.

But Western nations turned to coal, nuclear and solar power as alternative energy and businesses became more efficient and reduced their energy needs. As Western nations weaned their dependence on imported oil, OPEC in 1983 cut its prices. Since then, efforts by OPEC to set production quotas have often failed as some member countries ignored the limits.

19. Eiji Toyoda (1913- )
Led Japanese car exporting

Toyoda, a family scion, helped lead Toyota Motor Corp.'s aggressive push into the U.S. auto market. Toyota's exports inspired other Japanese car makers to follow, and their collective success dramatically altered the American auto industry, reducing the dominance of GM, Ford and Chrysler.

Toyota also influenced assembly line manufacturing techniques with its emphasis on production efficiency and quality control while turning out cars with few defects. Toyota entered the American market after its executive, Shotaro Kamiya, visited the U.S. and noted the popularity of the Volkswagen Beetle. Toyoda backed the plan and in August 1957 the first Toyota was unloaded in Los Angeles: a pokey, four-door sedan called the Toyopet Crown.

Toyota's U.S. sales in its first year: 288. Last year: 1.4 million. The first Toyotas sold here handled poorly when driven over 60 mph and tended to overheat in the mountains or desert. But Toyota kept investing in new models while refining its quality-control production methods. By the late '60s, its Toyota Corolla developed a reputation for reliability, low-cost and fuel efficiency. The 1973 OPEC oil crisis cemented demand for Toyota's economy cars and left Detroit's auto makers scrambling to make fuel-efficient models. Toyoda served as Toyota president and chairman; he retired in 1994. His cousin started the company as a loom factory; in 1935 it began making cars. Toyota Motor is now the world's third-biggest auto maker with $92 billion in sales; its American work force numbers 28,000.

20. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Basis for government economic intervention

Keynes was the most influential economist of this century. He advocated that governments play an active role to stabilize their economies by using spending programs to reach full employment and to avoid depressions. In the last 60 years his theories have been adopted by most Western nations.

Early in his career, Keynes worked for the British Treasury. His most important work, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936), was published in the Depression. Until then, most economists believed that a free market would ultimately lead to prosperity. But this laissez-faire approach failed in the Great Depression. Instead, Keynes wrote about the impact of total spending in an economy--from businesses, public agencies and consumers. Consumers were limited by their income, he said, and did not trigger business cycles; rather, the keys to business cycles were spending by businesses and government agencies.

Thus, in a depression, governments had to radically boost public spending--to the point of running a deficit--to stimulate a rise in demand for goods, to boost sales and lead to full employment. Keynes was knighted in 1942. After his death, Keynesian theory evolved into a series of government interventions to stabilize the economy, such as boosting taxes and interest rates in boom periods to slow the economy and avoid inflation. However, in the 1970s, as high inflation and unemployment spread across Western nations, the Keynesian theory lost some of its gloss.

21. Drs. Donald Ross (1893-1981) and Clifford Loos (1882-1960)
Fathers of managed health care

Ross and Loos invented managed health care at their Los Angeles clinic in 1929 as a way to provide affordable coverage for employees of the Department of Water and Power. The Ross-Loos Clinic then charged $1.50 a month for a full range of medical services, including hospitalization, transport by ambulance and physical therapy.

Their idea, called prepaid health care, was viewed as leftist and threatening by the mainstream medical establishment and the two doctors were expelled from the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. But Loos, a California-born surgeon, and Ross, a native Canadian who had worked as a doctor for the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, fought the expulsion and were reinstated by the American Medical Assn. "This form of medical service is here to stay, and there will be great expansion along this line," Loos predicted in 1931.

Their clinics did grow, and by 1935 enrollment exceeded 42,000. In 1933, another pioneering doctor, Sidney Garfield, set up a similar plan for construction workers building the California Aqueduct. Garfield was later hired by steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser to provide health care for his employees, and the Kaiser-Permanente health system was born. Today, 23 million Californians are covered by various managed-care health plans. The Ross-Loos clinics have had several owners, most recently MedPartners Inc., which exited the managed care business after years of losses and sold the clinics to KPC Medical Management of Long Beach.

22. Harry Warner (1881-1958) Jack Warner (1892-1978)
Pioneers of sound films

Harry, Albert, Samuel and Jack Warner released the first talking picture, which revolutionized the film industry and turned Warner Bros. into one of the dominant studios during Hollywood's golden age. The Warners bought a nickelodeon in 1903 and in the next two decades distributed and produced films. In 1923 they formed Warner Bros.

Harry, who was president, realized they were overly dependent on independent distributors, so he bought a distributor and eventually owned 500 theaters. Sam pushed the company into sound films. Bell Labs had developed a sound technique, which other studios passed on. But Warner Bros. worked with Western Electric to develop a sound-on-disc process for synchronized sound. In "The Jazz Singer" (1927), Al Jolson spoke some dialogue, and audiences went wild. The next year, Warner Bros. released the first complete sound film, "Lights of New York," which cost $40,000, but grossed $2 million.

Jack was film production chief and Warner Bros. thrived in the Great Depression by turning out gangster films and other features faster than its rivals, while paying its stars (Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart) less than other studios. Warner Bros. declined in the '50s with the advent of TV and a government-ordered sale of its theaters. Jack was the last remaining brother when he sold off his stake in 1967. Warner Bros. is now part of Time Warner.

23. Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957)
Movie studio magnate

For three decades, Mayer ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and developed a stable of movie stars that turned MGM into the most celebrated film studio of its time. Born in Russia, raised in Canada, Mayer was running a junk business in Boston when he bought a struggling movie theater in 1907. Within a few years he'd built a regional theater chain. He then began producing films and in 1918 moved to Los Angeles to open Louis B. Mayer Pictures.

By 1924 Loew's theater chain had bought three studios to create MGM and put Mayer in charge as vice president and general manager. The studio thrived in the '30s as MGM turned out films with expensive production values while Mayer created a storied roster of stars from Greta Garbo to Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland. Mayer's taste for patriotic, escapist, family films led to the Andy Hardy series, as well as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz." At once ruthless and patriarchal, Mayer had 6,000 employees and at his peak became the nation's highest-paid executive at $1.25 million a year. As television began to take hold and MGM's fortunes dropped, in 1951 Mayer was replaced by his former assistant Dore Schary. Several years later, Mayer failed in an attempt to win back control of the studio.

24. Thomas Watson Sr. (1874-1956)
IBM's visionary leader

Watson turned a mediocre key-punch card counting firm into one of the world's most dominant corporations. The IBM name became interchangeable with "Big Blue," the nickname for Watson's army of well-trained salesmen who followed his strict dress code of dark suits and white shirts. In 1914, Watson became president of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which made clocks, scales and tabulating machines. Watson saw its future in the machines that calculated data by sorting key-punch cards. A former salesman, Watson built a highly motivated, well-paid sales staff that emphasized customer service, not just product sales.

The company sold higher-priced, large, custom-built tabulating machines to government agencies and bigger companies. By the mid-1920s, it had changed its name to International Business Machines, and began selling the first electric typewriter. IBM benefited greatly from the growth of the federal bureaucracy during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. In 1935, IBM sold calculating machines to the new Social Security Administration. Also in the '30s, Watson expanded IBM sales overseas. During World War II, IBM built the first large digital computer for the military. When Watson died in 1956, IBM had grown to 60,000 employees--from 235 in 1914. Watson's son, Thomas Watson Jr., became IBM president in 1952 and led the company's big push to develop computers for the business market. By the late '60s, IBM controlled 65% of the U.S. computer industry. Watson Jr. retired in 1971.

25. Akio Morita (1921-1999)
Japanese industrialist

Morita's Sony Corp. led the vanguard of Japan's dominance of the consumer electronics industry. Morita and Masaru Ibuka started their firm in 1946 with $500. Their first product was a rice cooker, which failed. Morita pushed the company into making new electronic goods. Its first big seller in Japan was a tape recorder. In 1955, the company started making compact radios, using newly developed transistors instead of bulky vacuum tubes. By 1958, the company changed its name to Sony, derived from the Latin word for sound.

In the late '50s, Morita went to New York to begin selling Sony products in the U.S. He believed in the value of brand recognition and refused to build products for other companies under contract. He also invested heavily in technology, looking to develop innovative products. In 1968, Sony began selling a state-of-the-art color TV set called the Trinitron, which helped cement its reputation for excellent products. A decade later, Morita pestered his engineers to come up with a tape player that could be used while exercising and in 1979 the Sony Walkman was introduced. Another technological development came in 1982--with Philips Electronics--when the compact disc was introduced, creating a new standard for music products.

26. Ray Kroc (1902-1984)
Fast-food pioneer

Kroc turned McDonald's into a worldwide hamburger chain and triggered the explosive growth of the fast-food industry. In the early '50s, Kroc was selling machines that mixed five milkshakes at once; one customer owned eight mixers. So Kroc visited the place, a San Bernardino drive-up hamburger restaurant owned by Dick and Mac McDonald. The McDonalds had transformed their eatery into a speedy, assembly-line production center, selling French fries, shakes and burgers at such a high-volume that they cut hamburger prices to 15 cents from 30 cents each.

Impressed, Kroc set out to copy their format and build a fast-food chain and agreed to pay the McDonalds half a cent for every $1 in gross sales. Kroc opened his first McDonalds in Illinois in 1955. By 1960, 228 McDonald's were generating $37 million in sales. The next year, Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million. Kroc began by setting up franchises outside urban areas, benefiting from the middle-class move to suburbia. Kroc also advertised heavily to promote traffic at "the golden arches."

In time, the Big Mac, Egg McMuffin and Chicken McNuggets became part of the American lexicon. Kroc was a stickler for details and uniformity, requiring restaurant operators to attend a 19-day training course at his "Hamburger University" so that food at all McDonald's tasted the same. Even chef Julia Child lauded their French fries. By 1970, McDonald's restaurants were in all 50 states. Today, there are 25,000 McDonald's in 117 countries. Estimated 1999 revenues for McDonald's Corp: $13.4 billion.

27. William Levitt (1907-1994)
Suburban housing developer

Levitt built the first residential, tract-housing subdivision after World War II in Levittown, N.Y. Levitt transformed the housing business by using prefabricated parts and teams of workers, who in assembly line fashion moved from house to house to do their jobs, which cut costs. Levitt's family set up a construction firm during the Depression, and after World War II he took advantage of the nation's housing shortage and a federal program that offered mortgages to veterans. From 1947 to 1951, Levitt turned 1,200 acres of Long Island potato farms into a community of 17,450 nearly identical two-bedroom homes that sold for about $8,000 apiece.

Levitt shipped pre-cut parts to the sites for quick assembly and contractors with specific jobs--windows, roofs, doors, heating systems, etc.--shifted from house to house. This construction technique saved about $1,000 per home. Levitt also built community swimming pools, schools and recreation areas. His construction method was widely copied. But Levittown quickly became a target for sociologists who complained that, by selling so many homes in a narrow price range, Levitt had created an overly homogeneous community.

28. Theodore Vail (1845-1920)
Telephone pioneer

Vail in the early 1900s built AT&T into the nationwide, omnipotent, technologically advanced phone company that would endure until its government-ordered breakup in 1984. Vail worked at Bell Telephone (then AT&T's parent) from 1878 to 1889, but he retired when investors didn't support his idea for creating a nationwide phone system. In 1907, after the death of his wife and only child, Vail returned at age 62 to run AT&T at the request of financier J.P. Morgan. AT&T was heavily in debt and the phone industry was chaotic.

Independent companies had more than 50% of the telephone market, and some communities were served by rival companies whose phone systems were not connected. With Morgan's help, Vail set out to build a monopoly by buying up financially troubled independents. He also spent heavily upgrading AT&T's phone service and technology, which became a worldwide model. If Vail couldn't buy a rival firm, he'd charge them a fee so they could access AT&T's increasingly sophisticated long-distance network. In 1915, the first transcontinental phone line was established when Alexander Graham Bell in New York talked with his old colleague Thomas Watson in San Francisco. That same year, AT&T sent the first radio message over phone lines across the Atlantic. When Vail retired in 1919, AT&T had more than 10 million phones in service, compared to just 3 million in 1907.

29. Ralph Nader (1934- )
Father of the modern consumer movement

Nader's efforts led to seat belts, air bags and padded dashboards as standard equipment in cars, plus federally mandated automobile recalls. "Nader's raiders" have investigated and hounded all manner of industries, from meatpacking to pesticides, banking to baby food. Nader also led a successful campaign for airlines to reimburse consumers when they overbook seats. His support helped pass California's Proposition 103 auto-insurance rebate in 1988.

Nader made his reputation with the publication of "Unsafe at Any Speed" in 1965. His book criticized the auto industry for what he considered a profits-before-safety mentality and focused on the dangerous handling of General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair. GM hired private detectives to follow Nader; this revelation embarrassed GM at congressional hearings. Nader's book led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. He set up the nonprofit Public Citizen Inc. and other public-interest groups, staffed largely by college students and recent grads. Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and got 2% of the vote in California.

30. George Meany (1894-1980) and Walter Reuther (1907-70)
Union builders

The pair created a unified national labor front. Meany and Reuther rose from blue-collar jobs to achieve prominence in the U.S. labor movement during its heyday in the 1950s. They helped institute eight-hour workdays, health benefits and pensions for millions of workers. Meany, a plumber, was elected business agent of his local union in 1922 and became president of the New York State Federation of Labor in 1934, where he helped promote the passage of dozens of pro-labor bills. He became secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor in 1939 and moved up to the presidency 13 years later.

Reuther, a tool-and-die maker, became shop foreman in a Detroit automobile plant before being fired in 1932 for his union activism. After three years of travel in Europe, he returned to organize auto workers during a period of extreme anti-union violence. He was elected president of the United Automobile Workers of America in 1946, and in 1952 became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1955, Meany and Reuther merged the two groups to create the labor behemoth, the AFL-CIO, with Meany as president and Reuther as vice president. Despite disagreements in later years over politics and civil rights, the two jointly continued to lead the federation until Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970. Today, AFL-CIO represents 68 unions with 13 million members.

31. Juan Trippe (1899-1981)
International aviation pioneer

Trippe created the first international airline with Pan American World Airways and he popularized air travel. Using his inheritance, Trippe bought World War I surplus planes to start an airline on Long Island, N.Y. By 1927, he was running his third airline, which merged to form Pan Am. That year, Trippe scheduled an eight-passenger flight for a 90-mile, over-water trip between Key West, Fla., and Havana, Cuba, marking the first international airline flight.

By 1930, Trippe had government contracts to fly airmail routes to South America, which financed his passenger service to Latin America. An innovator, Trippe bought flying boats for long-distance flights and added new navigation gear to make flying safer. He signed Charles Lindbergh as a consultant. By the '30s, Pan Am was flying mail and passengers from California to Asia on the China Clipper. After World War II, Trippe wanted the federal government to license Pan Am as a monopoly carrier to compete with foreign airlines. He was turned down.

Trippe was Boeing's first customer for the 707 jetliner, which moved Pan Am into the jet age. By the '60s, Trippe had steered Pan Am into the hotel and real estate business, while creating a byzantine, 81,000-mile air route system servicing 85 countries. Trippe retired as chief executive in 1968. By then, Pan Am was nearly bankrupt. Various executives kept trying to right the company, but soaring fuel costs and deregulation were too much to handle. Pan Am went out of business in 1991.

32. James Watson (1928- ) and Francis Crick (1916- )
Fathers of biotechnology

Watson and Crick discovered the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical strands that help form chromosomes in cells and contain the gene code that is the basis of heredity. Their stunning discovery also led to the creation of a new industry, biotechnology. In the early '50s, scientists knew that DNA played a factor in cells and heredity, but its exact role was unclear.

Crick, a British physicist, had worked on radar technology during World War II. Watson was a young PhD from Indiana University. Working together in England, Watson convinced Crick that if they could understand DNA's exact structure they could solve its mysterious role. Using X-ray research on protein molecules passed along by biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, Watson had the insight that DNA consisted not of one but a pair of chemical strands.

Watson and Crick clarified DNA's structure to be a double helix, or shaped like spiral staircases, and that if these strands were separated, each would hold a set of chemicals identical to its former partner. This copying process explained how genes are reproduced in dividing cells. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962. In the 1970s, scientists began inserting bits of DNA into bacterium to create mini cell factories that reproduced specific proteins. This led to the creation of biotechnology companies, such as Genentech and Amgen, whose gene-spliced drugs now treat everything from AIDS to cancer.

33. Peter Drucker (1909- )
Father of management theory

Drucker created the field of modern management with a body of work dating back to the 1940s. He came up with the concepts of "privatization" and "knowledge workers" for a new class of employees, and he cited the importance of nurturing employees both for society's betterment and to enhance corporate profit. As Drucker put it, "An organization is a human, a social, indeed a moral phenomenon."

A Vienna native, Drucker was working as a journalist when he first came to the U.S. in 1937. His breakthrough book "Concept of the Corporation" (1946) was based on his first-hand observation of General Motors. He analyzed everything from GM's top managers to its labor relations. His 1954 book, "The Practice of Management," was based on his study of General Electric. Before Drucker, business theory chiefly concentrated on specific tasks such as accounting or engineering.

But Drucker sought to make management theory into a new discipline that covered everything from setting objectives to risk taking. He hired himself out as a consultant to organizations ranging from the Girl Scouts to Sears, Roebuck & Co., but Japanese businesses warmed to his theories quicker than did American firms. In 1961, Drucker was one of the first to note the rising importance of Japan's economy. Still active, Drucker has written 32 books and has taught at Claremont Graduate University since 1971.

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Champion of interstate highways

During Eisenhower's presidency (1953-61), one pet project he shepherded through Congress in 1956 was funding of the interstate highway system. Since then, a vast ribbon of 46,000 miles of interstate highways were built across the country at a cost of $130 billion, clearing the way for all manner of commerce and civil transport. The interstates connect more than 75% of U.S. cities with populations over 50,000, and they carry about 20% of the nation's road traffic.

Eisenhower, who led Allied forces during World War II, had seen Germany's autobahns and was impressed by how the high-speed roads connected that country. The first U.S. freeway opened in Pennsylvania in 1940. Four years later, Congress voted for interstate roads to be selected, but construction languished until Eisenhower's bill was passed. That measure committed the federal government to pay 90% of the cost, with states picking up the rest.

35. Ted Turner (1938- )
Cable TV pioneer

Turner popularized cable television by creating superstations with a basic programming menu of sports, news and old movies. After his father's suicide in 1961, Turner took over Turner Advertising Co., a struggling $1-million billboard firm. In 1970, Turner got into television by merging with a small Atlanta UHF station. To boost his advertising revenue, in 1976 he started broadcasting his station's signal by satellite to reach cable systems nationwide.

To provide sports programming for his WTBS channel, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team in 1977. In 1980, Turner started Cable News Network, despite few advertisers seeing any potential in a 24-hour news network. CNN then made its mark covering disasters such as the Challenger space shuttle explosion and the Persian Gulf War. Turner Broadcasting System Inc. was heavily in debt, but Turner kept expanding. In 1986, with the help of junk bond financing, he bought the MGM film library, which led to the creation of another channel, Turner Network Television. In 1996, Turner sold his company to Time Warner for $9 billion. Turner is now Time Warner's biggest shareholder.

36. Robert W. Woodruff (1889-1985)
Made Coke a worldwide brand

Woodruff turned the red-and-white Coca-Cola trademark into a brand synonymous worldwide as an American product. Coca-Cola Co. was sold in 1919 for $25 million to a group of investors, including Woodruff's father. Woodruff was installed as Coca-Cola's president in 1923 and he directed the company until 1955. Under his leadership, Coke's popularity leapfrogged, thanks to heavy spending on market research, production controls--so Coke tasted the same everywhere it was sold--and catchy advertising such as "The Pause That Refreshes" (1929) and "It's the Real Thing" (1941).

Woodruff's predecessor marketed Coke to upscale audiences, but Woodruff wanted Coke to be a drink for the masses, and the company launched campaigns in the '50s aimed at black audiences. During World War II, Woodruff promised he'd sell Coke for a token 5 cents a bottle to U.S. servicemen anywhere. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower asked the company to provide Coke in Africa and Europe to boost the morale of GIs. In the process, Woodruff won approval to open 64 overseas bottling plants. Woodruff's successors have continued to make Coke ubiquitous; the soft drink is sold in about 200 countries.

37. Robert E. Wood (1879-1969)
Pioneer of modern retailing

Wood catapulted Sears, Roebuck & Co. from a rural mail-order catalog firm into the nation's biggest retail chain by selling everything from washing machines to TVs and baseball gloves under one roof. Wood was an executive at rival Montgomery Ward in 1924 when he jumped to Sears as vice president. Wood foresaw how the popularity of automobiles would bring more rural customers to urban Classifiedss, so in 1925 Sears opened its first retail Classifieds in Chicago. By the end of the decade, Sears had more than 300 Classifiedss and Wood was president of the company.

In 1931, Sears' retail Classifieds sales surpassed that of its mail-order business; that same year Wood got into auto insurance by creating Allstate. As World War II ended, Wood correctly anticipated an economic boom across the country and aggressively opened Classifiedss in the Sun Belt. Sears was the first retail chain to set aside free parking areas next to its Classifiedss. When World War II ended, Sears was only slightly bigger than Montgomery Ward; by 1954, Sears' $3 billion in sales was triple that of its rival. Wood retired in 1954. In 1967, Sears was the first retailer to hit $1 billion in monthly sales.

38. Bella Abzug (1920-1998), Betty Friedan (1921- ) and Gloria Steinem (1934- )
The Women's Movement

Like the Communist Manifesto a century before, the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" launched a revolution that changed the world. Friedan's articulation of women's entrapment and malaise struck a profound chord of independence, and the notion of a career outside the home took hold. It also didn't hurt that the first safe and reliable form of birth control--the Pill--had just come on the market, and that Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl" helped reinforce the idea of equality with men. Friedan's credo that the personal is political led her, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and many others to found the National Organization for Women, to pressure the courts and legislatures to enforce the anti-job discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

By the 1970s, Steinem had begun Ms. magazine for those on the front lines of the movement--the millions of working women pouring into the workplace. Abzug, a civil rights lawyer, was elected to Congress in 1970 with the slogan "A woman's place is in the House--the House of Representatives," and helped pave the way for other women to enter politics. She also never gave up the charge to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. But by 1982 ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states proved an implacable obstacle--although 35 states had voted in favor of it. But by then the women's movement had moved far beyond Friedan's urgings to women to compete in a man's world; today, women comprise nearly 50% of the U.S. work force.

39. Amadeo P. Giannini (1870-1949)
Banking innovator

Giannini laid the bedrock of modern banking. He built Bank of America into the world's largest bank, set up the first branch bank network and opened lending practices to include loans to ordinary individuals and installment payments. In 1904, he opened Bank of Italy in San Francisco. Two years later, during the great San Francisco earthquake, Giannini hauled out $80,000 in cash before his building burned down and soon after was making loans from a counter top on the waterfront.

Sensitive to the great distances his depositors traveled, he bought a bank in San Jose in 1909 and opened his first branch. He kept buying banks throughout California and in 1927 consolidated them into Bank of America of California. Giannini envisioned that his field would be dominated by a handful of large banks, and in 1928 he set up a holding company called Transamerica. He purchased banks in New York, Washington, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada. Bank of America began offering installment loans on everything from real estate to used cars and home appliances, innovations that his competitors would copy. Giannini was chairman of Transamerica until his death in 1949.

40. Ida Tarbell (1857-1944)
Muckraker, trust-buster

A groundbreaking investigative journalist, Tarbell's reporting played a key role in breaking up John D. Rockefeller's monopoly of the U.S. oil industry. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. controlled about 90% of the nation's oil-refining capacity, but much of his business was hidden in a Byzantine maze of operations. Tarbell's book, "The History of the Standard Oil Company" (1904), thoroughly documented the creation of this monopoly and caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, the government sued Standard Oil under provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and in 1911, Standard Oil was broken up into 33 companies. Tarbell's father was a small-time oil producer.

41. Frederick Smith (1944- )
Overnight-delivery innovator

With Federal Express, Smith created the overnight air delivery business. At Yale University, Smith wrote a term paper about the need for overnight air freight; his teacher gave him a C. Undaunted, Smith started Federal Express in 1971 with $91 million from venture capitalists, plus his $4-million inheritance. Smith devised a hub system where all packages would be picked up and flown to Memphis, sorted at night, then flown to cities and delivered by truck to the customer's door. To avoid federal shipping regulations, the company owned its own planes.

Service began in 1973 with 14 jets flying to 25 cities. In two years, Federal Express lost about $29 million. As its reputation for reliability grew, by 1976 it was profitable and the company was delivering blood, organs, documents and computer parts and counted IBM and the federal government as customers. As more businesses relied on just-in-time inventory systems, Federal Express kept growing; its revenues hit $1 billion in 1984. The next year, Smith, worried about the growth in digital communications, offered ZapMail--the delivery of documents by fax and courier within two hours. Federal Express lost $300 million on ZapMail before abandoning it.

Despite competition from UPS and other package delivery concerns, FedEx and its parent company, FDX Corp., keeps growing and it now delivers to 210 countries with 600-plus aircraft, 46,000 vehicles and 141,000 employees.

42. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Civil rights activist

King eloquently inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. His work led to passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, calling for equal opportunity in the workplace and education, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. King also encouraged others to push for more employment opportunities for minorities. King began his civil rights work in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., by leading a boycott of city buses after a black woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. The next year, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to provide equal seating on its buses.

In 1957, King set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to protest racial segregation in schools, hotels and restaurants. King was often jailed. To prod Congress into passing a civil rights bill, he organized a march in Washington that drew more than 200,000 people. King also complained that poverty created social injustice and he planned a campaign to help the poor in their battle for economic opportunity. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while supporting a strike by black garbage workers. One King disciple, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, later created the Rainbow/PUSH coalition to challenge corporations to include more African Americans and other minorities in their operations.

43. Howard Jarvis (1902-1986)
Tax rebel

Jarvis led the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which drastically cut California property taxes and triggered a wave of grass-roots taxpayer initiatives across the country. A retired businessman, Jarvis was a political gadfly who had managed regional campaigns for Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential races and later failed in his own U.S. Senate bid. By the late '70s, runaway inflation and soaring California home prices had quadrupled property taxes for some homeowners--while their personal incomes lagged--threatening some with loss of their homes. Proposition 13, authored by Jarvis and retired Realtor Paul Gann, cut property taxes 58% by rolling them back to 1975 levels.

Proposition 13 was opposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But with Jarvis' support, the measure passed by almost a 2-1 margin. Proposition 13 slashed California property taxes by $6 billion and sent cities and counties scurrying for new revenues as they dramatically boosted fees for local services and began to rely heavily on sales taxes. Proposition 13 also hampered spending on public schools, as California's per-pupil spending dropped from 18th in the nation in 1977 to 35th today.

44. Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
Environmental inspiration

Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring," with its frightening descriptions of how pesticides can kill wildlife and poison the food chain, helped usher in the modern environmental era. Carson was a marine biologist and spent much of her life working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Carson's book blasted chemical companies as she unveiled the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, whose residues pollute the environment, with their toxins slowly working into the food supply. She described poisoned robins falling out of trees and of DDT-damaged eggshells collapsing from the weight of nesting birds.

Her book sold 500,000 hardcover copies and triggered a storm of denials by the chemical industry. But President John F. Kennedy read her work and ordered an investigation; his Science Advisory Committee backed Carson and called for stricter pesticide controls. Carson died of cancer in 1964. Her book continues to inspire environmentalists, and her work is credited with having an impact on everything from the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 to the Greenpeace movement.

45. Edward C. Johnson III (1930- )
Mutual Fund Kingpin

Johnson turned the mutual fund group his father started, closely held Fidelity Investments, into the industry's giant. Fidelity's current assets under management: $711 billion. Known as "Ned," he took over as president in 1972 and, with famed stock picker Peter Lynch, lifted Magellan and Fidelity's other funds into national prominence. Johnson turned Fidelity into mainstream America's most familiar mutual fund family, especially in the 1980s, when the middle class flocked to the stock and bond markets.

Though often described as fiercely private and lacking personality, he followed his father's strategy of having his fund managers buy stocks with growth potential rather than blue-chip steadiness--with enormous success. He also helped pioneer such mutual fund practices as selling direct rather than through brokers, offering discount brokerage services, forming a unit to handle big institutional accounts and creating dozens of funds that specialize in specific industries or geographic regions. He turned over most of his ownership of Boston-based Fidelity's parent, FMR Corp., to his daughter, Abigail, in 1995. According to Forbes magazine, Johnson's net worth is $2.2 billion. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 and joined Fidelity in 1957.

46. Milton Friedman (1912- )
Leader of conservative economics

The most influential conservative economist of our time, Friedman argued against governmental efforts to manage the economy, preferring a largely hands-off approach. Friedman led opposition to Keynesian economic theory--popular since the 1930s--that calls for governments to stabilize the economy by increasing spending in recessionary times and to boost taxes in boom periods to slow the economy and halt inflation.

Friedman insisted that Keynesian economics doesn't work. Instead, for 40 years Friedman has argued that the supply of money is the single most important influence on business and therefore the Federal Reserve Board should pump in a steady money supply of 4% into our economy, "month in and month out, year in and year out." Friedman believes in free competition, opposes farm price supports and supports enforcement of antitrust laws. The son of immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Friedman developed his theories while teaching at the University of Chicago. He served as an advisor to President Nixon. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976.

47. Paul Volcker (1927- ) and Alan Greenspan (1926- )
Inflation tamers

As successive chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, Volcker and Greenspan helped lay the financial groundwork for the nation's longest peacetime economic expansion. Volc