Word: pioneers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...divided between two main factions that vie with each other for political influence: the so-called Empiricists, a dry, hard-headed bunch who do their jobs with scientific precision; and the Intuitionists like Watson, who work by instinct, by feel. James Fulton, the Intuitionists' patron saint, is a deceased pioneer of "verticality" whose books contain cryptic, Masonic meditations that seem to address the nature of life: "We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order...
...study of plants used by indigenous peoples is called ethnobotany, and Plotkin had been steeped in the subject ever since his college years at Harvard a decade earlier. He had taken a course taught by Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer ethnobotanist who had spent years in the Amazon rain forest. During the first lecture, Professor Schultes showed a slide of what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark-cloth masks dancing under the influence of some kind of potion. "The one on the left has a Harvard degree," the professor said, pointing out how far some ethnobotanists...
There are many other people--mutual-fund pioneer Ned Johnson at Fidelity Investments and discount broker Charles Schwab, to name two--who over the course of the next 40 years helped push Wall Street and Main Street closer together. Yet for all their innovations, they remain at bottom Merrill's heirs. Their modern investing mantra is the same basic message he preached so many years ago-- that people should invest for the long haul; that they should have a clear understanding of the companies they are buying; that despite the hair-raising ups and downs, stocks have historically outperformed every...
...always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade...
...calculate 10 times as fast as IBM's tabulators. Many people, however, including Watson's father, couldn't believe the company's core products were headed for extinction. Nonetheless, Tom Jr., who became IBM president in 1952, never retreated. He recruited electronics experts and brought in luminaries like computer pioneer John von Neumann to teach the company's engineers and scientists. By 1963, IBM had grabbed an 8-to-1 lead in revenues over Sperry Rand, the manufacturer of Univac...