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Updated:
4/25/2011 |
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American Airlines |
American Airlines was developed from many small airlines, including Southern Air Transport in Texas, Southern Air Fast Express in the west, Universal Aviation in the Midwest, Thompson Aeronautical Services, and Colonial Air Transport in the
 Northeast. In 1930, American Airways was incorporated as a single company, based in New York. The airline operated wood and fabric-covered Fokker Trimotors and all-metal Ford Trimotors.
In 1934 American began flying Curtiss Condor biplanes with sleeping berths.
The DC-3 "Flagship", American's chief aircraft type during the World War II period.
In 1934, American Airways Company was renamed it "American Air Lines".
American Airlines was first to cooperate with Fiorello LaGuardia to build an airport in New York City, and partly as a result became owner of the world's first airline lounge known as the Admirals Club. American Airlines introduced the first transcontinental jet service using Boeing 707s on January 25, 1959.
 After moving headquarters to Fort Worth in 1979, American, led by Robert Crandall changed its routing to a hub-and-spoke system in 1981, opening its first hubs at DFW and Chicago O'Hare.
Through the 1990s, American expanded its network in Latin America to become the dominant U.S. carrier in the region.
Robert Crandall left in 1998 and was replaced by Donald J. Carty, who negotiated the purchase of the near bankrupt Trans World Airlines and its hub in St. Louis in April 2001.
American Airlines began losing money in the wake of the TWA merger and the September 11, 2001 attacks (in which two of its planes were involved). Carty negotiated wage and benefit agreements with the unions but resigned after union leaders discovered he was planning to award executive compensation packages at the same time, and was replaced by Gerald Arpey, the current CEO.
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Tandy
Corporation & Radio Shack |
Charles Tandy was born in Brownsville, Texas. Charles developed his small family leather business into an international corporation. He first turned it into a leather-craft company when shoe rationing in World War II almost killed the business, and later expanded into selling leather and tools to make such products as wallets.
Tandy subsequently acquired Pier I Imports, Dillard's Department Stores, Wolfe Nursery Stores, Color Tile, Leonard Brothers,qv Mitchell's stores, Alcon Labs, Robintech, and the Stafford-Lowdon printing company.
In 1963 Tandy Corporation acquired a chain of nine Boston-based retail stores known as Radio Shack, then selling electronics components. Radio Shack flourished, and by 1963 annual sales of the growing enterprise reached $20 million.
By the time of Charles Tandy's death in 1978, Tandy Corporation was a billion-dollar multinational corporation with 20,000 employees and 7,000 Radio Shack outlets. Corporate headquarters for the multinational manufacturer and retailer of diversified handicraft supplies and electronics were located in downtown Fort Worth at the newly-constructed Tandy Center.
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Zales
Corporation |
Zale Corporation is a leading specialty retailer of fine jewelry. As of 2009, Zale operated 1,247 specialty retail jewelry stores and 684 kiosks located mainly in shopping malls throughout the United States of America, Canada and Puerto Rico.
The company began in 1924 in Wichita Falls, Texas, when Morris Zale, William Zale, and Ben Lipshy opened the first Zales Jewelers store. By the beginning of World War II, the company had expanded to a dozen stores throughout Texas and Oklahoma.
In 1944, Corrigan's of Dallas was acquired, a finer jewelry purchase that eventually was joined by the Bailey Banks & Biddle brand and the company moved to Dallas.
In 1986, the company was bought out by a Canadian and Austrian consortium, and in 1989, they bought the Gordon's Jewelers chain.
Zale Corp. is now a public company trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 2008 Zale Corporation sold the Bailey Banks & Biddle upscale jewelry chain to Finlay Enterprises.
In 2008 105 locations closed and in 2009 an additional 191 stores closed Currently, the chain operates 680 stores in the United Sates, including 11 in Puerto Rico.
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Neiman Marcus |
 Neiman Marcus, formerly Neiman-Marcus, is a luxury specialty retail department store operated by the Neiman Marcus Group, and headquartered in Dallas.
Herbert Marcus, Sr., a former buyer with Dallas' Sanger Brothers department store, founded the company with his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, A. L. Neiman, then employees of Sanger Brothers competitor A. Harris and Co.
The store, established on September 10, 1907, was lavishly furnished and stocked with clothing of a quality that was not commonly found in Texas. Within a few weeks, the store's initial inventory, mostly acquired on a buying trip to New York made by Carrie, was completely sold out. Neiman Marcus was instantly successful, and its first several years of operation were quite profitable.
In 1914, Neiman Marcus opened in its new, permanent location at the corner of Main Street and Ervay Street. In 1936 the store staged a show called "One Hundred Years of Texas Fashions" in 1936 in honor of the Texas Centennial.
Herbert Marcus, Sr., died in 1950, and Carrie Neiman died two years later, leaving Stanley Marcus in charge of the company's operations.
The 1950s saw the addition of a second store. The company continued its extravagant marketing efforts (including the launch of His and Her gifts in the famous Christmas Book) with the inauguration of Fortnight in 1957.
 In 1965 the Preston Center store was closed and a new store, more than twice as big, was opened at NorthPark Center. Another branch in Fort Worth was also opened. In subsequent years stores opened in over 30 cities across the United States.
Stanley Marcus died on January 22, 2002.
Over the last 20 years, ownership of Neiman Marcus has passed through several hands. On May 2, 2005, Neiman Marcus Group was the subject of a leveraged buyout to two private equity firms, Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus.
The Neiman Marcus Group also owns Bergdorf Goodman specialty retail department stores and a direct marketing division, Neiman Marcus Direct, which operates catalogue and online operations under the Horchow, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman names.
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Texas
Instruments |
TI, is an American company based in Dallas, is renowned for developing and commercializing semiconductor and computer technology. TI is the No. 4 manufacturer of semiconductors worldwide after Intel, Samsung and Toshiba, the No. 2 supplier of chips for cellular handsets after Qualcomm, and the No. 1 producer of digital signal processors (DSPs) and analog semiconductors, among a wide range of other semiconductor products. In spring 1986, the company was the 13th firm to register its domain name, TI.com. In 2010, the company was listed at number 223 on the Fortune 500.
Texas Instruments was founded by
Cecil H. Green,
J. Erik Jonsson,
Eugene McDermott, and
Patrick E. Haggerty in 1947. It was setup by its parent company
Geophysical Service Incorporated (GSI) to manufacture the newly invented transistor. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941 on the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked. In November, 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division.
By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's Geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed
General Instruments Inc. Because there already existed a firm named General Instrument, the company was rechristened Texas Instruments that same year. Geophysical Service Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments which it remained until early 1988, when most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company.
Semiconductors
Early in 1952 Texas Instruments purchased a patent license to produce (germanium) transistors from Western Electric Co., the manufacturing arm of AT&T, for $25 000. By the end of that year, it was already manufacturing and selling them. TI Vice President Patrick Haggerty was the visionary at TI who realized the future of this technology in the electronics industry.
First Silicon Transistor
In April 1954, Gordon Teal at TI created the first commercial silicon transistor and tested it on April 14, 1954. At this point TI stood alone as the first volume manufacturer of silicon transistors.
First Integrated Circuits
Old logic IC produced by TI.
 Employee
Jack Kilby while working at TI's Central Research Labs invented the integrated circuit in 1958. Kilby
recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated
circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the
world's first working integrated circuit on September
12, 1958.
Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the
integrated circuit. In 2008 TI announced its new "Kilby Labs", a center of innovation designed to foster creative ideas for breakthrough semiconductor technology. Launched on September 12, the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit, the new labs will build on IC inventor Jack Kilby's legacy of revolutionizing our lives through chip innovation.
Standard TTL
Texas Instruments and other brands
of 7400 series TTL and CMOS logic.
 The 7400 series of transistor-transistor logic (TTL) chips, developed by Texas Instruments in the 1960s, popularized the use of integrated circuits in computer logic. The military grade version of this was the 5400 series.
Texas Instruments invented the hand-held calculator in 1967 (they were $2,500 a piece) and the single-chip microcomputer in 1971, and was assigned the first patent on a single-chip microprocessor (invented by
Gary Boone) on September 4, 1973.
Creating a new industry
TI had two interesting problems with engineering and product development after the introduction of the semiconductor and the microprocessor. Firstly, most of the chemicals, machinery and technologies needed to create semiconductors did not exist so TI had to "invent" them. Secondly, the market was small for TI electronic components in the early days so TI had to "invent" uses to create the markets.
For example TI created the first transistor radio for this purpose. Another example, TI developed the first wall mounted, computer controlled, home set-back thermostat in the late '70s but nobody would buy it mostly because of its cost. TI started an Industrial Controls division, based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which built automated process control computers used in the chemical and food industry and was very successful. This business was eventually sold to Siemens AG in October, 1991. TI turned to military and government uses and had many electro-mechanical devices used in the
Apollo rocket and moon-lander.
DLP
TI is the sole source for digital light processing micro-mirror components, a technology used in video projectors and televisions as well as movie theatres or cinemas.
DLP Cinema. On February 2, 2000, Philippe Binant, technical manager of Digital Cinema Project at Gaumont in France, realized the first digital cinema projection in Europe with the TI mark V prototype projector.
In 2007, Texas Instruments was awarded the Manufacturer
of the Year for Global Supply Chain Excellence by World
Trade magazine.
Texas Instruments is known to uphold values and is considered highly ethical. In four consecutive years (2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010), TI made it to the list of most ethical companies in the world, compiled by
Ethisphere Institute. TI is the only company to appear in all four years' list in the Electronics/Semiconductor category.
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More Companies to Come |
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