The Rest is History

1896: Theodor Hilferstadt, telegraph operator for Western Union who had recently arrived in Seattle from Germany, sneezes while sending a wire and accidentally substitutes a g for c in the message Plenty cold in Yukon.

1900: Arthur Hamsher Jr., a Minneapolis attorney for the Great Northern railroad, was looking for unused assets to liquidate to help fund the companys expansion plans. He identifies 900,000 surplus acres of undeveloped land in the Pacific Northwest that the company would probably never use, and brokers its sale to a 66-year-old German in the region, Friedrich Weyerhauser, who said he was looking for a little peace and quiet close to nature.

1901: Department store salesman Harold Adolphus Richmond gets chewed out by his boss, which affects his mood the rest of the day. One customer, a 30-year-old Swede named Johan W. Nordstrom, is unimpressed with Richmonds customer service skills, and knows he could do a better job. Richmond eventually enjoys moderate success selling buggy whips.

1909: Shortly before the Seattle Grand Cotillion Ball, local debutante Bessie Iona Ricketts has an argument with her date, the 27-year-old president of the Greenwood Logging Co., and decides to stay home. Her erstwhile date, William E. Boeing, goes instead to check out the flying machines hed been hearing about at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Ricketts dies a spinster.

1939: Over an oyster dinner, David Glenn, a field engineer for the Public Works Administration, tells his friend Melvin Franklin, a local insurance adjuster, that his boss overrode his rejection of the flawed Tacoma Narrows Bridge design to save two cents. Franklin feels sick hearing this, partly from knowing of the new policy on the bridge awaiting approval at General Insurance, but also from a fatal case of shellfish poisoning that will prevent him from acting on this new information.

1975: Albuquerque Police sergeant David Garcia scowls at the 21-year-old kid brought in for speeding and driving without a license. Youre not from around these parts, are you? he asks the young, bespectacled man. I got my eye on you. The young man pulls $1,000 cash out of his wallet to pay his bail and quietly decides to blow town and take his software company with him. Garcia retires to Jemez Pueblo in 1980.

1995: Jerry Herschel Huether, a programmer working on updates to Microsofts Bob interface, sends a long, well thought-out e-mail to Bill Gates arguing that the internet is likely to remain a fad for decades before anyone makes any money at it. The message gets blocked by a spam filter that targets the Comic Sans font. Huether leaves the company the following year.

1998: Julie B. Driver, an office assistant in the legal department of Amazon.com, is complaining to a friend in the elevator about Barnes & Nobles new website. Jeff Bezos steps on the elevator in mid-conversation, overhearing Driver say, We should just patent using a mouse click to buy stuff and sue them out of existence. Driver joins a startup company that year, which quickly goes under.

2000: McKenzie Wilson-Boylan delivers a load of dry cleaning to a client at Microsoft while working for MyLackey.com. The grateful client, newly flush on vested stock options, tips her $100. Wilson-Boylan buys 100 lottery tickets and wins $100,000. She now works as a dolphin handler in Puerto Vallarta with fond memories of the company, unaware of its actual fate.

2003: During a particularly cloudy summer day, Jane Nilsson, a part-time administrative assistant for the Forks Chamber of Commerce, posts to the new company blog, Its so dark here even the vampires are depressed! No one responds to the post. Later, while bored, she uploads a photo of her cat with an accidentally poorly spelled caption that gets circulated via e-mail. Embarrassed by the publicity, she quits and joins a convent.

2004: Coinstars prototype of a grocery store calorie-counting machine tests poorly with the stores because it drives down food sales. In a post-mortem meeting with CEO Paul Davis, the senior test manager, Mike Kieslowski, throws up his hands in frustration, saying, I dont know. Maybe we could just buy those Red Box things from McDonalds. He then laughs nervously at his own absurd suggestion, and considers a change in careers.

2007: Advertising copywriter Yolanda Cruz, working on a proposal to Boeing to market the 787 Dreamliner, which was scheduled to be launched that year, hits on the phrase Well Get You There Faster. After a moments thought, she crosses it out and instead decides to focus on the technical aspects of the plane. She still works in advertising.