The Runners Up Club Podcast
1) Hydrox: Oreo's Inspiration and Victim
In a cautionary tale for all of today’s artisanal food-makers, a small bakery sees its innovative new cookie concept copied by a much larger rival. Losing market share is bad enough but being transfor...Show More
2) Harold Lloyd: Tramps Over Glasses
In the 1920’s, Harold Lloyd’s silent film stardom outshone Charlie Chaplin's. Today, we remember The Little Tramp while The Glasses Character is a cinephile’s trivia question answer.
3) Tally Ho: A Playing Card Innovator Is Outpaced by The Bike
In the world of playing card design, there’s the classic Bicycle deck and then there’s everything else. Is it any wonder a fox-hunting dandy didn’t emerge as the nation’s most popular? Probably not.
4) IIiodor: The Madder Monk of Russia
Pre-Revolutionary Russia was the sort of place where more than one “holy man” had a legitimate claim to the title The Mad Monk. Rasputin won.
5) Broad Gauge Rail: An Engineering Genius’s Lost Cause
In an early standards war played out across the fields of Industrial England, an engineering genius loses out to a more widely adopted, though possibly inferior, system.
6) Gabriel Metsu: The Forgotten Dutch Master
Few artists create a style so distinct that it is recognizable to an untrained eye. Johannes Vermeer is one. Meet the now-obscure artist who Vermeer displaced from the pantheon of Dutch Masters.
7) Eulace Peacock: Hamstrung Champion
Jesse Owens’ greatest rival might have claimed a share of the sprinter’s four gold medals and a place beside him in history exposing the idiocy of Hitler’s Aryan racism… but for a common muscle pull.
8) Introduction to The Runners Up Club
A short intro to The Runners Up Club podcast, a series about second- and third-bests, from near misses to no chancers. It's an idiosyncratic series produced by, one hopes, people who are not idiots.