September 25 in business history: 51 amplifiers no ship could reach, a bank sold in a night, and the CEO Juul handed over

Three September 25s, spread across 63 years, each settled by what the operator had to hand over to keep the thing running: two cables carrying 51 amplifiers each, none of them reachable; a bank with 2,300 branches; and a chief executive's chair.

At 4 p.m. on September 25, 1956, at Lancaster House in London, the Postmaster General, Charles Hill, opened the first transatlantic telephone cable by speaking to the chairman of AT&T in New York and to the Canadian Minister of Transport in Ottawa. The 250 guests listened on individual earphones; television cameras recorded it 1. The first 24 hours of public service carried 588 calls from London to the United States and 119 from London to Canada 1.

What went into service that afternoon was 29 telephone circuits between London and New York, six between London and Montreal, and one circuit split between the three destinations for telegraph and other narrow-band traffic 2. Getting those 36 channels across the Atlantic meant two cables, one for each direction, each carrying 51 one-way flexible repeaters at 37-mile intervals over roughly 1,950 nautical miles from Clarenville, Newfoundland to Oban, Scotland 12. The repeaters were the whole bet. Power had to reach them from the shore, they had to survive two and a half miles of ocean, and once laid they could not be repaired; the vacuum tubes inside them were tested for eighteen years before the cable went down 2. They never failed in 22 years of continuous service, from 1956 until TAT-1 was retired in 1978 2.

The pre-cable business is the measure of what the cable changed. Transatlantic telephone service began in 1927 with a single radio circuit handling an average of about 2,000 calls a year, and in 1928 the rate to New York was cut to £9 for three minutes 1. Radio was subject to fading and atmospheric disturbance, and the frequencies available for circuits were limited 12. A three-minute call in 1956 cost $12 in business hours and $9 in the evening and at weekends 3. What the cable changed was friction: calls were connected in about ten minutes except during the 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. peak, and in the first full week of operation calls to Canada ran 85 percent above the average weekly radio traffic, calls from Canada were 100 percent higher, and full-rate calls to the United States rose 60 percent 1. Business callers were the main users 1. In its first year TAT-1 carried about 220,000 calls between Britain and the United States and 75,000 between Britain and Canada — twice what the radio circuits had carried in the previous twelve months — for £2 million of revenue shared among the three countries 1. The capacity kept being squeezed out of the same copper: the 36 channels became 48 when the bandwidth was narrowed to 3 kHz, and time-assignment speech interpolation, introduced in June 1960, took the usable capacity from 37 channels to 72 speech circuits 2.

Decision mirror: On February 14, 2025, Meta announced Project Waterworth, a subsea cable reaching five continents and spanning more than 50,000 kilometres — longer than the Earth's circumference — described by the company as a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year investment and the longest project of its kind using the highest-capacity technology available 4. Where TAT-1's two cables carried 36 voice channels, Meta's newest systems carry 24 fibre pairs, against the 8 to 16 typical of other new cables, and are laid at depths of up to 7,000 metres 4. Subsea cables still carry more than 95 percent of intercontinental traffic 4. The economics that made TAT-1 worth building in 1956 — a fixed asset whose capacity is set before demand arrives — are the same economics, about four million times larger in circuit terms 24.

Washington Mutual Bank was closed on the evening of September 25, 2008 by the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was named receiver. JPMorgan Chase acquired the assets, assumed the qualified financial contracts and made a payment of $1.9 billion; claims by equity, subordinated and senior debt holders were not acquired 5. The bank and its Park City, Utah subsidiary held combined assets of $307 billion and total deposits of $188 billion, across more than 2,300 branches in fifteen states — the largest failure of an insured depository institution in the FDIC's history 56.

The run had already decided it. Washington Mutual lost $16.7 billion of deposits in the nine days from September 15, the OTS said, leaving the thrift without the liquidity to meet its obligations 7. FDIC chairman Sheila Bair framed the outcome from the depositor's side: "For all depositors and other customers of Washington Mutual Bank, this is simply a combination of two banks," she said. "For bank customers, it will be a seamless transition. There will be no interruption in services and bank customers should expect business as usual come Friday morning" 5. Neither the uninsured depositors nor the insurance fund absorbed any losses 5.

The buyer's arithmetic is what shows what was actually for sale. JPMorgan said it would mark the acquired loan portfolio down by approximately $31 billion — its estimate of remaining credit losses on impaired loans — while the deposits came across at full value 8. The combination created the largest depository institution in the United States with more than $900 billion of customer deposits and the country's second-largest branch network, 5,400 branches in 23 states reaching 42 percent of the population 8. JPMorgan called the deal immediately accretive to earnings, adding more than 50 cents a share in 2009, against about $1.5 billion of pretax merger costs and about $1.5 billion of annual pretax savings by 2010, and said it would raise capital alongside the transaction 8. The conference call was scheduled for 9:15 that night 8.

What the owners got is the other half of the price. Washington Mutual's holding company filed for Chapter 11 protection the following day, and the FDIC's receiver does not project having assets to distribute to the bank's subordinate note holders or equity holders 6. The depositors were made whole, the buyer took the network, and the claims below them were left where they stood.

Decision mirror: The receivership has outlasted almost everyone who read the news that week. The receiver paid JPMorgan $645 million to settle the bank's indemnity claims, and collected $843.9 million from the holding company's bankruptcy settlement, which took effect in March 2012 6. A first interim distribution on September 26, 2017 paid about $2.76 billion to allowed senior unsecured creditors — roughly 95 percent of the remaining assets at the time — and a second interim distribution followed on November 21, 2025, distributing about $160 million, seventeen years after the failure 6. A bank failure is not an event with an end date; it is a balance sheet that has to be worked down.

On September 25, 2019, Juul Labs announced that K.C. Crosthwaite would become chief executive effective immediately. Crosthwaite was Altria's chief growth officer and had been an observer on Juul's board; Kevin Burns, who had run the company from fewer than 300 employees in the United States to operations in 20 countries, stepped down, saying he had decided a few weeks earlier that the time was right 9.

Two concessions came with the appointment, effective immediately: the company suspended all broadcast, print and digital product advertising in the United States, and it stopped lobbying the administration on its draft guidance, committing to support and comply with the final policy 9. Crosthwaite gave the reason in his own words: "Unfortunately, today that future is at risk due to unacceptable levels of youth usage and eroding public confidence in our industry. Against that backdrop, we must strive to work with regulators, policymakers and other stakeholders, and earn the trust of the societies in which we operate" 9.

The price of the licence had already been set eight months earlier. In December 2018 Altria paid $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul, valuing the company at $38 billion 10. Five weeks after the leadership change, on October 31, 2019, Altria wrote the investment down by $4.5 billion in a single quarter. Altria's chief executive, Howard Willard, told analysts: "Certainly in the range of scenarios when we made our investment in Juul, we did not anticipate this dramatic of a change in the e-vapor category" 10. By then Juul had already stopped selling most flavours and the FDA's application deadline for keeping products on the shelf had moved from 2022 to May 2020 10.

The ending is the number worth carrying forward. On March 3, 2023, Altria exchanged its entire minority economic investment in Juul for a non-exclusive, irrevocable global licence to certain of Juul's heated-tobacco intellectual property. As of December 31, 2022, the carrying value and estimated fair value of that investment was $250 million 11. Altria's chief executive, Billy Gifford, said Juul faced "significant regulatory and legal challenges and uncertainties, many of which could exist for many years" 11. $12.8 billion in, $250 million marked.

Decision mirror: The licence did come back. The FDA granted marketing orders for several Juul products in July 2025, and on August 28, 2026 it authorised the JUUL2 device with tobacco- and menthol-flavoured pods at 18 mg/mL, finding that between 19.9 and 34.6 percent of those using the tobacco pod and 28.4 to 49.3 percent of those using the menthol pod had stopped smoking cigarettes entirely at six weeks 12. The FDA has now authorised 48 e-cigarette products in total; the category has been converted from an open market into a licensed one 12. The company survived the regulation. The shareholder who bought in at a $38 billion valuation did not get the value back.