We love graphs that make huge scale business deals easy to digest and understand. This chart is a great example, showing us a timeline of major telecommunications deals and mergers. As we follow the path of the telecom world through the timeline, we see that there was once a wealth of cellphone carrier options. Today, this isn’t the case. We’re down to three major cellphone carrier options. These are: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. We have a visualization of what exactly happened to all these companies that used to be household names.

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One example we can see is the fate of Mint Mobile. A lot of people recognize this name because Hollywood superstar Ryan Reynolds was their spokesperson. T-Mobile made a lucrative deal to acquire Mint in 2023 and luckily for the company, Ryan Reynolds agreed to remain a spokesperson.

Out of all the companies, AT&T is the most successful with the most subscribers. But there is a thing as too much success. Because the competition for telecommunication has shrunk over the past few decades, the US Justice Department has intervened and investigated multiple big deals that may have breached monopoly laws. This happened when AT&T had to abandon their planned merger with T-Mobile. With only two major players left in the market, they would have violated monopoly laws. T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint also came under fire, but was ultimately allowed to go through. Many of these mergers are worth millions and billions, so we think graphs like these showing the trajectory of a whole industry are fascinating!

Data can be the key to exposing injustices in society. These graphs are a strong example of that. They examine the pay gap between men and women ever since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act. This legislation was supposed to eliminate the gap entirely, but we can see from the graphs that even sixty years later, the gap still exists. There has been some improvement. In the 60’s the pay gap was $0.61 to the man’s dollar and we’re now up to $0.84 to a man’s dollar in 2022. Graphs like this make it clear when we still have work to do:

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The Equal Pay Act was introduced to give workers of all kinds more rights. It covered child labor as well as the gender-based wage gap. Following the timeline displayed, we can see that it certainly had an effect on the wage gap, but it didn’t close it entirely, and change came slowly. It’s no coincidence that this came about in the 1960s since previously, it was uncommon for women to work outside the home. When they did, they were limited to roles like nursing, teaching, and secretarial positions. The feminist movement of the 60s helped millions of women enter the workforce, but it was clear right away they wouldn’t be treated the same as their male coworkers. We love how the data presents a detailed picture of this issue. You can see comparisons by the dollar and by yearly salary. In both cases, women consistently lag behind for no discernible reason other than their gender. Using calculations based on all this data, we can predict that if change continues at this rate, the gap won’t close for another few decades. We hope visualizations like this can help inspire faster change!

Google it! This is perhaps one of the most abundant examples of a brand name evolving into an everyday word. The cultural phenomena of brand names gradually becoming a part of the vernacular and losing their trademarks has been happening since kerosene was trademarked in 1854 by Nova Scotia geologist and inventor Abraham Gesner. Over time, other manufacturers began putting their brand on kerosene. This is known as genericide. Intense name indeed. The team at LLC Attorney has created this fun and vibrant timeline of brand names that became everyday words. I learned a lot, and I hope you do too!

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I had no idea about a lot of these, especially linoleum! Linoleum is believed to be one of the first brand names to transform into an everyday word. The brand name ‘Linoleum’ was first introduced by inventor Frederick Walton in 1864. After five years of extensive advertising, his product began sweeping across Europe and beyond. In 1878, he filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement against another flooring manufacturer that began using the Linoleum name in America. Unfortunately for Walton, the court dismissed the lawsuit because he had never trademarked the brand name and linoleum had become so widely used that it had become a generic term. Talk about flooring the competition! Other examples that surprise me are ping pong, yo-yo, dry ice, and heroin! Heroin was the name of a morphine-derived drug created and trademarked by Bayer in 1898. They lost the trademark to genericide by 1917.