James B. Lansing

James Bullough Lansing — born James Martini in Illinois — built loudspeaker drivers that defined how recorded music sounded in American cinemas, recording studios and, eventually, on stages. His transducers were genuinely superior and genuinely influential: the components he designed at Lansing Manufacturing in the 1930s went into the Shearer Horn used across the film industry, and the drivers he designed after 1946 became the reference for studio monitoring and live sound for decades.

He was also, by consistent account, an indifferent manager of money. Lansing Manufacturing struggled after his business partner Ken Decker died in a 1939 air crash, and in 1941 he sold to Altec Service Corporation — becoming an employee of the company built from his own work, under a five-year contract. When it expired in 1946 he left and founded Lansing Sound Incorporated. A settlement with Altec, which owned the Lansing name commercially, restricted him to trading under his initials. The constraint produced JBL.

The new company was in serious financial difficulty within three years. Lansing died by suicide in September 1949, aged 47. The business survived because it held a life-insurance policy on him; the proceeds cleared enough of its obligations for Bill Thomas to stabilise it and continue. It is a bleak fact and it belongs in the case rather than outside it, because it is the moment the story stops being about a founder and becomes about a brand.

What followed vindicates the distinction. JBL passed through Jervis Corporation in 1969 — the vehicle Sidney Harman built into Harman International — then Beatrice Foods, then Harman again, then Samsung in 2017. Five owners, none of whom destroyed it, because its value was lodged in engineering reputation and distribution rather than in one person's taste.