Bose

Founder Amar Bose didn't set out to sell speaker systems and headphones. He began his career as an academic engineer at MIT in the late 1950s, licensing power conversion and amplification technology to the U.S. military and government agencies such as NASA.

Bose, who died in 2013 at age 83, had been interested in electronics and audio from an early age. At 10, he had gone on a Boy Scout trip for which someone had brought along a hobby radio communication kit. They drove a couple of antennae into the dirt and started talking to each other. Bose was hooked.