1876  General ElectricA European mortgage crisis caused an international banking collapse, but tucked away in the relative calm of

New Jersey, Thomas Edison opened a laboratory. It grew into a company with $173 billion in revenue and more than 50,000 patents.

1932  RevlonDuring the Great Depression, the Revson brothers, along with chemist Charles Lachman (who contributed the l to the company’s name), started this beauty business by creating a new manufacturing process for nail polish.

1938  Hewlett-PackardFounded in a Palo Alto garage at the tail end of the Depression with $538 in working capital, Hewlett-Packard went on to become one of the world’s largest tech firms. It took a year for Bill Hew­lett and Dave Packard to develop their first product: an audio oscillator that was eventually bought by Walt Disney.

1981  MTVUnemployment, an energy crisis, and high interest rates defined the recession of the early 1980s, but MTV provided a needed distraction when it broadcast “Video Killed the Radio Star” on a single cable station in New Jersey. Today, MTV is a subsidiary of Viacom, with 150 channels worldwide.

1984  Cisco SystemsCisco Systems was founded by a group of computer scientists from Stanford University just as the U.S. was emerging from a deep recession marked by skyrocketing inflation and unemployment. The company rode the wave of the Reagan boom years—and an expanding tech bubble—to become one the world’s biggest tech corporations.