Chocolate, cars, steel and rubber: five settlements that exist only because one firm needed somewhere to put its workers — and then laid the streets, named them, and wrote the rules.
Milton Hershey's 1918 gift made his boarding school the owner of his chocolate company, and the Milton Hershey School Trust still controls the majority of the voting stock. The town's amusement park began in 1906 as a picnic ground for factory workers.
Cadbury named the estate after the Bourn brook that runs through it, tacking on the French '-ville' because French chocolate was thought the finest. It is still dry: no public house has ever opened inside the village.
Volkswagen's home plant has employed around 60,000 people in a city of about 125,000, and its canteen currywurst — parts number 199 398 500 A — is the most-produced item the company makes: over eight million in 2023 alone.
A British viceroy named it in 1919 for Jamsetji Tata, who died in 1904 before the site was even chosen. Built where the Subarnarekha and Kharkai meet, it remains the only Indian city of over a million people with no municipal corporation of its own — Tata Steel's utilities arm still supplies the water, power and roads.
Henry Ford poured a fortune into a plantation that never sent a gram of rubber to a Ford car; his grandson sold the land back to Brazil in 1945 at a loss of over US$20 million. A few thousand people now live among the ruins on the Tapajós.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.