(FORTUNE Magazine) – The past 100 years have easily been the most frenetically paced in the history of business, bookended by the flowering of the Industrial Revolution and the global ball of e-string that is the Internet. In the four-page foldout that follows, we focused on six of the constants in business life amid all that change. Throughout the century, businesses have always striven to be faster and more productive. That's fundamental. The qualities that business people poured into their work haven't changed much, either. Leadership, ingenuity, and salesmanship were keys to successes that ranged from J.P. Morgan's calming the panic of 1907 to Ray Kroc's billions and billions served. Then, too, there were the inevitable if unintentional byproducts of all that striving: a certain amount of excess and some real cases of folly. From tail fins to Trump, it's been an entertaining--and often outrageous--100 years.

--Theodore Spencer

Leadership

1900s The mogul: During the panic of '07, J.P. Morgan gathers the nation's financial elite in his Manhattan library and won't let them leave until they put up the money to stabilize the economy.

1910s The regulator: The government breaks up Standard Oil, the most powerful corporation of the day.

1920s The celebrity: Charles Lindbergh achieves a new kind of media-driven prominence. He pays the price in shattered privacy.

1930s The union worker: The CIO's sit-down strikes put the worker at the bargaining table with corporate chieftains.

1940s The American: The Marshall Plan to rebuild war-ravaged Europe asserts the economic leadership of the U.S.

1950s The man in the gray flannel suit: Managers like Honeywell Chairman Harold Sweatt (left) become the backbone of corporate life.

1960s The conglomerator: Symbolized by Harold Geneen of ITT, corporate managers believe they can run any business.

1970s The woman: A new generation of female college grads enters the work force expecting to lead. Many wind up doing exactly that.

1980s The MBA consultant: In the heyday of McKinsey & Co., the best leader is an outsourced one.

1990s The e-leader: Cyber chiefs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com reinvent old business models for a wired world.

SPEED

[1900s] 20 hours: Duration of New York-Chicago trip on the Twentieth Century Limited, 1902

[1910s] 12.5 hours: Average production time per Model T in 1913 2 minutes: Time for same task in 1916, after Ford creates assembly line

[1920s] 5 days: Time to mail a letter cross-country in 1920 31.5 hours: After regularly scheduled air mail begins in 1924

[1930s] 4.5 hours: Length of New York-Chicago trip on Douglas DC-3

[1940s] 35 per day: Completion rate of Levittown homes

[1950s] 4,000 per second: Rate at which the Univac I, the world's first business computer, performs multiplication operations

[1960s] 4 hours, 50 min.: Duration of transcontinental flight on DC-8, 1964

[1970s] 70 mph: Speed limit on I-75 in Ohio in 1970 55 mph: After oil embargo in 1974

[1980s] Overnight: Length of time to FedEx a package cross-country

[1990s] One month: Time it takes for Priceline.com to achieve a market cap of $23 billion

EXCESS

[1900s] $250 million: The then unheard-of price J.P. Morgan pays for Andrew Carnegie's steel empire

[1910s] $1 billion: John D. Rockefeller's personal wealth in 1913

[1920s] $8.5 billion: Margin loans held by stock market speculators in October 1929

[1930s] $22,500: Maximum income that Mafia kingpin Lucky Luciano claimed on any federal tax return

[1940s] $46,000: Per-minute cost of David O. Selznick's 1946 Duel in the Sun, the most expensive film to date

[1950s] 3.5 feet: Length of tail fins on 1959 Cadillac convertible

[1960s] $1.1 billion: Net worth of oil magnate John Paul Getty, when he installs a pay phone at his English manor for the exclusive use of his guests

[1970s] $4.8 billion: Total Las Vegas gambling revenue by decade's end

[1980s] $550 million: 1987 compensation of junk-bond king Michael Milken

[1990s] For sale: Lavish lakefront home nr Seattle, 40,000 sq ft, centrally controlled music, "smart" lighting, video wall. B.O. over $50 million. Contact bill@microsoft.com.

INGENUITY

[1900s] Modular: Cadillac founder Henry LeLand invents interchangeable parts for mass production.

[1910s] Edifice Rex: Steel construction and reinforced concrete make skyscrapers possible.

[1920s] Steamboat Willie: Disney popularizes talking animated cartoons.

[1930s] Flicker: Fluorescent lights enter the workplace. Nobody likes them but the accountants: They last ten times longer than the old bulbs and cut energy use 80%.

[1940s] Hauler: Henry Kaiser produces "Liberty ships" in less than five days each, faster than U-boats can sink them.

[1950s] Vinyl LP records, invented by Peter Goldmark, usher in a new era of pop music.

[1960s] Tubeland: RCA introduces color TV to American living rooms. Bonanza becomes first TV Western with brown horses instead of gray.

[1970s] Icons: Xerox PARC invents the GUI (graphical user interface) and saves the world from DOS.

[1980s] Hedge: Financial derivatives let treasurers, banks, and hedge funds bet on almost anything. Within a decade, Metallgesellschaft, Procter & Gamble, and Gibson Greetings, among others, bet wrong.

[1990s] Up front: Bali Co., a division of Sara Lee, sells 22 million Wonderbras beginning in 1994. Women everywhere start to leverage existing assets.

SALESMANSHIP

[1900s] Mail order: Sears Roebuck builds a new 40-acre, $5 million office building and mail-order plant.

[1910s] Door-to-door: Fuller Brush Co. achieves $500,000 in sales in 1918.

[1920s] First radio ad: In 1922, a Queens real estate salesman forks over $100 for a ten-minute spot on WEAF.

[1930s] Fireside chat: F.D.R. convinces a dispirited American public that capitalism still works.

[1940s] Loose lips sink ships: World War II propaganda touts taciturnity.

[1950s] Burgers Ray Kroc sells America a new dietary staple.

[1960s] Think small: Ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach's soft-sell campaign turns the Volkswagen Beetle into a national icon.

[1970s] Must be the shoes: Phil Knight convinces the world that sneakers are high fashion.

[1980s] Thriller: Michael Jackson's album sells more than 42,000 copies a day for ten months.

[1990s] dot-com: To break through the dot clutter, startup business plans regularly budget as much as $100 million for marketing.

FOLLY

[1900s] Sank like stone: Thomas Edison's design for an all-concrete home, patented 1908

[1910s] Ran dry: Prohibition. Until repealed in 1933, it makes bootlegging a growth industry.

[1920s] "Permanent and high plateau": What market prognosticator Irwin Fisher said stocks had reached in 1929

[1930s] Beggar thy neighbor: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act instead beggared everyone in the Great Depression.

[1940s] Puddle jumper: Howard Hughes' $25 million Spruce Goose flies for a total of 60 seconds.

[1950s] Stop the rain...and hail, lightning, blizzards and other bad weather. Goal of a $50 million institute proposed by the National Academy of Sciences.

[1960s] Harassment: GM's treatment of Ralph Nader for his campaign against the Corvair

[1970s] Corner: What Herbert and Bunker Hunt attempt to do to the silver market. They go bankrupt instead.

[1980s] Legend...in his own mind. Billions in debt, Donald Trump's casino and real estate empire needs bailout from lenders.

[1990s] Golden parachute: For the executive who's had everything else. Michael Ovitz hits $90 million worth of silk after just 14 months at Disney.