5 Unassuming Cities That Secretly Control the World
Our world exists thanks to a network of roads and ships that move goods in every direction. That means you can get your socks from any of countless suppliers, which is good news if 75 percent of all sock factories get bombed. But sometimes, you’ll find yourself using an item that is guaranteed to come from one single spot.
All baseballs are coated in mud from one river in New Jersey. All Tabasco sauce is made on one island in Louisiana. And quite a few other items are similarly sourced from one tiny place.
The Semiconductor Industry Revolves Around Spruce Pine, North Carolina
Computer chips are made of semiconductors, and semiconductors are made of silicon. That’s why you’ll hear the chips biz referred to as the “silicon industry,” or hear the tech part of California referred to as “Silicon Valley,” or hear cool kids saying, “I’ll call you on my sil.” Silicon is an extremely common element here on Earth, second only to oxygen in abundance. But to melt down the relevant silicon mineral, you need a crucible that’s made of an extremely pure silicon mineral of its own.
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That mineral is ultra-pure quartz, and unlike silicon in general, it’s not easy to get. The bulk of it comes from one source, in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, a town of only 2,000 residents. An informal estimate of how many chips worldwide use quartz from Spruce Pine is that all of them do. A slightly more formal estimate would say 70 percent, which is still pretty huge considering chips control pretty much every electronic device you can think of.
Spruce Pine has had a bit of a hiccup recently, in the form of a catastrophic hurricane named Helene. Cutting that town off from the rest of the world isn’t great for the global silicon supply chain. Manufacturers have quartz stockpiled at the moment, but if we don’t hook Spruce Pine back up soon, everyone’s going to feel the pain of a shortage. Maybe factories are going to have to switch from natural ultra-pure quartz to artificial ultra-pure quartz. Or maybe they will abandon all hope and start smashing every existing computer, with hammers.
Let’s not wait to find out.
Louisville Made All the Disco Balls
The world got its first taste of disco balls in the 1910s, long before disco. People called them “myriad reflectors” back then, and you’ll see them in movies from that period, including silent movies from Germany. A Kentucky duo, Louis Bernard Woeste and William A. Stephens, got a patent on these reflectors. Jazz clubs started using them because those glittering lights best suited a live band.
Half a century later, we got disco. Everyone now wanted disco balls, but not everyone could make them. Some 90 percent of disco balls came from Louisville, from a company called Omega National Products. It rebranded itself as Omega Mirror Products, since the newly popular ball was still called a mirror ball at the start of the disco era. If the company predicted the ball’s ultimate name, they’d have gone with Omega Disco Products.
People buy fewer disco balls today, and they’re no longer primarily made in Louisville because people can more easily buy them cheap from China. But those Chinese balls aren’t sanded properly and don’t reflect light as well, so really, are they true disco balls at all?
The Town of Morton Makes the World’s Canned Pumpkin
With Halloween approaching, you’ll be happy to know that you can source your pumpkin from countless patches. You might be interested to know, though, that 70 percent of pumpkins come from six states, and one of those states grows more pumpkins than the other five combined. It’s Illinois, and the industry gets a lot more concentrated than that if we shift to one particular pumpkin product. We’re talking about canned pumpkin, or pumpkin in a can.
The town of Morton, Illinois, population 17,000, makes 80 or 90 percent of all the canned pumpkin in the world. The reason for this is that canned pumpkin is gross, and there’s no reason for the rest of the collective world to make more than 10 percent of it.
The other reason is the town had a dedicated plant back in 1925, most people sent their pumpkin there to be processed and they just never stopped. That plant was owned by Libby’s, a Chicago company, and Libby’s eventually got bought up by Nestle, which is so powerful that no one can shut the plant down now.
RVs Come from Elkhart
Indiana, neighbor to pumpkin-maker Illinois, makes the country’s RVs. Nearly all recreational vehicles are made there, with 85 percent of all RVs nationwide made in Elkhart County specifically.
If you had to pick one state to make RVs, you might well guess Indiana, since it makes so many vehicles in general, ranking just behind Michigan and Ohio in auto output. Still, 85 percent being made in one county defies what anyone would predict. This oddity goes back to the 1930s, when a guy named Milo Miller set up shop in Elkhart.
He was followed by two other RV makers, Wilbur Schult and Harold Platt, and some of the workers they trained founded their own RV companies. The new founders saw no reason to establish their own companies anywhere but Elkhart because the county they were in offered everything they needed.
Those requirements included nearby steel, business-friendly laws and plenty of Amish. Yes, Amish — every factory needs workers, and when it comes to RVs, the Amish are the workers you’re looking for. Around half of the Amish men in nearby settlements work at making RVs. They aren’t allowed to drive RVs, but Amish law doesn’t say anything against building RVs (because elders never considered that idea).
Starbursts Are All Made in Waco
Mars has candy factories all over the world, so you’d think that they’d have factories all over the country as well. And yet some 85 percent of all Snickers bars in North America are made in one factory in Waco, Texas. Around the same percentage of Skittles are made there. And this factory is also responsible for every single North American Starburst.
This factory opened in 1976, half a century after Mars existed as a company. We have to assume it’s a dream place to work (in 2020, for example, they came up with a Snickers bar that weighed more than two tons, just for fun). At least it doesn’t have people dangerously falling into pools of liquid chocolate like in Wonka’s factory.
Well, two workers did fall into a vat of chocolate in a Mars factory in 2022, earning an OSHA fine, and emergency workers needed to cut a hole at the bottom of the vat to free them. But that was in Mars’ Pennsylvania factory, the one where they make M&M’s. That place is garbage; everyone knows that. They don’t make any Starbursts there at all.
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