1972: Economist Milton Friedman rings the opening bell at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to inaugurate the world's first day of trading in foreign-currency futures. Friedman inspired the "Merc" to create the new market after several banks refused to fill Friedman's order to short-sell $300,000 worth of British pounds sterling on the U.K. government's indication that its currency was overvalued.

Susan Abbott Gidel, "100 Years of Futures Trading: From Domestic Agricultural to World Financial," Futures Industry, December 1999/January 2000, p. 16.

1967: Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin, speaking at a luncheon at Manhattan's Lincoln Center to honor the 175th anniversary of the New York Stock Exchange, warns that speculation is getting out of hand. "There is an obvious risk," he observes, "that speculative in-and-out trading of this kind may virtually corner the market in individual stocks…. Abuses of investor confidence by a few, for short-term gain, reflect badly and, in the long run, disastrously upon the entire industry." No one takes heed (just as, in later years, no one listens to Alan Greenspan's similar warnings) — but the market for hot new issues crashes 18 months later.

John F. Lawrence and Paul E. Steiger, The 70s Crash and How to Survive It (World Publishing, New York, 1970), pp. 3-4.

1949: The Tokyo Stock Exchange, originally founded in 1878, reopens for business (along with exchanges in Osaka and Nagoya) after the devastation of World War II.

Museum of American Financial History

1930: Two Texas engineers found a company called Geophysical Service Inc. to use seismographic technology to improve the business of exploring for oil. They later rename the company Texas Instruments.

1832: Meatpacking mogul Philip Danforth Armour is born in Stockbridge, N.Y. Pioneering such distasteful but profitable techniques as using waste cuts as filler, and packing meat in sealed cans, he turns Armour & Co. into one of the largest industrial companies on earth and helps make Chicago the "hog butcher to the world."