1999: eToys Inc., a startup Internet retailer, goes public on NASDAQ. Initially expected to be priced at $10-$12 per share, the stock is underwritten at $20 and quadruples before the opening bell can even ring. The first trade is at an astonishing $83 9/16. The shares close the day at $76 9/16, a one-day return of 282.8%. Just 19 months later, on February 26, 2001, the company announces that it will file bankruptcy.

Benjamin Graham (with Jason Zweig), The Intelligent Investor (HarperBusiness, New York, 2003), pp. 443-444

1974: The Consolidated Edison Co. of New York is lambasted at its annual meeting by shareholders who are infuriated that the company is about to skip paying its quarterly dividend after 89 years of uninterrupted payments. "What are we to do?" lamented one widow. "Who is going to pay my rent? I had a husband. Now Con Ed has to be my husband."

Hersh M. Shefrin and Meir Statman, "Explaining Investor Preference for Cash Dividends," in Richard H. Thaler, ed., Advances in Behavioral Finance (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1993), pp. 417-418.

1913: William R. Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co., is born in Ann Arbor, Mich.

1873: Jacob Davis, a Latvian tailor who has settled in Reno, Nevada, and a Bavarian merchant named Levi Strauss, who sells cloth in San Francisco, jointly take out U.S. Patent No. 139,121. Strauss supplies the $68 in patent fees; Davis supplies the design, which he had created after one of his customers kept ripping through his pants pockets. The two men patent the process for holding indigo denim "waist overalls" together with metal rivets — the first blue jeans.

1862: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act into law, enabling anyone who had farmed public land for at least five years to acquire title to 160 acres free and clear, after the payment of a minimal filing fee. The Homestead Act uncorks a flood of migration into the Midwest and West, turning the U.S. into the world's breadbasket.