1991: The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of the nation's economic recessions and expansions, finally declares that a recession has begun — in July, 1990, that is.

1961: The first patent for an integrated circuit is awarded to Fairchild Semiconductor's Robert Noyce, who later co-founds Intel Corp. with Gordon Moore.

1931: Pynchon & Co., one of the Wall Street's largest and most prestigious brokerage firms, goes bust, with $40 million in liabilities — the biggest failure of a brokerage yet on record. The main reason: Pynchon had bet much of its own money on the hot new-media issues it helped underwrite, including General Theatres Equipment and Fox Films. Those securities have lost up to 57% over the preceding 12 months.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, and London, 1985), p. 238.

1926: The era of "talkies" begins, as AT&T, Western Electric and Bell Labs announce that they have developed a device to provide "perfect automatic music for movies."

The New York Times, April 26, 1926, p. 7, in Floyd Norris and Christine Bockelmann, The New York Times Century of Business (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000), p. 71

1874: Guglielmo Marconi, son of an aristocratic Italian father and an Irish mother, is born in Bologna, Italy. In 1901 he sends the first radio signals across the Atlantic, ushering in the era of wireless communication.