2000: NASDAQ closes at a record 5048.62, up 24.1% for the year to date — after gaining 86.5% in 1999. A conference on optical fiber stocks sells out nearly every hotel room in Baltimore, the biggest stocks on NASDAQ trade at an average of 120 times earnings, and 15% of NASDAQ's value is made up of companies less than two years old that have never earned a profit. James J. Cramer, author of the eponymous column "Wrong!" for TheStreet.com, writes that a revival of value stocks "will only happen when the Brocades and Broadcoms blow up. And I don't see that happening any time soon." In fact, says Cramer, he's tempted to short-sell Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, betting that the great value investor's shares are "ripe for the banging." BancOne fund manager Chris Guinther sums it all up: "In today's market, it pays to be aggressive." Today is the absolute peak of the market bubble: In one of the worst crashes in history, NASDAQ plunges 60.6% over the next 12 months. And Cramer's "Red Hots"? Brocade unravels by 67.1%, Broadcom collapses by 84.1%. Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway gains 72.2% over the year to come.

The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2000, p. C1, and March 13, 2001, p. C1

1999: NASDAQ introduces an exchange-traded fund, the NASDAQ-100 Index Tracking Stock. Functioning like a mutual fund but trading like a stock, the units hold shares in each of the stocks in the technology-heavy NASDAQ 100 index. The QQQs (or "Qubes") shares close the first trading day at $51.062. Exactly a year later, they've gained 124.2%. But by the same time in 2001, all their gains have evaporated and they trade at $45.10.

1876: The telephone is officially born in a laboratory on Exeter Place in Boston, as Alexander Graham Bell hollers into his variable resistance transmitter, which sits in a bowl of water and sulphuric acid, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." Bell's assistant, Thomas A. Watson, hears him; "the effect was loud but indistinct and muffled." In a letter to his father today, Bell scribbles triumphantly, "Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly this afternoon." A year-and-a-half later, Bell offers to sell the commercial rights to the telephone for $100,000 to Western Union, which rejects the offer on the grounds that the telephone is a passing fad.

Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 181-182, 229;Amy Friedlander, Natural Monopoly and Universal Service: Telephones and Telegraphs in the U.S. Communications Infrastructure, 1837-1940 (Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Reston, VA, 1995), p. 24