1946: The Computer Age is formally born as John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, officially unveil their Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. The world's first large-scale electronic computer consists of 30 separate units containing well over 17,000 vacuum tubes and weighing more than 30 tons. ENIAC astounds the public onlookers by performing 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications per second.

1936: Richard Whitney, the outgoing president of the New York Stock Exchange, opens a safe, pulls out $150,200 in bonds, and pledges them as collateral. Whitney needs the money to cover margin loans on trades he has made in a penny stock, Distilled Liquors Corp. — the producer of Whitney's favorite drink, an applejack called Jersey Lightning. But the bonds belong to the New York Yacht Club, not to Whitney, and his action is outright embezzlement. When he is caught, in 1938, he becomes the national symbol of Wall Street corruption and galvanizes the Roosevelt administration's will to reform the financial system.

John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), pp. 234-277;Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Wall Street (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982), pp. 164-180.

1934: The New York Stock Exchange prohibits its members from participating in "stock pools," or organized groups of brokers who gang together to drive the price of a stock up or down regardless of demand from the general investing public. It's one of the few reforms the NYSE adopts voluntarily after the Great Crash.

"Today in NYSE History," at www.nyse.com/about/TodayInNYSE.html

1932: Governor William Comstock of Michigan, in a weekend bombshell, declares that he is shutting down every bank in the state to avert loan defaults and public panic. Henry Ford, who had already sunk more than $13 million of his own money into Detroit's leading banks to keep them solvent, has refused to put up any more, and Federal authorities refuse to bail out the Detroit banks unless Ford agrees to "subordinate" his deposits by surrendering his rights to early withdrawal. The stalemate has left Gov. Comstock no choice but to shut the banks down. Over the next five weeks, every other state in the U.S. closes its banks too.

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), pp. 422, 434-439, 537.