1998: K-Tel International, the sleepy little outfit that hawks cheesy compilations of old rock'n'roll songs on late night TV, instantly becomes a hot growth stock by announcing that it will soon begin selling songs online. The stock, which closed at $6 5/8 the day before, takes off like a Screamin' Jay Hawkins solo, hitting $67 3/4 by May 4. Within two years, however, the stock has been delisted from NASDAQ and trades around $2 a share.

USA Today, April 24, 1998, p. B3

1970: A New York Stock Exchange member firm sells its own shares to the public for the first time as Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette launches its own IPO. Until now, brokerage firms had always happily shared their investment "ideas" with the public, but had refused to share the profits from those ideas. (Perhaps that's because most of the profit is not in the ideas themselves, but in promoting them.)

1868: The U.S. Senate ratifies the Alaska Purchase, negotiated the month before by Secretary of State William H. Seward with the government of Russia. For $7.2 million (roughly $90 million in today's dollars), the U.S. becomes the new owner of 586,412 sq. mis. of what the public cynically calls "Seward's Icebox." (Of course, the purchase price does not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes exacted from the Russians by eager U.S. lawmakers.)

1865: Charles Proteus Steinmetz in born in Breslau, Germany. He immigrates to the U.S. in 1889 and joins General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., where he develops the principles of alternating current (AC), making the widespread delivery of electricity possible.

1792: The Pennsylvania state legislature passes a law incorporating the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Co., the first major transportation stock in the U.S. The P&L issues 1,000 shares to the public at an initial price of $300. Investors oversubscribe, signing up for 2,276 shares, and the price more than triples to $1,000 within days. It takes the company roughly two years to complete the 62-mile toll road. But the P&L is a huge success and thrives for decades to come.

John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (Routledge, New York and London, 1999), p. 10;"A Blueprint for America's Free Markets: The History of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange," privately printed by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, 1996, p. 5

1720: The earliest known discussion of securities analysis is published in The London Flying-Post, as several authors lay out their differing views on how to calculate the value of shares in the South Sea Co.

Paul Harrison, "The Origins of Stock Market Valuation: Discounting Dividends and Intrinsic Value in 1700," working paper, Brandeis University, 1997, p. 4.