1985: Quantum Computer Services is incorporated in Delaware. In 1991 it changes its name to America Online, Inc.

1973: The Stock Exchange of Singapore is founded.

The LGT Guide to World Equity Markets, 1997 (Euromoney Publications, London, 1997), p. 403.

1937: The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of Social Security benefits in the landmark case of Helvering v. Davis. The court rules, "Congress did not improvise a judgment when it found that the award of old age benefits would be conducive to the general welfare."

Sylvester J. Schieber and John B. Shoven, The Real Deal: The History and Future of Social Security (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999), p. 48.

1844: The nation's first telegraph line, between Baltimore and Washington, becomes operational when Samuel Finley Breese Morse, portrait painter and co-inventor of the telegraph, transmits this message to the floor of the U.S. Senate at 8:45 a.m.: "What hath God wrought."

Amy Friedlander, Natural Monopoly and Universal Service: Telephones and Telegraphs in the U.S. Communications Infrastructure, 1837-1940 (Corporation for National Research Inititatives, Reston, VA, 1995), p. 10

1688: The earliest known book on the stock market, Joseph Penso de la Vega's Confusion de Confusiones (Confusion of Confusions), appears. His anecdotes of the Amsterdam stock exchange read like modern Maalox moments: "When speculators talk, they talk shares…when they look at something, it is shares they see…if they eat, the shares are their food…and even on the death bed, their last worries are the shares…. The speculator fights his own good sense, struggles against his own good will, counteracts his own hope, acts against his own comfort, and is at odds with his own decisions."

Joseph de la Vega, Confusion de Confusiones (Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, Cambridge, MA, 1957), pp. xi, 22.