1929: Today is Black Thursday the first taste of the Great Crash. At the opening bell, 150,000 shares of Cities Service, the oil company, trade hands for $8.4 million, the largest block trade of stock ever yet recorded. By 10:30 a.m., even the blue-chip stocks are dropping $5 to $10 with each trade, and the ticker tape is running 16 minutes late. By lunchtime, RCA is down 35%, and Montgomery Ward has nose-dived 39.9%. Then a bankers' pool" is formed to put a floor under the plunging market. At 1:30 Richard Whitney president of the New York Stock Exchange and lead broker for J.P. Morgan & Co. marches up to the trading post for U.S. Steel and bids $205 for 25000 shares. That's $10 higher than the last bid and the panic breaks. Still the Dow closes down 2.1% on record volume of 12.895 million shares. The bull market of the 1920s is about to end and the Great Depression is waiting in the wings."

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. 6-11;John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), pp. 124-125;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated