1952: The New York Stock Exchange completes its first nationwide survey of stock ownership and reports an amazing finding: 6.5 million Americans, or a whopping 4% of the total population of the U.S., own common stock.

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

1945: Mathematician John von Neumann writes his "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," which proposes that instructions and memory should be stored in the same kind of computer memory device — one of the logical breakthroughs making advanced computing possible.

Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 22.

1938: In a move the New York Stock Exchange had resisted for a decade, William McChesney Martin is elected the NYSE's first paid, independent president. In a striking sign that he takes his independence seriously, Martin immediately sells his stake in his own brokerage firm and auctions off his seat on the Exchange. His starting salary: $48,000.

John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), p. 281.

1934: Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt tells his cabinet that he will name the notorious stock manipulator Joseph P. Kennedy the first chairman of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, notes in his diary: "The President has great confidence in him because he has made his pile, has invested all his money in Government securities, and knows all the tricks of the trade." Government lawyer Jerome Frank exclaims that naming Kennedy is "like setting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep."

Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Wall Street (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982), pp. 105-107.

1932: The total market value of all stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange scrapes bottom at $15.6 billion, down from $89.7 billion on September 1, 1929.

Sylvester J. Schieber and John B. Shoven, The Real Deal: The History and Future of Social Security (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999), p. 21.