1976: The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is overhauled. Instead of being made up of 425 industrial stocks, 60 utilities, and 15 railroads, it will now consist of 400 industrials, 40 utilities, 40 financial stocks and 20 transportation issues, including airlines. Technology, consumer, and healthcare stocks are still called "industrials," and they don't count for much yet.

S&P 500 2001 Directory (Standard & Poor's, New York, 2001), p. 9.

1970: Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opens at 3180 Porter Drive in Palo Alto, Calif. Here a talented team goes on to develop the laser printer, the PC, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet.

Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperBusiness, New York, 1999), p. xiv

1941: Myron S. Scholes is born in the gold-mining town of Timmons, Canada, to a dentist and the owner of a chain of small department stores. He later helps develop the Black-Scholes-Merton options-pricing theorem. The good news: This mathematical model helps millions of Americans grow wealthy with stock options. The bad news: Merton and Scholes, as partners in the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, nearly capsize the global financial system with their leveraged trading in late 1998.

1934: The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) officially begins its business of regulating the nation's financial markets.

Museum of American Financial History

1876: The Basel Stock Exchange (now part of the SWX Swiss Exchange) opens for trading, primarily to trade Swiss banking and railroad stocks.

Basel Stock Exchange Annual Report, 1995, p. 19.

1862: The Internal Revenue Service is created by act of Congress to collect income taxes to finance the Civil War. Declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1895, federal income tax comes back from the dead in 1913.

1791: The first daily securities auction is reported in New York City, as John Pintard and A.L. Bleecker & Sons advertise a "Sale of Public Securities at Auction, This evening at the Coffee House Long Room at VII O'Clock."

Walter Werner and Steven Smith, Wall Street (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991), p. 21.

1720: Stock in the South Sea Company, one of the first modern bubbles, hits 950 pounds per share. Over the next four months, it loses roughly 80% of its value, and many speculators — including a brainy scholar named Isaac Newton — are wiped out.

Larry D. Neal, "How the South Sea Bubble Was Blown up and Burst," in Eugene N. White, ed., Crashes and Panics: Lessons from History (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1990), pp. 42-45;John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (The Cresset Press, London, 1960), pp. 162-163.