1903: Horatio Nelson Jackson, a doctor from Burlington, Vermont, wins a $50 bet with a friend when he pulls up in his one-cylinder Winton automobile in front of the Holland House on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. With his mechanic Sewell K. Crocker and a stray dog named Bud that they picked up in Idaho, Jackson has completed the first crossing of the United States by automobile. The journey from San Francisco has taken them 63 days; there is not yet a single mile of paved road in the entire rural U.S., and Jackson and Crocker often have to lay down 30-foot strips of heavy-duty canvas to enable their Winton to cross the roughest and muddiest patches of "road."

Tom Lewis, review of Curt McConnell, Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908, in The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2000, pp. 140-141;David A. Kirsch, review in The Journal of Economic History, June, 2001, pp. 562-564

1881: Thomas Alva Edison files a U.S. Patent application (No. 479,184) for a facsimile telegraph. Although the fax machine is first commercialized by AT&T and Western Union in the 1920s, it does not catch on until more than 70 years after Edison patents it.

1786: The earliest known U.S. stock and bond tables are published in the Massachusetts Centinel.

Walter Werner and Steven Smith, Wall Street (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991), p. 208.