1933: Less than a week before Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated, the stock market forecasts a gruesome future. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 50.16, a new low for the year and barely above its all-time nadir of 41.22, set on July 8, 1932. Stocks are selling at 0.65 times book value and 10.3 times reported earnings, with an average dividend yield of 8.7% (among those that can afford to pay dividends). Five trading days later, after Roosevelt's banking moratorium and financial reforms kick in, the market is 23.8% higher; by the end of June, it has doubled.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1985), p. 538;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated

1891: David Sarnoff, future president of Radio Corporation of America and the greatest visionary of the radio and television industries, is born in Uzlian, Russia.