1935: The Public Utility Holding Company Act becomes Federal law, breaking up the intricately financed utility "pyramids" that had been one of the main tools with which Wall Street had sheared and fleeced the investing public in the 1920s. By 1929, utilities were the largest market sector at 18% of total U.S. capitalization; while utility revenues were fairly small, Wall Street had egged Main Street into bidding these stocks up to absurd levels. Utility stocks have never regained that illusion of grandeur.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1985), pp. 640-641;Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Wall Street (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982), p. 131.

1920: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, allowing women to vote for the first time.

1919: The Coca-Cola Co. successfully sells shares to outsiders for the first time, as a syndicate of banks and brokers from around the country buys 417,000 shares to resell to retail investors at an initial offering price of $40. (An earlier attempt at a stock offering in 1892 failed miserably.)

1873: Lee De Forest is born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He goes on to invent several of the key improvements that make radio broadcasting possible.

1791: John Fitch is granted a U.S. patent for the steamboat, which he had already haltingly demonstrated on the Delaware River four years earlier. But Fitch never gets his production costs under control, and Robert Fulton (who does not launch his own steamboat until 1807) is forever remembered as the father of steam-powered navigation.