1929: The Harvard Economic Society declares that despite its severity we believe that the slump in stock prices will prove an intermediate movement and not the precursor of a business depression such as would entail prolonged further liquidation." The same day The Wall Street Journal editorializes: "Conditions do not seem to foreshadow anything more formidable than an arrest of stock activity and business prosperity like that in 1923. Suggestions that the wiping out of paper profits will reduce the country's real purchasing power seem far-fetched." As the old saying goes there are two kinds of forecasters: those who are wrong and those who know they are wrong."

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), p. 245;Edward Angly, Oh Yeah? (Fraser Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 1992 ed.), p. 13.

1825: The Erie Canal is inaugurated as New York City hosts a flotilla of boats with a parade, banquet and fireworks display after they traverse the 363-mile run from Lake Erie. Financed with $6 million in stock and bonds and eight years in the making, the canal cuts shipping time from New York to Buffalo from three weeks to eight days — and slashes the cost of transporting goods from $100 a ton to $15. Suddenly the American frontier is opened to a two-way flood of commerce.

Robert Sobel, The Money Manias: The Eras of Great Speculation in America, 1770-1970 (Weybright and Talley, New York, 1973), p. 52