1901: As competing bull and bear factions try to corner the market in Northern Pacific railway stock, the shares hit $1000 — up from $96 only five weeks earlier! Then the market crashes, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 6.1% on near-record daily volume of 3.1 million shares. And Samuel Bolton, a leading brewer in Troy, N.Y., who has lost a fortune speculating on stocks, commits suicide by diving into a vat of hot beer.

Clement Juglar, A Brief History of Panics (G.P. Putnam's, New York, 1916;reprinted, Fraser Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 1993), pp. 159-160;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated;The New York Times, May 10, 1901, p. 1, reprinted in Floyd Norris and Christine Bockelmann, The New York Times Century of Business (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000), p. 14

1894: Benjamin Grossbaum is born in London, England, to a homemaker and an importer of Austrian china. His family later changes its surname to Graham, and he becomes the founder of securities analysis and value investing.

Benjamin Graham, The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1996), pp. 1-2.

1859: In the midst of an IPO boom in trolley companies, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Streets Passenger Railway goes public on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and investors are so desperate to get stock that they line up all night to sign the share register and fistfights break out when people try to cut in line.

"A Blueprint for America's Free Markets: The History of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange," privately printed by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, 1996, p. 10