1907: The Dow Jones Industrial Average suffers its seventh-worst daily percentage loss of all time, dropping 8.3% (or 6.89 points) to 76.23 as the Panic of 1907 begins to take hold.

John A. Prestbo, ed., The Market's Measure: An Illustrated History of America Told through the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow Jones, New York, 1999), p. 112

1904: The U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5 to 4, that J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Co., holding company for the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railroad lines, is stifling free competition and violating the Sherman Antitrust Act — marking an end to the era of robber barons and monopolies.

Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 533.

1883: Karl Marx dies peacefully in London, England — 107 years before his intellectual creation, Communism, dies painfully.

1837: In one of the earliest known cases of insider trading, two stock speculators, the brothers Francois and Joseph Blanc, are acquitted on charges of fraud. The brothers had bribed the operators of an optical telegraph near Tours to encode secret messages that would disclose the movements of the Paris stock market — enabling the Blancs to take advantage of other investors who had to wait until the next day's newspaper for market updates. The court acquits the Blancs on the extremely French grounds that their conduct is improper, but not forbidden by law.

1821: On one of the quietest days in Wall Street history, the market is open, but not a single share of stock changes hands.

Walter Werner and Steven Smith, Wall Street (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991), p. 163.

1794: In one of the most ambivalent innovations of all time, Eli Whitney patents his cotton gin, setting off an industrial boom in the textile-mill towns of New England — but also extending the evil life of slavery by another 70 years.