Black Tuesday hit Wall Street in 1929 as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions
of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock
tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not
handle the huge volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black
Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.
On September 2, 1969, America’s first automatic teller
machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing
cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville
Centre, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the
banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank
to conduct basic financial transactions.
By the 1980s, these money machines had become
widely popular and handled many of the functions
previously performed by human tellers, such as
check deposits and money transfers between
accounts.
Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people
as cell phones and e-mail.
Donald C. Wetzel (93) is an American businessman known
for holding the USA patent to the automatic teller machine.
On January 8, 1835, President Andrew Jackson achieves his goal of entirely paying off the United States’ national debt. It was the only
time in U.S. history that the national debt stood at zero, and it precipitated one of the worst financial crises in American history.
The elimination of the national debt was both a personal issue for Jackson and the culmination of a political project as old as the
nation itself. Since the time of the Revolution, American politicians
had argued over the wisdom of the nation carrying debt. After independence, the federal government agreed to take on individual states’ war debts as part of the unification of the former colonies. Federalists, those who favored a stronger central government, established a national bank and argued that debt could be a useful
way of fueling the new country’s economy. Their opponents, most notably Thomas Jefferson, saw the debt as a source of national
shame.
Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845)
War bonds were debt securities issued by the government to finance military operations and other expenditure in times of war. They were
also a means to control inflation by removing money from circulation from a stimulated wartime economy.
Donald Wetzel (center) demonstrates America’s first ATM in 1969 at
the former Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, LI.
