Through the Ages

      On September 30th, 1929, the Dow Jones industrial average reached a historic high of 381. Just shy of two months later, October 24th would become known as Black Thursday during which over 13 million shares would be exchanged but most losses would be recovered by the end of the day. The following Tuesday would earn the appellation “Black Tuesday" as the average dropped from 261 to 230. This initiated what came to be known as the Great Depression and there are many theories and models covering both the factors that led to it, contributed to its international nature and led to its unusual persistence.      Most state that there is a lack of sufficient data to fully account for all relevant factors resulting in a large variety of models. Some, like Ben S. Bernanke in his articles “The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach,” and “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression” take a ver...

     When John Moses Browning died November 26, 1926 at the Fabrique Nationale plant in Liège, Belgium attended to by the Company physician and his son, Val, it is arguable that he had been the most successful firearms designer in history and certainly during the first quarter of the twentieth-century. John had traveled to Belgium with his wife Rachel in the Autumn of 1926 to work on his Superposed Shotgun design, having been to Liège on numerous occasions but it was Rachel’s first time accompanying her husband. She would return to the United States with his remains which had had lain in state at the FN Boardroom on December 7th and he would be laid to rest on December 17th in Ogden Utah but having set the stage, let us turn to the beginning.      John Moses Browning was born January 23rd, 1855 in Ogden, Utah to Mormon parents Jonathan and Elizabeth Browning. Jonathan Browning was originally from Tennessee but had moved to Nauvoo, Illinois and opened a succ...

    I was born in the 1960s in Dekalb, IL. One may wonder what connection my birth would have with postbellum American entrepreneurs, but being born and spending portions of my youth in Dekalb, during that period, one learned two important facts about Dekalb. Dekalb is known for two things, the foremost being corn, and the second being an invention in 1873 by the man pictured above, Joseph Glidden. The portrait of Joseph Glidden was downloaded from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and was taken in 1858 by an unknown artist, the details of which can be found here.: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.98.88    This blog is not simply about Joseph Glidden however, but rather how the work in one year, 1873, of entrepreneurs from two distinctly different endeavors and how their combined ingenuity changed the American West. The first of these was of course Joseph Glidden, who designed two strand barbed wire, frequently referred to as the first modern barbed w...