1929: The Great Crash (6 of 30)

1929: The Great Crash

The latest share prices flashed from Wall Street could be printed out within minutes across America using telegraphic ticker-tape machines.
You could find ticker tape in night clubs in railroad depots, in beauty parlours, on ocean liners.
The market became a pervasive part of America's play culture in the 1920s.
I eat sleep, dream, talk stocks, the only way, I believe, to make money.
It 's exciting.
I love it 17,000 dollars' profit on 3,500 dollars' capital.
Not bad! There were wild speculations in all kinds of securities - movie company stocks, aeronautical stocks, all the auto company stocks.

One of the hot stocks of the 1920s was Radio Corporation of America.
It was a lot like today's Google.
It was cutting-edge technology.
They had this idea that you could put radios in cars - imagine that(!) The American investing public began to connect the products they were using that were coming from corporate America with the notion that, "hey, I might own a share of the company that makes that product that I like."
By the mid-20s, around 3 million Americans were in the market, and Wall Street gripped the public imagination.
With tales of fortunes being made overnight, the idea of a great bull market - where shares only seemed to go up - took hold.
Every popular magazine, every newspaper, every radio station was fascinated by what was going on in the Stock Market.
People charted the activities of celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx and were fascinated by what stocks they happened to be speculating in.