Oct 29: Black Tuesday Crashes Wall Street, the Internet's First Message

Host 1 Good morning. Welcome to On This Day in American History. Today is Thursday, October 29th, 2026. Um have you ever noticed how America's greatest engineering triumphs and like its most spectacular failures often share the exact same birthday?

Host 2 Oh yeah absolutely.

Host 1 Today we're pulling from a stack of of historical sources for a deep dive and there is this incredible through line for October 29th. It's really all about our obsession with with building massive ambitious systems.

Host 2 Right. We build them to protect us and then we watch them them just spectacularly crash. and then, you know, we let those those crashes shape our future.

Host 1 Exactly. And we see that ambition perfectly in 1814.

Host 2 Yeah. The war of 1812 is raging. The British are blockading the northeast and New York City is just just completely exposed.

Host 1 Right. They desperately needed a harbor defense.

Host 2 So they turn to steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton, who builds the Demologos, depending on which source you consult, consult, it's either America's or maybe even the world's very first steam warship.

Host 1 And the defensive engineering on this thing is just brilliant. He knew the engine was the single point of failure, right? So he builds this ship with two half hulls.

Host 2 One for the boiler and one for the engine.

Host 1 Yeah, exactly. And he nested the paddle wheel right in the middle. behind these five foot thick timber sides I mean it's like designing a modern data center where you take the most critical servers air gap them and just bury them behind blast doors the whole ship is really just a massive shield

Host 2 a shield for that one vulnerable mechanism yeah and Fulton was notoriously protective of it too

Host 1 I bet

Host 2 he actually wrote that he couldn't trust the machinery to be directed by anyone but himself

Host 1 Wow quite the control freak

Host 2 a bit yeah but I mean his paranoia paid off Theodore Roosevelt later called it the true prototype of the modern ironclad. It predated the famous battle at Hampton Roads by like half a century.

Host 1 That is wild. So in 1814 you have this physical impenetrable system designed to protect American wealth from an outside threat.

Host 2 Right.

Host 1 But if you jump forward exactly 115 years to October 29th 1929 you get an American system that obliterates that wealth entirely from the inside.

Host 2 oh man black Tuesday

Host 1 yeah

Host 2 it wasn't just a bad day of trading it was the structural failure of an entire economy that was built on a a house of cards

Host 1 because it was totally propped up by leverage

Host 2 exactly everyone was buying on margin playing with brokers borrowed money acting like the line would just go up forever

Host 1 right until a small dip triggered this catastrophic feedback loop brokers started demanding cash forcing investors to sell off assets to cover to cover those margins

Host 2 which drove prices even lower

Host 1 yeah triggering another massive wave of margin calls it was this unstoppable algorithmic doom loop driven entirely by human panic

Host 2 on that single single Tuesday a record 16.4 million shares traded hands the Dow fell 25% over a few days just wiping out 14 billion dollars

Host 1 that's staggering and the dark irony is how disconnected the public was from what was actually happening look at the Seattle Times front page from that day

Host 2 oh the department store quote

Host 1 yes directly under a terrifying headline blaring stocks hit lowest levels there's a quote quote from a local department store president proudly declaring we're planning a tremendous Christmas this year

Host 2 he had had zero clue the floor had just completely fallen out from under him

Host 1 none and that that single crash ushered in the Great Great Depression reshaped financial regulations and I mean the market didn't hit those pre-crash highs again until 1954

Host 2 so Wall Street proved that when human trust in a system evaporates the system collapses

Host 1 speaking of systems crashing on October 29th exactly 40 years later another crash happened but this one launched the modern era

Host 2 Right. Because in 1969, we built a system that didn't rely on human traders at all. The birth of the ARPANET.

Host 1 And it still managed to crash on its very first day.

Host 2 Naturally.

Host 1 So a student programmer named Charlie Klein was was sitting at a terminal at UCLA trying to log into a Stanford Research Institute computer.

Host 2 I should note our sources disagree slightly on the exact time here

Host 1 oh right most say 10 30 pm but one places it around 9 pm

yeah

Host 2 yeah but regardless of the hour Klein Klein types L Stanford confirms confirms by phone got the L

Host 1 he types O

Host 2 got the O

Host 1 and then he hits G hits G for login

Host 2 and the the entire system just completely dies

Host 1 it is incredibly fitting that the internet's very first action was a system crash isn't it

Host 2 oh absolutely the buffer memory simply overloaded overloaded the early system just couldn't handle the the incoming data and choked

Host 1 and there were no cameras to cameras to capture this right just a simple entry in what they called an IMP log

Host 2 right an interface message processor log

Host 1 that log is essentially the black box of black box of the early internet it it recorded the absolute first test of packet switching

Host 2 where data is chopped up into small blocks sent through different routes and reassembled at the destination.

Host 1 Exactly.

Host 2 And Professor Leonard Kleinrock thought the fact that it crashed on G was poetic too. He called that resulting two letter message low succinct and prophetic

Host 1 lo and behold

Host 2 exactly and within an hour they had it it back up laying the groundwork for the massive interconnected digital world we we use today

Host 1 wow well before we wrap up our deep dive we've gotta mention a few other quick milestones that share this date

Host 2 let's hear them

so

Host 1 so in 1998 77 year old John Glenn became the oldest person in space in 1947 President Truman Truman received the landmark civil rights report to secure these rights and in 1945 the first ballpoint pen in the US went on sale for $12.50 it was called the Reynolds Rocket

Host 2 incredible moments in history but you know thinking back on today's deep dive there's this lingering thought

Host 1 what's that

Host 2 well from Fulton's 1814 warship to the 1969 ARPANET we just constantly strive to build larger more complex networks but as the devastation of 1929 showed us when these massive intertwined systems inevitably crash they take everything down with them

Host 1 yeah

Host 2 so it makes you wonder are the systems we rely on today really any less vulnerable

Host 1 thanks for tuning in see you back here here tomorrow