Junk bonds became one of the defining characteristics of the leveraged-buyout mania of the 1980s, and Drexel prospered as its creation became a preferred source of deal financing. However, all good things must come to an end. Drexel collapsed, Milken went to prison, and junk bonds lost a bit of luster. However, high-yield debt continues to be a frequent source of financing throughout the corporate world — in 2011, junk bonds comprised about $1.4 trillion of $32 trillion U.S. bond market.
Pictures for the people
George Eastman sold the very first Kodak camera on April 6, 1888. It wasn’t the first camera ever made — not by a long shot — but it was the first time anyone had tried to bring photography to the people. Lauren Hewes of the American Antiquarian Society writes:
[It was] a camera designed for the people, not for professional photographers. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like such a big deal today, when I can snap a photograph with my cell phone and email it halfway around the world in a second or two. But until 1888 the populace could only consume photographs produced by professional photographers. You had to haul yourself and your family to the photographer’s studio to get a family portrait. Or you hired the professional photographer in town to come out and take a picture of your home or your prize cow, or your factory or business.
Eastman’s invention revolutionized photography. … The camera allowed almost anyone who could afford the price [of $25] to create a visual record of their lives, outside of the professional photographer’s studio. The exposures were a distinctive round shape and can be identified both by this shape and by their mounts, which are usually marked with the Kodak insignia. The camera had severe limitations (it could only take 100 shots, had to be returned to Kodak for processing, and had a finicky shutter that was set with a string), but it was successful enough that the company quickly came out with a smaller, more affordable version … [the] Brownie camera.
Early adopters must always suffer through a commercialized development process, it seems. Photography spread gradually among the populace, but the explosive phase of its growth wouldn’t occur for some time — $25 in 1888 would be nearly $650 in modern terms, and later upgrades to this first camera tended to increase the price. Before Eastman’s camera, only a few million photographs had ever been taken, although the technology had been around since the 1820s.
The Brownie camera spurred wider adoption, and by the time of the Great Depression, the world was taking about 1 billion pictures every year. By the 1970s, that number had grown tenfold. This was just practice for the smartphone-driven photography explosion that has now taken the world by storm: today, nearly 400 billion photos are taken around the world each year, a rate equaling the total photographic output of the entire 1800s every two minutes.
The article The Deal That Rocked the Dow to New Highs originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.
Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter, @TMFBiggles, for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends American Express and owns shares of Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
