Skip to content

Happy Birthday, Share!

September 10, 2010
by

No, not Cher (who turned 64 on May 20). The share — as in stocks, securities.  The first known share in history, it turns out, was purchased on yesterday’s date in 1606, by a Dutchman by the name of Pieter Harmensz, for stock in the Dutch East India Company.  So the share turned 404 yesterday. Happy birthday, share!

All this detail has only recently come to light. The original document held by Harmensz was just discovered in a vault in the Dutch city of Enkuisen.

from → Commerce, History, Trivia
No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

w
Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: