Today in history—March 10

1629: King Charles I dissolves Parliament and will not call another one for eleven years. When members return, their mood will not be improved by the delay.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first successful telephone call, saying “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

1891: Kansas City undertaker Almon Strowger, angered that a local telephone operator kept steering his prospective customers to another undertaker (her husband), invents the first automatic telephone switch.

1926: The Book of the Month Club opens for business, selling books by mail at reduced prices.

1947: Future prime minister Avril Phaedra Douglas “Kim” Campbell, PC (British Columbia Law 1983), is born at Port Alberni, British Columbia.

1964: The first Mustang rolls of the Ford Motor Co. assembly line.

1977: Comedians around the world are delighted when scientists discover rings around Uranus.

2000: The NASDAQ stock market index hits a peak of 5048.62 as elderly grandmothers in Paducah shove money into Red Hat and Pets.com.  They will lose much of that money.