Sunday · September 27, 2026
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19941776 Club

Bezos quits Wall Street, incorporates a bookstore called Cadabra in his Bellevue garage

Web usage is climbing 2,300 percent a year; the 30-year-old typed the business plan during the drive out from New York.

In spring 1994, web usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year, and a 30-year-old Wall Street executive named Jeff Bezos decided he could not sit it out. He quit his job, typed a business plan during a cross-country drive, and on July 5, 1994, incorporated a company in Bellevue, Washington, first named Cadabra, Inc. He chose books as his opening product for their low cost and universal demand. Within 30 days, the venture he'd renamed Amazon.com was selling $20,000 worth of books a week out of his garage…

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More from July 5
1814

Scott's regulars break Riall's line at Chippawa; the British general had taken them for militia

After 25 minutes of volley fire on open ground near the Niagara, the Right Division's lines collapse and American regulars prove they can stand against British veterans.
1775

Congress sends King George a loyalty oath and a list of grievances; the delegates call it their olive branch

Hancock and the full Congress sign the petition in Philadelphia, and envoys Richard Penn and Arthur Lee are bound for London with the appeal.
1859

Captain Brooks claims a mid-Pacific atoll for the United States; he calls it the Middlebrook Islands

The sealing ship Gambia raised the flag under the Guano Islands Act, planting a U.S. claim a third of the way between Honolulu and Tokyo.
18521776 Club
Speaking the day after Independence Day at Corinthian Hall, he calls slavery "the great sin and shame of America" before a mostly white crowd invited by the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.
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More from Modern America
1998

Thirteen Tomahawks hit a Khartoum medicine factory; Washington says it made nerve gas

The strike came thirteen days after the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the target was a plant that made most of Sudan's antibiotics.
2020

Biden accepts the nomination alone in a Delaware ballroom, no crowd, no roar

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1994

Thirty-three years after his death, the Air Force finally makes Eugene Bullard an officer

France called him a hero and gave him a pilot's license in 1917; his own country waited until 1994 to make it official.
2012

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