Today in Entrepreneurial History: December 31

By Dane Carlson on December 31, 2012 in History

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• 1600 – The British East India Company is chartered.
• 1695 – A window tax is imposed in England, causing many householders to brick up windows to avoid the tax.
• 1759 – Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum and starts brewing Guinness.
• 1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, NJ.
• 1904 – The first New Year’s Eve celebration is held in Times Square (then known as Longacre Square) in New York City, New York.
• 1923 – The chimes of Big Ben are broadcast on radio for the first time by the BBC.

I’ll bet that you, like me, wondered what a “window tax” is.

The tax was introduced in England and Wales under the Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money in 1696 under King William III[1] and was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax. At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because they believed that the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.

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Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,198 posts to the site.

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Another Idea: How to Start a Consultant Time Management Business

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