On this day in economic and financial history…

Travelers  began doing business in the closing days of the Civil War, on April 1, 1864. On this day, company founder James G. Batterson issued the first Travelers written insurance policy to himself, a ceremonial transaction that nevertheless marked the official beginning of travel insurance in the United States. Several days earlier Batterson had engaged in the first unofficial insurance transaction for the yet-to-be-created accident-insurance company. Travelers recounts the incident on its history timeline:

Travelers was founded more than a century ago through an off-hand transaction of only two cents. The two cent incident occurred on March 24, 1864, when a Hartford businessman, James G. Batterson, met a local banker, James E. Bolter, in the post office. Bolter had heard that Batterson and several fellow townsmen were organizing a company for the purpose of introducing accident insurance to North America.

“I’m on my way home for lunch,” Bolter said. “How much would you charge to insure me against accident between here and Buckingham Street?”

“Two cents,” Batterson quoted promptly, as he took Bolter’ two pennies and tucked them into his vest pocket. Bolter walked the four blocks to his home without mishap. His two cent “premium” is a souvenir treasured by the company Mr. Batterson founded, Travelers.

In the years that followed, Travelers became the go-to source of travel insurance, with a client roster including legendary circus showman P. T. Barnum, department store pioneer John Wanamaker, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and James Harper, co-founder of the Harper Brothers publishing house (the flagship imprint of today’s HarperCollins). As transportation opportunities expanded from steamships to railroads to automobiles and finally to aircraft, so too did the travel insurance industry. Today, more than $1 billion in travel insurance premiums are collected by Travelers and other insurers each year.

Travelers went through two notable mergers between the end of the 1990s and the middle of the 2000s. The first, which formed Citigroup , is directly responsible for repealing Glass-Steagall and ushering in a new era of megabanks. Two years after Citi divested the insurer in 2002 (insurance and banking didn’t go together quite as harmoniously as chocolate and peanut butter), Travelers and St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance, another Civil War-era insurer, merged to create the Travelers of today. This merger was completed on April 1, 2004, exactly 140 years after James G. Batterson sold that first Travelers policy to himself and began an insurance empire.

Small beginnings for the biggest of Big Tobacco
Philip Morris & Co, the predecessor of Altria , was incorporated in New York in April of 1902 as the American arm of a London tobacconist with the same name. As the U.S. was then the world’s primary tobacco-grower, it made little sense for London‘s Philip Morris to export there, particularly in light of the U.S.’ high tobacco-importation tariffs. In its first full year of operation, Philip Morris sold …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance