The 1929 Wall
Street Crash was caused, as insiders knew at the time, by huge losses in
sock futures due to the early onset of the missing sock phenomenon occurring
after underage sock weavers in the garment industry walked off the job to
protest in favor of child labor laws, carrying with them thousands of
individual socks from what had been pairs (the sock market later became known as the stock market to help cover up this story).

One of the most significant developments in the
history of socks occurred when synthetic
fibers first became public at the NY World Fair in 1939 (the NY location
produced the name NYlon).  People went
crazy over them because it was believed that the non-natural fiber would cling
better than wool or cotton and keep the socks together in a pair without one of
them constantly turning up missing.  Unfortunately, for reasons that still baffle the scientific community,
this wasn’t the case.

The National
Security Agency (NSA) was created in 1952 from its predecessor agency the
Armed Forces Sock Agency (AFSA), which itself was created during WW II to
investigate the missing sock phenomenon in the Armed Forces, especially the
infantry. Originally the National Sock Agency, as the problem was known to have
spread into the civilian population, the onset of the so-called Cold War
produced the expanded security and cryptologic intelligence needs that morphed
into the NSA as we now know it.  (BTW, a
CIA whistleblower recently claimed that a domestic drone can spot a missing
sock from 25,000 feet, but he is now being held at an undisclosed location.)

Perhaps the biggest failure of the short Kennedy
Administration was the infamous Bay of
Pigs invasion.  Preparing to launch
the attack from Miami, which has notoriously sock eating Laundromats, many of
the invading Cubans were forced to wear combat boots without socks (don’t try
this at home) and thus foundered on the beach and were handily defeated.