The first stock ticker is unveiled in New York City - November 15th, 1867

On this day in 1867, the world’s first stock ticker was unveiled at the New York Stock Exchange.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to This Day in History Class, a show
that tallies the gains and losses of history one day
at a time. I'm Gabelusier, and today we're talking about
a revolutionary machine that removed the geographical boundaries of the

(00:22):
stock market and added some cartoonish flare to turn of
the century offices. The day was November fifteenth, eighteen sixty seven.
The world's first stock ticker was unveiled at the New
York Stock Exchange. Since the exchange's founding in seventeen ninety two,

(00:46):
transactions had only been reported either by mail or by messenger,
and in many cases, a stock's price would change by
the time a quote reached the investor, meaning that traders
often didn't know the true price at which they were buying.
The advent of the stock ticker didn't solve that problem entirely,
but it did greatly increase the speed of trading communications.

(01:09):
That's because the device could receive up to the minute
stock prices over telegraph wires and then print them out
almost in real time on long, thin ribbons of paper tape.
The ticker's name came from the sound of the typewheel
as it pressed out the endless chains of letters and digits.
If you've never heard one before, it sounds like this.

(01:36):
The inventor of the stock ticker was Boston native Edward Callahan.
After dropping out of school at age eleven to pursue
a career in business, Callahan landed a job as a
telegrapher at the company that would later become Western Union.
He eventually worked his way up to being the chief
telegrapher at the firm's New York office, but after a

(01:57):
chance encounter on the city streets, he decided to strike
out on his own. One day, while walking near a
stock exchange in New York, Callahan noticed a group of
messenger boys running full tilt to a nearby broker's office.
They were delivering the current stock prices for various companies
fresh from the trading floor, and had made Callahan realize

(02:17):
how much simpler the process would be if investors could
receive stock quotes by telegraph instead. He decided to tackle
the project himself, and what he came up with was
a modified telegraph receiver that could print the current price
of a given company stock. This would allow business owners
and investors to keep a constant eye on the marketplace.

(02:38):
They could learn how many shares had been traded each
day and the price per share, as well as how
much the price rose or fell since the previous day's closing.
The ease and speed of that reporting was invaluable to
investors on Wall Street, but also to ones all around
the country. Those who could afford a stock ticker bought
one right away, in larger enterprises bought several, using each

(03:01):
one to provide information on a different mix of stocks.
The technology was also a win for the New York
Stock Exchange, spurring its growth and bringing in new business
that had once been spread out among different local exchanges.
The stock ticker wasn't perfect, though, and in eighteen seventy one,
Thomas Edison took a crack at improving it. His version,

(03:24):
known as the Universal Stock Printer, was able to be
synchronized with other tickers on a telegraph line so that
they all printed the same information. It also required much
less battery power than Callahan's original. As a result, Edison's
design became the industry standard for many years, and remained
so with some adjustments until around nineteen thirty, when a

(03:45):
faster ticker was developed. Along the way, New Yorkers found
a new use for the coils of used ticker tape
that had begun to pile up in their offices. The
first recorded ticker tape parade took place in eighteen eighty
to celebrate the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. Throwing
the paper wasn't planned in advance. Several workers just started

(04:08):
flinging ribbons of tape out their office windows onto the
passing parade, and the people in other buildings saw them
and started doing the same. The flurry of ticker tape
added such a festive touch to the proceedings that it
soon became a fixture of New York parades. Although the
pieces thrown now tend to be smaller and more colorful
than the first patch. Thanks to its use in parades,

(04:30):
ticker tape has actually outlasted the stock ticker itself. The
last mechanical models were released in the early nineteen sixties
and were able to print up to nine hundred characters
per minute. In nineteen sixty five, a ticker was first
linked to a computer system, allowing it to print transactions
within seconds of their execution on the exchange floor. Within

(04:52):
a few years, computer networks were able to send the
information straight to an electronic display, eliminating the need for
both the ticker and its tape. The new setup allowed
data to circulate much faster and more efficiently, paving the
way for truly global markets. And while the silent, ceaseless
scrolling of an electronic display isn't as charming as an

(05:14):
old fashioned stock ticker, the machine's legacy does live on
in at least one way. The three or four letter
codes that identify specific stocks are still known as ticker symbols,
and some especially long lived companies are still traded using
the same shorthand they started with more than one hundred
and fifty years ago. I'm Gabelusier and hopefully you now

(05:40):
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
You can learn even more about history by following us
on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and
if you have any feedback you'd like to share, feel
free to pass it along by writing to this day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks as always to Chandler Mays

(06:03):
for producing the show, and thank you for listening. I'll
see you back here again tomorrow for another day in
history class,