How a telegraph became a market feed
Before prices could appear on a screen, market information traveled over telegraph wires. A stock ticker turned incoming signals into abbreviated company symbols and prices, printing them in sequence on a narrow, continuous strip of paper. The machine’s repeated tapping gave it the name “ticker.”
The strip was useful because it made a stream of reports visible and portable. Traders could read prices as they arrived, while the paper accumulated a record of what had been reported. A broker or investor away from the exchange no longer had to rely only on someone describing the market by word of mouth.
The paper could not keep pace with every market
A ticker was a communications system with a physical limit: it could print only as fast as information reached it and the machine processed it. When many prices were being reported, the tape could fall behind events on the exchange. A figure appearing on the ribbon was therefore a recent report, not necessarily the price available at that instant.
That delay mattered. Traders learned to read not just the numbers but the flow of the tape, knowing that a busy market could make the printed feed stale. Electronic displays later removed the paper ribbon, but the old ticker’s basic promise survived: carry market information outward as it happens. The word remains even though the tapping and paper trail are gone.
