TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines?

Re: Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines?

Jim Haynes (haynes@alumni.uark.edu)
Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:43:42 GMT

> In article <telecom24.364.8@telecom-digest.org>,
> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

>> I was wondering what kind of machine, if any, replaced the classic
>> glass-dome model and continued to produce a tape showing trades.

(Guess I missed the original message, or I would have replied.)

The glass-bell-jar ticker was replaced ca. 1930 by a machine made by
Teletype. It used a six-level start-stop code and printed using a
type wheel. I would have to look this up, but think the speed was 600
letters per minute, which works out to 100 wpm. The glass bell jar
tickers continued to be used by Western Union to report baseball
scores as late as circa 1950. Sports score reporting was a service of
W.U.; the customers for the service were mostly bookies and other
gamblers.

W.U. made some tape printers for telegrams using the basic mechanism
of the 1930 ticker; this was called the 401-A printer. Teletype made
a low-cost page printer in the late 1930s using much of the same
technology; this was the Model 26. The ticker had no model number.

Those tickers where replaced circa 1965 by a new Teletype ticker
operating at 900 chars/min and often called the "900" ticker for that
reason. It used technology under development for the Model 37 page
printer; but within the Bell System it was called the Model 28 ticker
even though it had little in common with the Model 28 equipment line.
I guess they wanted to reserve Model 37 for the new page printer. The
900 ticker used the same 6-level code as the earlier ticker.

This ticker could be considered the last successful Teletype product
of the almost-all-mechanical genre. The Model 37 and Model 38 page
printers achieved few sales and never got completely debugged.
Everything after that used a lot of electronics instead of complicated
mechanisms.

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

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