"Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning."
Thomas Alva Edison
The idea behind the stock ticker, which derived originally from telegraph technology, was to provide stock prices via a telegraph machine. It earned the name "ticker" because of the noise it made as prices came through, which also explains the name "tick" for the up or down movement in the price of a security.
E. A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company invented the first stock ticker in 1867. Others came on the market shortly afterward, but it was not until Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) created the Universal Stock Ticker for Gold and Stock in 1871 that the machine's efficiency was greatly improved.
Edison created the "screw-thread unison" device that enabled stock tickers to be synchronized, allowing them to transmit the same information at the same time. This was a huge improvement on previous models, which had to be reset by hand when they fell behind the transmission they were receiving. This saved companies a huge amount of time and-effort, because they did not have to send their employees running to the.-ticker every time they needed to be reset.
Edison improved the design further by changing the type wheel and paper feed, as well as devising a transmitter that worked like a typewriter keyboard. These improvements required much less battery power than previous tickers. Edison's ticker continued to be used until the 1930s, and the money he earned from this invention allowed him to set up his first laboratory and manufacturing plant in Newark, New Jersey. New tickers introduced in 1930 and 1964 were twice as fast as earlier models, but a fifteen to twenty minute delay between a transaction and the time of its announcement existed until real-time electronic tickers were launched in 1996.
