HIGH-SPEED “TICKERS”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 745, 19 August 1929, Page 11

HIGH-SPEED “TICKERS”

TO KEF.P PACE WITH WALL STREET A tape-machine that will tick faster than any “ticker” has ever ticked before has been introduced to Wall Street. This machine, because of its great speed, will probably end the career of the boy who stands in the broker’s office marking up quotations. The best American and foreign engineers have been employed to manufacture this delicate instrument. It will print 500 characters a minute as compared with 300 on the old instrument, but will not be jumped to capacity at the start. It will begin with 300 characters a minute, and then gradually increase. This is necessary in order to permit the telegraph company to increase its circuits throughout the country. The new “ticker” cannot travel any faster than the company’s circuit. When you consider that sometimes the “ticker” is 40 cr 50 minutes late in reporting sales on the floor you can readily realise what the investor is up against, writes a New York correspondent. Suppose you own some shares and you want to sell them. You look at the “ticker” in your broker's office in Chicago. The price is satisfactory. You instruct your broker to sell. The “ticker.” however, may be so far behind the market that you sell at a price much different from the one you think you are selling at. You may be pleased or you may be angry, but it would have been much better if you had received the price the "ticker” told you. It is for this reason that the Stock Exchange is concentrating in improvements on the “ticker.” Without the tape-machine how would people know what was for sale in the market at any minute of the day? During the last six years the “ticker” speed has been increased 40 per cent. Formerly its average speed was from 215 to 225 characters a minute. Now it has been geared up to print 300 characters a minute. A character is the printing of a number or a letter or the making of a space. Even after the new tape-machines are approved, the task of installing them will be an enormous one. There are over 7.000 to be put into their places. The old ones will have to be replaced one at a time. The new system cannot work at top speed until the last one of the old types is out. A “ticker” operating 300 characters a minute needs only one-fifth of n second to print a single character. This printing operation involves the use of 15 or 20 different but closely associated pieces of apparatus, each one of which performs a different function at the proper time. The time allotted to the operation of certain of these devie'es is measured in a thousandth of a second, and so delicate is the machinery of the “ticker” that a special non-gumming oil costing £25 a gallon is used to lubricate the sensitive mechanism. One hundred men are needed to keep the “tickers” in order. These men come from the ranks of men who get their start as mechanics by going about the offices of stockbrokers cleaning, repairing the “tickers” and filling them with tape. The present “ticker” could print SOO characters a minute, and thus take care of any number of sales in one day if it wasn’t for a little mechanical feature. It can’t print in sequence. If its wants to jump eight characters it has to make eight ticks. In other words, if it wants to jump from A to Z it has to tick its way to the end of the alphabet to reach Z.