Karl Weber

Irvington NY

A stock ticker

Introduced in New York in the 1860s, ticker tape machines were used until 1970 to convey stock prices to thousands of brokerage houses and financial institutions around the city. They became symbols of Wall Street, of instantaneous modern communication, and of a world intimately linked--including economically--by electronics. Images of pinstriped business men panicking over the ticker tape were staples of cartoon art during the Depression years. And of course the machines also helped shape an iconic New York cultural institution--the hero's procession through the streets of lower Manhattan in what we still call a "ticker tape parade."