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Push 'Em Back
A look at the early history of pushtechnology that started with stock market ticker tape machines.
Published September 1997
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Investors and newshounds of yesteryear used push technology to stay up to date
For months, push technology has been hailed as the next big thing: it spells the end of Web browsers, say the pundits, and is the best hope for building business on the Web. But push, at bottom, is nothing new. Variations on the concept go back more than 130 years.
The essence of push technology is preselection and speed. The customer requests specific information before it happens--stock updates on Eli Lily, sports news from the Chicago Sun-Times, weather reports from Tasmania--and the provider sends it as soon as it does. Today's incarnation of push, of course, involves the transmission of one's selections over the Internet, via services like Pointcast. Those of yesteryear used the telegraph, the first lightning form of mail for point-to-point communication, as their medium. Primary among push's predecessors were the stock-ticker and news-wire services, both of which delivered preselected information instantaneously and continuously to subscribers.
The origin of the stock ticker dates back to 1863, when Dr. Samuel S. Laws, manager of New York City's Gold Exchange and an amateur electrician, invented the gold indicator to put an end to the crush of messenger boys scurrying into the Exchange and back out to their clients with the latest gold price in hand. As the price of gold changed, an electrical signal sent from the trading floor would cause a hand on the device--a clocklike dial rimmed with numerals--to move until it pointed to the latest trading price.
Laws initially placed a gold indicator in a window at the Exchange, but he soon began installing them, through his newly founded Reporting Telegraph Co., in brokerage firms throughout Manhattan and pushing the latest prices of gold over the telegraph wires. Thus, as early as 1866, brokerage houses willing to pay the monthly fee could base trades on up-to-the-minute market information rather than waiting for runners to bring the news.
Other inventors improved the technology fast on Laws's heels. Franklin Pope, superintendent at the Reporting Telegraph Co., developed an apparatus that printed Roman characters on a moving strip of paper. Boston telegrapher E.A. Callahan, with backing from the Gold & Stock Telegraph Co., modified the design of a European-made telegraph so it would print not just gold prices but stock-market quotations on paper tape. The clickety-clack of its type wheel earned the machine the name "stock ticker." Inspired by the device's commercial promise, another Boston inventor-telegrapher--Thomas A. Edison--made improvements to it, patenting his design in 1869.
Just like the pushing of information over the Internet, the pushing of gold and stock prices by telegraph became a highly competitive business. Prices emanating from the Exchange (to become the New York Stock Exchange) could be recorded and marketed by any ticker service with a representative on-site. Such firms proliferated, buying or licensing--from the likes of Edison--the tickers necessary to build a network.
