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APPENDIX 
the stock tape which continualy ran behind these enormous markets. 
At length, American inventive genius came to the rescue of the Stock 
Exchange by producing an entirely new stock ticker machine, capable 
of printing goo characters a minute and of handling 7,000,000 share 
days. But this machine could not be immediately utilized; not only 
were elaborate tests on a time basis necessary, but the task of installing 
them all over the country was also great. Furthermore, the new 
machines could not be operated up to their full capacity until every 
old machine in the country had been replaced. 
In the interim, the attempt was made to speed up the ticker ser- 
vice by using fewer characters to print the same information. Some 
time before, the ticker symbols for the various listed share issues had 
been carefully revised, not only to cut symbols of three letters down 
to two, and those of two dowh to one, but also to make the one letter 
symbols as far as possible coincide with the most active stocks. The 
actual printing of symbols was performed in the old ticker machine 
by a little wheel, electrically operated, with the various letters on its 
circumference. To save time taken up by rotation of this wheel from 
one letter to another, the ticker symbols were also reorganized so as 
to make the letters of a given symbol come as close together as possible 
on this wheel. 
As of Sept. 25, 1929, there were 9,707 stock tickers and 1,068 bond 
tickers in operation by the New York Quotation Co., the Western 
Union Telegraph Co., and (in Boston) the United Telegram Co. 
They were located in 346 cities in 41 states of the Union and in the 
Dominion of Canada. Of this total, 5,728 were located in New York 
State. 
Automatic ticker quotations were first completely dispatched to 
the Pacific Coast in March, 1926. Subsequently, the service was ex- 
tended to such other distant centers as Dallas, Texas; New Orleans, 
Louisiana; Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Denver, Colo- 
rado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles and San 
Diego, California; and Vancouver, British Columbia. 
When in 1928 the old stock ticker still was unable to keep up with 
the market, even more drastic steps were taken to economize characters 
on the tape. In price quotations, all but the last digit plus any frac- 
tion was omitted; thus 300 Steel common sold at 14738 which for- 
merly had been printed on the tape “X3.14734” now became “3.733.” 
Subsequently, the rule was made that when the tape is five or more 
minutes behind the market, no volume of sales under 5,000 shares 
should be reported until the tape has again caught up to the market. 
Since the bond tape did not become similarly congested, inactive