What is Ticker Tape?
Ticker tape is a thin ribbon of paper once used in stock ticker machines, which provided a running print-out of stock market fluctuations. Today, stock ticker machines have largely been replaced with digital “tickers” on websites, television news, or LED displays. The ticker tape machine, invented in 1867, first allowed people to see stock quotes in something close to real time. Before the stock ticker, stock prices were delivered by hand, usually just in a daily digest. Because stock prices fluctuate constantly, being aware of them in real time offers a significant benefit to investors and traders. The stock ticker was, in a way, the precursor to the modern computer printer. Textual information was transported through wires to the stock ticker machine to be printed out onto ticker tape. In early models, the information transported to the stock ticker was written in Morse code, but in 1869, Thomas Edison developed an alphanumeric system for conveying stock information. Alphanumeric tic
