19. Mergers & Acquisitions
In 1873, The Manhattan Quotation Telegraph Company appeared with a stock ticker invention of Mr. J.E. Smith. In order to secure the stock quotes from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, they offered to pay a fixed price and a royalty to the exchange. Gold & Stock purchased the Manhattan Quotation Telegraph Company a few months after Manhattan entered the market.
20. Stock Quote Battles
A new renegade entry called the Commercial Telegram Company controlled a printing invention of Mr. Stephen D. Field. The company ignored all patents (which they eventually paid penalties on) and other rights, and claimed their instrument was superior to all others. The New York Stock Exchange granted the Commercial Telegram Company the same rights as Gold & Stock. The monthly charge for tickers fell from $25 to $10 for subscribers (the actual cost to Gold & Stock was $13 per month). As the competition increased between these two organizations, the stock exchange tightened its control over the quotations in 1885. This competitive environment demonstrated the value of the stock quotation reporting business from the floor of the exchange.
21. Rare Gold & Stock
Gold & Stock faced the expiration of the original Calahan patents and growing competition from the Commercial Telegram ticker. Mr. George B. Scott, of Gold & Stock produced a new superior ticker, taking advantage of the numerous ticker patents held by Gold & Stock.
22. New York Quotation
If it were not for a falling out between Gold & Stock and the New York Stock Exchange, the Scott ticker would have been the exclusive ticker of the exchange. In 1890, the exchange secured a majority interest in the Commercial Telegram Company and reorganized as the New York Quotation Company. They made the New York Quotation Stock Ticker the exclusive stock printer on Wall Street and restored a monthly rate of $25. The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company discontinued services to members of the exchange below Canal Street. Gold & Stock tickers continued to serve the rural areas.
23. Burry Stock Ticker
The Consolidated Exchange also abandoned the Gold & Stock ticker and adopted the ticker used by the Stock Quotation Telegraph Company as its exclusive ticker. It was initially invented by Mr. A. Wirshing and was improved by Mr. John Burry, who eliminated some weight and added a self-winding device. By 1910, Western Union (the Gold & Stock identity now gone) had thousands of Burry tickers which they were renting from the Stock Quotation Telegraph Company at the rate of $3 per month, which totaled $35,000 per year (11,666 Burry stock tickers in service).
24. The Self-Winding Stock Ticker
As always the American economy continues to grow, and the volume of trades on the stock exchange grew in number. Imagine "bandwidth" in the late 19th-century as a 3/4-inch-wide piece of paper tape. In order to keep up with the volume of trades, stock tickers were engineered to print faster. The new self-winding stock ticker invented by Gold & Stock was much faster than the Universal, though both remained in service together for many years.
The Gold & Stock self-winding ticker was invented by George B. Scott, Superintendent of Gold & Stock, and W.P. Phelps of the Philadelphia Local Telegraph Company. In 1903, J.C. Barclay, Assistant General Manager of Gold & Stock, called Jay R. Page in Chicago to come to New York to help make the device smaller. They decided to place the escapement magnet and the adjustment screws inside the ticker frame. After this change the ticker was called the Scott-Phelps-Barclay-Page Ticker.
Eventually it would come to be known simply as the self-winding stock ticker, and come to be identified with Western Union. The self-winding device is the image one generally imagines when referring to a stock ticker. One of the manufacturing vendors in the early 1900s was Thomas Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, plant, current site of the Edison National Historic Site. These "Western Union" self-winding tickers are sometimes mistakenly thought to be invented by Thomas Edison because they were manufactured at his plant. In reality, it is doubtful that Edison had any involvement with Western Union's self-winding ticker.