Wall Street has been synonymous with American finance - and has defined New York to the rest of the world - since May 17, 1792, when twenty-four brokers convened under a buttonwood tree and agreed to regulate the stock market. Until the exchange itself went public in 2006, members were limited to 1,366 seats, which traded for upward of $1 million each (depending on market conditions, they might be priced higher or lower than the going rate for taxi medallions).
By the end of the nineteenth century, trading volume was increasing exponentially. It tripled between 1896 and 1899 alone, then doubled by 1901. To accommodate the growth, the Stock Exchange commissioned a neoclassic headquarters designed by George B. Post, which opened at 18 Broad Street in 1903. The trading floor, half the size of a football field, measured 109 by 140 feet under a 72-foot-high ceiling. The 90-ton pediment, designed by John Quincy Adams Ward (he also sculpted the statue of George Washington across the street at Federal Hall), featured a 22-foot figure flanked by representations of Agriculture and Mining and Science, Industry and Invention, and waves symbolizing the exchange's global maritime scope. It is titled Integrity Protecting the Works of Man. Apparently, integrity was insufficient protection. The weighty marble figures, ravaged by pollution and flaws, were replaced in 1936 by lead-coated replicas.
A paper strip running through a stock ticker (the name reflected the sound the machine made) produced ticker tape. Introduced in New York in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, who worked for the American Telegraph Co., it has been described as the earliest medium of digital electronic communication. It would endure for fully a century, elating and terrifying brokers glued to their tickers around the country and providing fodder for the distinctive confetti that distinguished New York's ticker-tape parades up the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Broadway. The original machines used Morse code; Thomas Edison's ticker, developed in 1869, printed out one alphanumeric character per second. (Nowadays, trading algorithms depend on information flashed in milliseconds.)
Arguably, Wall Street's worst moment was Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Shouts of "sell" drowned out the opening bell. In the first half hour alone, three million shares were traded; $2 million in value evaporated. When the market closed at 3:00 P.M. that day, it had lost $14 billion (over $300 billion in today's dollars). A record 16.4 million shares had been traded, recorded on fifteen thousand miles of ticker tape that registered a net loss in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 12 percent. The last ribbon of ticker tape, which could accommodate 285 words a minute, ran hours late. The final two words, appropriately enough, were "Good Night." The market would not recover to its pre-crash level until 1954.
TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
