New York Stock Exchange
Exploring Downtown
The Dow Jones averages, bulls and bears, the great crash of 1929, the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s – here is the beating heart of the world’s financial markets, housed in grand neoclassical style at the corner of Wall and Broad streets. Brokers have been trading shares on Wall Street since 1792, when they started meeting informally under a buttonwood tree on the sidewalk outside 68 Wall. In 1903, their descendants, operating as the New York Stock Exchange, built this new home.
The New York Stock Exchange has pioneered the development of information technology to speed data to investors. Stock brokers were among the earliest users of the first telegraph line between New York and Philadelphia in 1844. No sooner had Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone than the first phones found their way to the NYSE trading floor, in 1878.
The ticker-tape machine (see below), invented in 1867, revolutionized the communication of stock prices, and became a symbol of Wall Street business. With the turn to wireless networks, the “ticker-tape” has become electronic, and today runs on television networks around the world, generated by a system that can process billions of shares a day.
Marker is on Broad Street, on the left when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
