History
A short history of the ticker
For a hundred and fifty years, a single line of moving text has been how news arrives when you are busy doing something else. It has been printed on paper ribbon, spelled in light bulbs, and burned into the bottom of a television screen. Only one thing about it has never changed — and FeedsBar exists because of that one thing.
A machine that printed the market
Edward Calahan built the first stock ticker for the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company in New York, and patented it the following spring. Before it, prices left the exchange floor in the pockets of running boys. After it, a brass machine under a glass dome printed them onto a ribbon of paper, continuously, in every office that would rent one. The name was onomatopoeia: it ticked.
Edison makes them agree
Edison did not invent the ticker, though he is often credited with it. What he built four years later was the Universal Stock Printer, and his real contribution was subtler than a better machine: a unison mechanism that let every ticker on a line be synchronised, so they all printed the same thing at the same moment. A price is only worth having if everyone is looking at the same one.
The zipper
On the evening of 6 November the Motograph News Bulletin lit up around the fourth floor of the Times Tower — 380 feet of moving letters spelled out in 14,800 bulbs, readable blocks away. It was election night, and the first thing it ever said was that Herbert Hoover had beaten Al Smith. The ticker had left the office and become architecture, and a crowd stood in the street to read it.
Eight storeys of market
Nasdaq wrapped the base of 4 Times Square in a 14,000-square-foot cylindrical LED screen and switched it on in the last days of the century. It cost $37 million. A hundred and thirty years after Calahan's paper ribbon, the same information had grown to the size of a building — and still scrolled.
The crawl that never left
At 10:49 on the morning of 11 September, Fox News put a continuous line of text along the bottom of the screen. CNN and MSNBC had it up the same day. Crawls had existed before — for a hurricane, an election, a bulletin — but they had always been temporary, and their appearance meant something was wrong. This one never came down. Within a year the ticker was simply what cable news looked like.
And then they switched it off
Twenty years on, Fox News and MSNBC quietly retired their tickers; CNN kept its. The format did not fail. It just stopped being something a network needed to own — by then everyone had a screen of their own, and the question was no longer whether you could have a ticker, but who got to decide what ran across it.
Someone else always chose
Follow the thread and the same fact sits under every one of these. Calahan's ribbon carried what the exchange listed. The zipper carried what an editor at the Times decided was the headline. The crawl carried what the network wanted on screen beneath the anchor. The ticker has always been a very good way to receive the world — and it has never once been yours.
That is the part FeedsBar changes. It is the same object, on your own desktop, running the sources you picked. We publish curated sets to save you the setup, and you can switch them off, add a feed nobody else follows, and end up with a ticker that is not quite like anyone else's. The medium is a hundred and fifty years old. The editorial control is the new bit.