Ticker tape

The stock ticker was a printing telegraph that, from 1867, fed stock symbols and prices onto a narrow paper strip in near real time. Edward Calahan built the first for the New York exchange; Thomas Edison improved it in 1869 with his Universal Stock Printer, one of his early commercial successes. The name ticker came from the ticking sound of the type wheels striking the tape.

When spent tape was later thrown from office windows during parades, the phrase ticker-tape parade was born. The machines survived into the 1960s and 70s, when electronic quote displays took over — but the tape lived on as a metaphor for streaming real-time data.