Summary of Proposal – Contesting the Ticker (Greg Elmer, P.I.)

In March of 1887, Frank Jones, a carpenter living in the east end of London, received a letter from the Exchange Telegraph company (Extel) -- henceforth his subscription and consequently access to the London Stock Exchange (LSE) ticker would be discontinued.
This letter, only one of hundreds sent by Extel (upon orders from the LSE), would in turn lead to many more letters and heated exchanges between and among Extel executives, committee members of the LSE, and ticker service subscribers. The telegraph’s early ‘democratization’ of financial investing had proven too fast and too unpredictable for Britain’s financial and economic elite. Financial news and information would need regulation and governing.

Drawing upon archival documentation of the Extel company and the London stock exchange at the London Metropolitan Archive, this project narrativizes this largely untold history, one that would set the terms for both the expansion of investing and the circulation and dissemination of financial information and news. This is also a story about the impact of the telegraph, a technology that has long served as an archetypal case study in media and communication studies, one of the pivotal disruptive communication technologies that forever changed societies, economies, and cultures. Yet this proposal’s historical goals turn the tables on the likes of Innis, McLuhan and Carey who offered broad economic and cultural analyses of the telegraph’s impact. In so doing, this study will turn to the telegraph’s financial receiver, it’s ticker machine and tape that communicated in a timely fashion for the first time, the value of highly traded company stocks. What role would its regulation play in the bourgeoning investor marketplace, the development of financial professions, and the early financial wire service? What justifications did the LSE provide to curtail the use and dissemination of financial information and news? And how did Extel rework its service to largely maintain the hegemony and monopoly of the London Stock Exchange?

Through a hybrid history writing method that mixes personal narratives, scene setting (much like that used to introduce the proposal above), and the steps involved in following controversies (as developed by Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory scholars), the project will write a story of information communication, management and control from the thousands of letters, minutes, policy documents, news reports, and legal documents archived in the Extel and LSE archives at the London Metropolitan Archives. But why London, why the LSE? The corporate rules of investing, filing, and news dissemination developed in Britain did not stay in Britain – rather they were exported to countries around the globe, including Canada. Spurred on by market forces that propel us into the future to consider our prospects, this project proposes to return to the origins of financial investing and news, to ground our contemporary debates over economic and financial policies.

Publications

TBA

Film