The Teleregister board was an electrically controlled quotation board that displayed changing stock and commodity prices in brokerage offices. Instead of having an attendant copy figures onto a blackboard, a central service transmitted updates to mechanical number indicators. Customers could watch a selection of securities together, with prices remaining visible until they changed.
Its importance was practical: market information became easier to consult. A ticker delivered a sequence of reports; the Teleregister arranged selected information into a standing display. That distinction helps explain both its appeal and its restrictions.
When Did the Teleregister Board Appear?
The Teleregister was operating in a New York brokerage office by 1929. Robert Daine developed the device, with Western Union holding a majority interest in the company. An early installation at Sutro & Company on Forty-fourth Street received updates from an operator at 480 Canal Street. It replaced the work of three employees who had chalked up quotations, a change documented in The New Yorker’s contemporary report on Daine’s invention.
The problem was not simply getting prices into an office. It was turning an arriving stream of information into something a roomful of people could use. Printing a price and making that price readily visible were different jobs.
A stock ticker machine provided a paper record that readers followed in sequence. The board answered a different question: what was the latest displayed figure for the stock someone wanted to check? Rather than searching through earlier reports, a customer could look at its assigned position.
How the Teleregister Board Worked
The service combined human data entry, communications lines and mechanical display equipment. In the operation documented in 1936, staff at a central New York station read incoming ticker reports and typed price changes into transmitting equipment. Trunk lines carried the updates to other cities, where connections branched out to individual boards. This arrangement appears in the April 1936 Electronics account of stock exchange communications.
Automation therefore removed repeated posting work at the receiving offices; it did not remove every human step. One centrally entered update could serve multiple locations. The attractive idea was to perform the transcription once rather than repeat it beside every customers’ room.
Electrical Signals, Moving Numbers
The display was electromechanical, not a television screen. Electrical impulses selected the relevant indicator group and operated mechanisms that moved numbered dials into position. The numbers were physical characters, exposed through openings in the board.
A Teleregister-assigned design included separate indicators for whole numbers and fractions, grouped into opening, high, low and last prices. Its circuits selected both the security and the price category before changing the display. The 1932 electrical indicating system patent records this arrangement, including electromagnets, ratchets and removable indicator assemblies.
That distinction matters when identifying the equipment. A wall covered in changing figures might look electronic in a photograph, but its visible output could still depend on moving mechanical parts.
What Information Did the Board Show?
Teleregister boards did not all carry the same selection of securities. Brokers chose which stocks appeared. The company’s 1956 brochure preserved by the Computer History Museum describes stock and commodity coverage and five price fields. Its photographed board also includes market averages, transaction totals and a ticker-delay indicator.
| Display field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Previous close | The preceding session’s closing price |
| Open | The current session’s opening price |
| High | The highest reported price for the session so far |
| Low | The lowest reported price for the session so far |
| Last | The most recent sale price received and posted |
These fields made comparison easier without requiring a chart. A reader could compare the last price with the previous close, then judge where it stood within the day’s range. But a last sale remained a report of a completed transaction, not a promise that another order would receive that price.
Reading the Board in Practice
Consider an illustrative stock with a previous close of 50, an opening price of 50½, a high of 52, a low of 49¾ and a last price of 51¼. Those figures show that the last reported trade was above the previous close but below the session’s high.
They do not show the sequence of every intervening trade. The stock might have reached its high early and fallen, or recovered after touching its low. The same five figures could describe quite different paths through the session. A summary display was useful, but it was not a complete trading record.
The last price also needed to be read with its age in mind. A figure that had not changed might reflect no new transaction, or an update that had not yet arrived. “Still on the board” and “available to trade now” were not interchangeable statements.
A Shared Display, Not a Personal Terminal
By 1955, Teleregister installations included wallboards measuring from twelve to sixty feet across. Boards were leased monthly, and subscribers selected the information displayed. The service still used central operators to enter quotations from selected ticker reports, as documented in The New Yorker’s 1955 account of the Teleregister operation.
The shared format created a straightforward compromise. Everyone could consult the same display, but the broker’s selection determined what everyone could see. A customer interested in an unlisted security needed another route to its price. More wall space could add coverage; it could not make the board an unrestricted enquiry service.
This provides a useful contrast with the individual quotation lookup approach covered in our Quotron I article. The distinction is between watching a prepared selection and requesting information about a chosen security.
The Teleregister board’s historical value lies in that prepared selection. It made changing market figures persistent, organized and visible to a group. It did not execute trades or eliminate reporting delays. It improved the act of reading the market—a narrower achievement than automating an exchange, but a substantial change to the brokerage office.