Saturday, April 3, 2010

My current web search

The panic of 1907 and telephone technology. I am working the thesis that telephone, probably the manual switchboard, made events on the stock exchange much more rapid and farther known. The stock exchange was an avid user of banks of telegraphs. Deployment of telephone exchanges went rather rapidly.

By 1904 there were over three million phones in the US[3], still connected by manual switchboard exchanges. The concentration was around Mew York, Boston and Chicago. the telephone terminated at the site of the person called, unlike the telegraph which required a runner; and telephone was two way. Contracts could be finalized within minutes between a stock trader and the exchange agent.

So, by 1907, the size of the high speed stock trading market expanded, parabolically, for a few years. In terms of information theory, the precision of the market had probably doubled, both the distribution of traders and the market accuracy had increased in ranks, or bit of precision. The market in 1907 discovered that the economy had become more accurate as well, a general leap forward in productivity.

The course of these things is that the new found productivity lets the economy relax back to a more normal rank, one that matches the constant uncertainty value. One might say that a productivity leap excites for a while, then we all return to our standard proportion of leisure, at a higher standard of living.

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