- Let me extend a warm welcome to all readers of The American Philatelist: Monthly Journal of the American Philatelic Society
and members of The Austrian Collectors' Association of the Liechtenstein Philatelie.
I particularly look forward to hearing from any of you who have Herman Herst Ticker Tape envelopes from 1934 (timcrack@alum.mit.edu).
Let me take a moment to compare ticker tape collecting to postage stamp collecting.
Adhesive paper postage stamps were first used in 1840, 27 years before New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ticker tape was first used, in 1867.
Stock ticker machines started to be retired in the late 1960s, but they did not stop running completely until 1994.
So far, postage stamps have outlived the ticker's demise by roughly the same three decades that they predated its birth.
Unlike ticker tape, postage stamps were printed in advance of being used, then typically affixed to
an envelope or package, and then subsequently mailed to some recipient. So, their life
had multiple stages over some period of time: design, creation, affixion, and delivery. Each stamp is a mini work of art,
often framed in its own perforated border. Stamps cry out to be collected! If they were larger,
you could hang them on your wall. (In fact, I do have several framed stamps on my walls.)
In November 2022, I looked at eBay.com and saw over 11,000 "postage stamp" listings, ranging
from about $1 to about $7,000. An advertisement from Hipstamp.com in the July 2023
issue of The American Philatelist claims they have 7 million+ stamps from 1,200+ sellers. As a consequence,
anyone can amass an interesting and diverse collection of attractive stamps at prices to suit their budget.
Many stamps are common, some are rare, and some are exceedingly rare.
Stamp collections are as varied and interesting as the collectors themselves.
Unlike stamps, however, ticker tape was printed on the cheapest possible paper, immediately viewed, and then discarded.
It was stale and useless by day's end, and had little further use (except perhaps to be thrown during a
parade if it had not already been thrown in the trash). Although I estimated above that 100 million miles of ticker tape was printed
between 1867 and 1994, finding ticker tape nowadays is difficult. I look at eBay.com about once a week, but 99 times out
of 100 there is no genuine printed NYSE ticker tape for sale.
In terms of scarcity, genuine NYSE printed ticker tape is like an exceedingly rare stamp.
After 20+ years of collecting, I have managed to amass a collection consisting of exactly
one piece of NYSE ticker tape. Can you call it a collection if you have only one piece?
It took some time for me to realize that printed NYSE ticker tape is so rare that being a collector of it is a futile hobby.
So futile, in fact, that demand for ticker tape from the general public is negligibly low. Low demand means, in turn,
that you might buy a foot of unremarkable NYSE printed ticker tape for $20—if you can find it. In this regard,
unremarkable NYSE printed ticker tape is unlike an exceedingly rare stamp: it can be both exceedingly rare and inexpensive
because the demand is so low.
(There are exceptions, like the $5,000 ticker tape from the crash of 1929 mentioned above, but that is remarkable tape, not unremarkable tape.)
Given the futility, I gave up collecting ticker tape, and chose instead to collect ticker
tape images. Now I have a collection! A byproduct of my collection and my interest
is that I often end up helping the few ticker tape owners out there who do exist
(and who, like me, often also have amassed a one-piece collection).
Let me add that I find ticker tape fragments interesting because even the shortest snippet is a vignette
that tells a story about that day's trade. Oftentimes, that piece of tape was set aside for a reason. Maybe
it was an important day in financial history (e.g., the October 29, 1929 snippets),
an unusually busy day in the market (e.g., the March 9, 1961 snippet), or a personal visit to the NYSE (April 15, 1965 snippet).
Alternatively, maybe it was incorporated into something else (e.g., the pin/ash trays and jewelry box from 1967 and 1968), or
the ticker tape parade envelopes from the 1960s. I guess the same is true of stamped envelopes or cards that were mailed
to someone, though it's not necessarily true of unused stamps.
- Let us now turn to Herman Herst Jr., the famous stamp dealer/collector, author, etc. He was born
on March 15, 1909. So, he was only 25 years old when he fabricated and sold the envelopes shown below.
It was 1934 and he was working in the bond department of Lebenthal & Co.
As far as I can tell, Lebenthal still exists at the same address, 120 Broadway, NY,
just one block from the NYSE. Note also that 120 Broadway backs onto Nassau Street, where
Herst dealt stamps in the 1930s and 1940s. Herst died January 31, 1999, aged 89.
The commemorative philatelic covers displayed below have stock ticker tape pasted onto them. They
were constructed and then mailed as we see them on the afternoon of Monday October 29, 1934.
So, they are at least that old. They mark five years since Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.
I think that each item was made up by Herst personally (typed, ticker tape pasted, stamped with the company name, etc.)
and I believe that they were mailed personally by him at Wall Street Station Post Office near his office.
Given the different forms of address (typed, stamped, handwritten), I think Herst used stamped self-addressed envelopes
sent in by collectors. (Thank you to Olaf Rappe for this observation.)
Let me describe what the various stock ticker symbols represent on these pasted tape snippets. It is, however, somewhat of a moot point,
because they are almost certainly fabrications. In fact, these are the earliest fabrications I have seen.
Herman Herst is playing a prank on us from the grave. (I do wonder whether Herst was trying to create a new collectable genre,
with his prank ticker tape.) As far as I can tell, Herst's prank remained hidden for 88 years, from 1934 to 2022, as I will explain.
Note that Herst could use no more than about 10-12 characters to write a message, but he often used half that number.
It's difficult to say much in so few characters. So, his pranks are pranks in only two dimensions:
they are not what they purport to be (i.e., they are not the natural product of NYSE trading); and, they contain hidden messages.
The ticker symbols appearing: ECT is Electric Storage Battery Corp., YS is Youngstown Sheet and Tube Corp., WU is Western Union, TEL is Telautograph*,
CK is Collins and Aikman, BO is Baltimore and Ohio RR, ND is National Dairy Products Corp. (now under Kraft),
WA is Wabash RR, CE is Chicago and Eastern Illinois RR, BR is BF Goodrich. CO is the Chesapeake and Ohio RR.
To the best of my knowledge, however, the other symbols on these tapes (OLD, EGR, APH, EX, LS, FF, EE, AI, ASE) do not correspond to any actual stocks
trading in 1929 or 1934, though some of these symbols were used later by the NYSE.
*The Telautograph was
invented in 1888. It was the first machine that allowed a picture/signature/handwriting to be transmitted via electrical signals to a stationary sheet of paper. It was,
in essence, an early fax machine.
Daniel Schibley, an amateur philatelist in the U.S., showed me the WU TEL EGR APH envelope in October of 2022.
He pointed out that the last three symbols spell TELEGRAPH when combined, and he asked me about it.
Up to that point I had seen the ECT OLD WA YS cover (courtesy of Olaf Rappe in 2021) and the CK BO ND CO cover, and I had not noticed
the pattern or realized that Herst was playing a joke on us. For one full year prior, I had puzzled over the prints I had seen.
They showed phantom ticker symbols alongside ticker symbols that purported to be from October 28, 1929, as follows.
WU TELEGRAPH is Western Union Telegraph (note, however, that the Trans-Lux Directory mentioned
above lists Western Union simply as W: UEL–ZP).
I suspect that ECT OLD WA YS is PRO T [ECT OLD WAYS] or CO NN [ECT OLD WAYS].
I see now that CK BO ND CO is STO [CK BOND CO] T TON. There is also
CO EXCELS (where CO is for Chesapeake and Ohio RR, and the letter is addressed to Laverne Peake**),
and there are envelopes with snippets of COFFEE GRAIN & BASE METALS, each of which
is traded on futures markets:
coffee,
grain, and
base metals.
**At first, I thought Mr. Peake was a fantasy created as a joke by Herst (i.e., that the Chesapeake RR prompted
Herst to invent Mr. Peake). If Herst had mailed it to fake person, however, just to get it returned to him,
then I would expect it to be stamped as "return to sender," which it is not. U.S. census records do indicate
a man named Laverne Peake living in Phelps NY in 1940. According to the rear, Herst had this envelope in his hands 50 years later.
Was he signing it for a collector who brought it in to him? I suspect that Herst's prank envelopes were all triggered by Mr. Peake's request
for a commemorative envelope (with Herst noticing that he could use ticker tape to play with words using Peake's name).
Does any reader have a Herman Herst Jr prank ticker tape envelope from 1934 not pictured here? If so, please contact me:
timcrack@alum.mit.edu. I am happy to help decode it. Your snippet of ticker tape
might come from just before of just after one of the ones pictured here, and together they might help to explain each other.
- This web page is mostly about pinpointing dates on ticker tape. So, what date were Herst's tape
snippets produced? They must have been produced on or before the Post Office date stamp of October 29, 1934.
Given their uniformity of appearance, I am going to assume that these ticker tapes were all printed on the same day.
There is only one day before 1935 that CK and ND on the Hicks envelope could have traded at these
prices. It is Monday October 28, 1929, the day before Black Tuesday. The price range for ECT and YS also
admits October 28, 1929 (the only other candidate is March 20, 1929, seven months earlier).
However, neither WU nor TEL are near the prices given on the Eisenstein envelope during 1929 or 1934.
As far as I can tell, the other ticker symbols on these snippets of ticker tape are not genuine, and the order
in which they appear is certainly no coincidence. So, the tapes are not the natural outcome of any
NYSE stock trading process that I have ever seen; they are almost certainly a fabrication.
Note also that the Miller and Peake envelopes (and also the Mosher and Schauffler envelopes)
contain the same symbols and prices as each other. This is a case of one ticker machine being fed the same data twice. If it
were instead two ticker machines receiving the same market feed it is very unlikely that Herst
would have found matching pieces among the lengths of tape in the ticker's waste basket.
I first suspected that Herst used some sort of test circuit to print these tapes, using some actual stock
prices from October 28, 1929, but also using made-up symbols that helped him spell out words, as a prank.
However, a viewer sent me a fragment of tape as follows:
This undated TESTING MIDWEST STOCKS tape is most likely a pre-market test sent from the Mid-West exchange, in Chicago,
to the NYSE in mid-1955 (the woman who sent me this is the same woman whose grandparents visited the NYSE
in June 1955.) So, now I suspect that most of Herst's ticker tape was cut from pre-market tests sent by other exchanges.
(Note that the stock ticker symbols and prices and their order are identical to those in some of
the Herst images from 1934.) It is still possible, however, that the Peake/Chesapeake tape might be a complete fabrication by Herst himself.
Aside: Note that the tape fragment above has diagonal cuts in it, and, in fact, most cut ticker tape you see
has been cut on a 45-degree angle. These cuts were most likely made using a mahogany/chrome/Bakelite tape cutter.
It is about 6 to 8 inches square, and looks like a small guillotine, as in the following image. You lift the little
Bakelite handle and the blade is exposed for slicing. This one was for sale on eBay in August 2023; I have seen
others for sale quite regularly.
These price are not closing prices from October 28, 1929. So, either he just chose random prices between the
historical high and low of that day, but after the fact in 1934, or he printed them during the day on
October 28, 1929 and kept them for five years.
I have concluded that these ticker tapes were most likely printed in 1934, because although Herst was
originally from New York, he was still a university student in Oregon in 1929. He completed
a bachelor's (international law) at Reed College and a master's (journalism) at Univ. of Oregon.
He did not return to New York until 1932. He worked, in quick succession, first at the NYT then the Star Ledger in NJ,
before jumping to the Bond Department at Lebenthal & Co. in 1932. (Thank you to Daniel Schibley for
this 1932 observation.) It seems unlikely that Herst had operator access to not only a stock ticker but some sort of
test circuit for printing whatever he wanted until he was at Lebenthal, three years after the 1929 crash.
He may have printed them out during a slow Saturday session, on Saturday October 27, 1934, or during his lunch break on
Monday October 29, 1934 (activity tends to slow on Wall Street at lunch time), before mailing them on
the Monday afternoon. Also, the self-addressed envelopes were likely recent arrivals on his desk, and
the Peake-Chesapeake connection could not have been anticipated five years in advance. Thus suggesting a
similarly recent fabrication.
I am sure that many people kept copies of the WSJ listing prices from October 28, 1929, which show the Open, High, Low
and Last prices (indeed, I am looking at online copies of that day's WSJ, NYT and Barron's as I write this).
Such a copy was likely consulted by Herst in October 1934 to construct these tapes. He likely figured that
to fool people, he'd need the genuine ticker symbols to match up with genuine prices, but
he could use any price he wished for the phantom symbols.
Herst was the sort of person who would jump on an opportunity. For example, I read a
story of him mailing letters to fabricated addresses in Tokyo Japan as soon as he heard about the Pearl Harbor bombing,
and again to Berlin Germany when war was declared on Germany, just so that he could get interestingly franked envelopes when they were
subsequently returned to him as undeliverable. So, he is definitely someone who would jump on the five-year anniversary of the
"crash of 1929" to market these items. Note also that someone (Herst?) has written in pencil on the Hicks envelope (BO ND) tape
that it is from October 29, 1934. So, he may have printed them in the morning, using historical prices,
and mailed them in the afternoon.
Note that the additional fabricated ticker symbols would not draw much
attention for four reasons: First, the purchasers were likely stamp collectors, and not stock market
experts who would notice the fabrication. Second, like today, there were hundreds of NYSE stocks that the lay person has never heard
of. So, these extra symbols would be assumed by the buyer to be among those names (just look at the names in the WSJ today,
or those in the Trans-Lux Directory, above). Third, unlike today, ticker symbols were
not commonly used by lay persons in the 1920s and 1930s. Ticker symbols were not even reported in the WSJ, NYT, or Barron's at the time.
Instead, these newspapers printed only abbreviated company names alongside prices. Finally, ticker symbols were not necessarily
unique in the 1920s and 1930s. That is, different exchanges used slightly different symbols for the same stock.
The bottom line is that fabricated symbols would not draw attention to themselves in Herst's context.
For completeness, note that I see that the NY City postage was only two pennies, whereas the other letters required three pennies.
Note also that Herst's tape is the narrow 3/4"-wide tape as compared with the 1"-wide
tape seen in most of the envelopes below from the late 1960s.
Finally, before looking at Herst's envelopes, note that the return address on Herst's envelopes is 200 West 70th Street, on the Upper West Side.
That apartment building was built in 1926 and is shown below. It is coming up to 100 years old, but must
have been near new when Herst moved in. It is about five and a half miles north of the NYSE (and Herst's office) as the crow flies.
- PROT[ECT OLD WAYS] or CONN[ECT OLD WAYS] (Does anyone have a better interpretation/suggestion, based perhaps on ECT being a battery company? Was he
saying that storage batteries were an old way of getting electricity at that time?). Image belongs to Olaf Rappe.
- Rear of above envelope. Note that it was not sealed. The gum is unused. With no contents, there was no reason to seal it. The flap was
tucked inside, and Herst's stamp applied (which would have been obscured if sealed). Also, the envelope itself was
the important thing here, rather than any contents. So, sealing it would invite opening, which would damage it. Images belong to Olaf Rappe.
- [WU TELEGRAPH], where WU is Western Union. Image belongs to Daniel Schibley.
- [...APH CO EXCELS] Continues from the previous one, where CO is Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. He is saying that
this railway company excels! I suspect it is their stock that excels (financial stock that is, not rolling stock).
Image belongs to Walter Anderson.
- [CO EXCELS], where CO is Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; note it is addressed to Peake, who appears in census records.
The rear of envelope shows that unlike the Bleyer envelope, this one has been sealed and slit open. Perhaps it originally had
contents for Mr. Peake; maybe the prank was revealed to him.
- STO[CK BOND CO]TTON. With rear. Image belongs to Walter Anderson.
- BO[ND COTTON] Continues from the previous. With rear. Image belongs to Walter Anderson.
- [COTTON]C Continues from and overlaps with the previous. With rear. This may be COTTON COFFEE. Image belongs to Walter Anderson.
- Too faded to read; I have a request out to the owner. I suggested he shine UV light on it to read the old ink
(but so far I have not gotten a response to my email). Walter Anderson pointed out to me that Steven J. Rod made
this YouTube video in 2021 in which,
at around the 6:30 to 7:00 mark, he discusses these envelopes and shows the Hicks envelope, above.
Mr. Rod says that "Pat" Herst (his nickname) made these envelopes while still a "runner" for Lebenthal, before entering the stamp
business in 1935. (A runner is a junior employee who runs from place to place for others, often carrying
orders or trade confirmations.) Mr. Rod says that Herst made 10 of these envelopes. If there are exactly 10 of these, then I am
going to claim that this faded one must say ST O CK or STO CK on it, because I have images for 10 envelopes here
and I see the tail end of STOCK on the Hicks envelope. So, STOCK must be on one of them, but that leaves only this one.
- C[OFFEE GRAI]N...
- ...GR[AIN & BASE] METALS, continues from previous.
Coffee,
grain, and
base metals (i.e., a metal,
like copper, that is not a precious metal) are three products traded on the U.S. futures markets!
