Tangential, but one thing I recently learned about telegraphy was that it was one of the final tools, for establishing an accurate global map. Taking your longitude requires knowing what time it is. An hour's error is 15 degrees of rotation or more than a thousand kilometres. Just one second error is several hundred metres.<p>Before the telegraph there was no standard time, not as we use it today, where it's the same second in New York and London. And synchronizing clocks used to be very difficult. In the 1850s, just before the cable, the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, would routinely ship chronometers between London and Boston every few weeks, to keep the American time standard synced with London, so that American ships could use the London-centric longitude definitions. And of course, this was back when clocks weren't terribly accurate, and a quality chronometer might lose or gain a few seconds a month.<p>In the 1840s, American surveyors started using long-distance telegraph links to make longitude measurements in different locations at the same time. The distance between the coasts was established within a few hundred metres by the late 19th century.<p>Some more reading: <a href="https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S" rel="nofollow">https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S</a> "The telegraphic longitude net of the United State and its connection with that of Europe, as developed by the Coast and Geodetic Survey between 1866 and 1896"
Fast forward to today, high-frequency trading shops in Europe are investing in software-defined radio and FPGA technology to shave off microseconds in trade execution. This quest for speed mirrors the impact of the original cable. The core takeaway is simple: advancements in communication technology can drastically improve market efficiency and connectivity, transforming local markets into global ones almost overnight.
People at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange back in colonial America had a system where when a ship landed in NYC it would have info about ships coming one or more days later to Philadelphia and they would semaphore the info over to high points in NJ and on down though to Philadelphia. The info would get from NYC to the exchange in 5 to 10 minutes, and insiders were able to trade at advantage with that info.
fun fact<p>> The term cable is a slang term used by foreign exchange traders to refer to the exchange rate between the pound sterling and US dollar. The term originated in the mid-19th century, when the exchange rate between the US dollar and sterling began to be transmitted across the Atlantic by a submarine communications cable.<p>-- wiki
Tax each transaction, that'd put a damper on high-speed trading. If you want to see the arguments for eliminating HFT, here's the central issue, there are others:<p>> "Former economists for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) studied HFT firms over a two-year period and found that revenue was concentrated among a handful of companies in a winner-takes-all market structure. "<p><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/has-high-frequency-trading-ruined-the-stock-market-for-the-rest-of-us.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/has-high-fr...</a>