They Were Trading in the Dark: The Lost Hours of 1929

On October 24th, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange ticker ran four hours behind the market. It was still printing after seven that evening. For those hours, nobody on the trading floor — and nobody in the country — knew what anything was worth. Not the investors. Not the bankers. Not the newspapers reporting on it. This is the story of the 1929 stock market crash told through the machine that was supposed to keep everyone informed, and couldn't. Black Thursday, Black Tuesday, and the two days the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors because the men running the ticker machines had gone seventy-two hours without sleep. Every fact in this video comes from newspapers printed that week. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Only Machine That Told You What You Were Worth 0:26 Black Thursday: The Day the Tape Fell Behind 1:05 Still Printing After Seven 1:24 The Bankers of 23 Wall Street 2:11 Black Tuesday: Sixteen Million Shares 2:47 The Day They Closed the Exchange 3:32 The White Knight of Wall Street 4:02 Six Front Pages, One Missing Word 4:44 It Just Tells You Faster SOURCES Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) — October 24, 25, 28, 29, 30 and 31, 1929 Library of Congress, Chronicling America https://www.loc.gov/collections/chron... "Oct. 29 dies irae" — James N. Rosenberg, 1929 Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division https://www.loc.gov/item/96516489/ Western Union Telegraph Stock Ticker Smithsonian National Museum of American History https://americanhistory.si.edu/collec... Britannica — Black Thursday https://www.britannica.com/event/Blac... Science Museum — Telegraphy and the Wall Street Crash https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/obje... HistoryLink — Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929 https://www.historylink.org/File/1430 Gilder Lehrman Institute — Stock Market Crash, 1929 https://www.gilderlehrman.org/news/da... HistoryNet — The Rise and Fall of Richard Whitney https://historynet.com/wall-street-em... All archival images are in the public domain or carry no known restrictions on publication. Sound effects licensed CC0. The Hidden Exchange — financial and economic history, from the primary sources up.