The Sound of History
Print
E-mail
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
Out of all of the celebrities and characters who visit the New York Stock Exchange, the real star is the Trading Floor Bell. Its distinctive ring opens and closes each day of trading and is the featured player on financial news programs.
That clang has been the same since 1903, when the Exchange took up residence at 18 Broad St. As the Exchange expanded, so did the number of bells. Today, four identical bells (each with a backup) are situated in four areas of the Trading Floor, and all are controlled from the podium.
In 1998 the Exchange decided to refurbish all eight bells. Mike McGuinness, a former technician and now a senior analyst at NYSE, who worked on maintaining the bells when he was a technician, recalls how the bells were manually wound every week. “It was like winding up a toy, tightening the coil,” McGuinness says. To refurbish the bells without losing their integrity, some special handiwork was required by Edwards Signaling & Security Systems, the company that originally manufactured the bells. The Plainville, Conn., company went as far as to track down a former employee, a mechanical engineer, who understood how the bells worked. The internal coil mechanisms were removed and electronic motors were installed, which meant no more manual winding was required.
To ensure that the bells maintain their unique characteristics, the motors, springs and hammers are custom made by Edwards, now a part of United Technologies Corp. (UTX), says Director of Trading Floor Operations Tony Monteleone, who is in charge of the bells.
As long as the bells were getting new inner workings, McGuinness says, he suggested to a co-worker that the manual mechanism be replaced by an electronic system that would make the bells ring at the right time automatically. “I thought I was going to lose my job,” he recalls now, laughing. “Installing an automatic system was out of the question; the tradition of ringing the Bell was held in high esteem. Ringing the original Bell — that’s an honor and a 100-year-old tradition.”
