Atlas Powder Company Specimen Proof - Delaware 1913

Beautiful engraved RARE Specimen Proof $ 1000, 6%, 10 Year Income Gold Bond Certificate from the Atlas Powder Company dated in 1913. Printed on off white paper with purple ""Cancelled"" hand stamps and ""Destroyed"" in orange on top refering to the plate destruction. This historic document has a vignette of a of Atlas holding exploding box on back. Republic BNC. VG with wrinkles, toning and light stains. This RARE and Unique item is over 94 years old.


Certificate Vignette

Laflin & Rand Powder Company collaborated with rival DuPont in 1882 annd formed Hercules Powder. In 1902 DuPont purchased Laflin & Rand, operating it as a subsidiary. In 1912, a successful Federal antitrust suit against DuPont for its prior ""Powder Trust"" activities forced the company to dissolve Laflin & Rand and divest a portion of its explosives business into two newly created companies, the Hercules and Atlas Powder Companies.

In 1907, DuPont became the target of an anti-trust suit, the first of many, which discouraged its practice of growth through the acquisition of its competition. In 1913 DuPont was broken up into the Hercules Powder Company, the Atlas Powder Company, and the du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. Hercules and Atlas were to compete with DuPont in dynamite and black powder; DuPont managed to hold on as the sole provider of smokeless powder to the US military.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.