Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from the Electric Materials Co. This historic document was printed by the Columbian Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company logo with a hand holding lightning bolts. This is the first time we have had this certificate for sale.
Certificate Vignette The Electric Materials Company was founded in 1915 by the late Orris C. Hirtzel as a "Copper Works." The original buildings occupied 15,000 square feet on Washington Street in North East, Pennsylvania. There was an initial capital investment of $100,000 and original product lines included street railway repair parts, drop forgings, etc. Since that beginning in 1915, the Company has expanded both its product lines and plant facilities. Today the plant covers approximately 420,000 square feet and employs over 300 people working three shifts. 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 and realized nice appreciation in value over the past several years.