Product Details
CompanyMergenthaler Linotype Company Certificate TypeCapital Stock Date IssuedFebruary 4, 1896CanceledYesPrinterHomer Lee Bank Note CompanySignaturesHand signedApproximate Size11" (w) by 7 1/4" (h)ImagesShow the exact certificate you will receiveGuaranteed AuthenticYesAdditional DetailsIssued to and signed on verso by Darius Ogden Mills
Historical Context
The invention of the first working Linotype was a long, arduous and intricate process that involved many players and the creation of a long succession of companies.
In 1877, the National Printing Company was organized under the laws of the District of Columbia and Lewis Clephane, the brother of James O. Clephane, was elected president. After the first successful trial of the Linotype in October, 1885, the Mergenthaler Printing Company was established to raise fresh capital from the shareholders of the National Printing Company. Finally, The Mergenthaler Linotype Company was formed in New York in 1895. Philip Tell Dodge served as its first president until 1928 when his son Norman Dodge replaced him. The Mergenthaler Linotype Company of New York, the organization's newest iteration, was launched with $5,000,000 capital (in 1895 dollars), and $10,000,000 (in 1895 dollars) in stock holdings across 333 investors.
In 1889 The Linotype Company, a British offshoot of the firm, was formed by Joseph Lawrence, publisher of The Railway Magazine. In 1899, a new factory in Broadheath, Altrincham was opened. In 1903, the British company merged with Machinery Trust to form Linotype & Machinery Ltd.
Mergenthaler Linotype dominated the printing industry through the twentieth century. The machines were so well designed, major parts remained virtually unchanged for nearly 100 years. A particularly notable success was Linotype's Legibility Group of typefaces, used by most of the world's (Latin-alphabet) newspapers for much of the twentieth century. The ruggedness of the Linotype system, which cast lines as solid bars of type, aided this dominance.
Linotype Company was merged with Mergenthaler acquisition K. S. Paul to form Linotype-Paul Ltd which developed a range of Linotron phototypesetters using K. S. Paul's cathode ray tube technology.
The company, as so many in the printing industry, endured a complex post-war history, during which printing technology went through two revolutions — first moving to phototypesetting, then to digital.
During the 1950s, the Davidson Corporation, which manufactured a series of small offset presses, was a subsidiary of Linotype. This was later sold to American Type Founders and operated under the name ATF-Davidson.
Through a series of mergers and reorganizations, the business of Mergenthaler Linotype Company ultimately vested in Linotype-Hell AG, a German company. In April 1997, Linotype-Hell AG was acquired by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. The following month certain divisions of Linotype-Hell AG were spun off into new companies, one of which was Linotype Library GmbH with headquarters at Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. This new company was responsible solely for the acquisition, creation and distribution of digital fonts and related software. This spin-off effectively divorced the company's font software business from the older typesetting business which was retained by Heidelberg. In 2005, Linotype Library GmbH shortened its name to Linotype GmbH, and in 2007, Linotype GmbH was acquired by Monotype Imaging Holdings, Inc., the parent of Monotype Imaging, Inc. and others.
Darius Ogden Mills
Darius Ogden Mills was born in North Salem, in Westchester County, New York, the fifth son of Hannah Ogden (1791–1850) and James Mills (1788–1841), a supervisor, postmaster and justice of the peace for the town of North Salem. His maternal grandfather was William Ogden (1767–1815), who was from Dutchess County and a member of the prominent Ogden family of New York and New Jersey. He was educated at North Salem Academy and Mt. Pleasant Academy.
Career
Shortly after his father's death in 1841, he began working as a clerk in a small general store in New York City at the age of 15 At age 21, he moved to Buffalo, New York, at the invitation of his cousin, Elihu J. Townsend (the son of Malinda Ogden Townsend, his mother's sister), and became the cashier of the Merchants' Bank of Erie County, and later a one third owner.
In December 1848, he took an exploratory trip to California, through the Isthmus of Panama, where he joined the California Gold Rush, following two of his brothers, James and Edgar Mills. By November 1849, he had made $40,000 and decided to make California his permanent home. Therefore, in 1850, he returned to Buffalo where he sold his interest in the Bank and returned to Sacramento, where he founded his own bank, the "Gold Bank of D. O. Mills & Co." This was helped significantly by a cousin from the English branch of the Mills family, Charles Mills, 1st Baron Hillingdon, who ran the Glyn, Mills & Co. bank in London. He never invested in gold mining or silver mining directly, as he considered mining to be too speculative. He rather started ancillary businesses that supported the mining industry, such as banks and railroads. He was a part owner of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, which was the only link from the Comstock Lode to the Central Pacific Railroad. The major shareholder in the railroad was William Sharon, whom William Ralston had sent to Virginia City as representative of the Bank of California.
In 1864, with other investors, he founded the Bank of California, which grew large in the 1860s and 1870s, but collapsed due to financial irregularities involving its chief cashier, William Chapman Ralston. Mills used his personal fortune to revive the bank, along with Sharon, and attract new investment, and within three years, the bank was again strong.
Later life
In 1880, two years after resigning from his second term as the president of the Bank of California, Mills returned to New York, where he participated in the development of a number of buildings in Manhattan, including 160 Bleecker Street, or "Mills House No. 1". He also invested in the Niagara Falls Power Company, one of the first large power companies organized in the United States. His devotion to philanthropy involved sitting on the boards of a number of charitable and cultural institutions. He was a trustee of the Carnegie Institution from 1902 to 1909.
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