A.M. Byers Steel Company 1920's

Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from the A.M. Byers Company printed in the 1920's. This historic document was printed by the Republic Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's founder. This item has the printed signatures of the company's President (L. F. Rains) and Treasurer (Frank G. Love) and is over 75 years old.






Certificate Vignette



A.M. Byers was incorporated in 1903 although the original business was founded in 1864 as Graff, Byers & Co. The company was a manufacturer of pig iron, and wrought iron pipe. Their property consisted of rolling mills, pipe mills and galvanizing works located in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and a blast furnace and rolling mills located in Girard Ohio know as the Girard Iron Company. In 1925, the company acquired the Orient Coal & Coke Company Company which was incorporated in Pennsylvania.

The company was merged into General Tire and Rubber Company in 1970. General Tire and Rubber Company changed its name to GenCorp in 1984. With more than 12,000 employees worldwide, GenCorp is a major technology-based manufacturing company headquartered in Sacramento, California. Its businesses are concentrated in three principal industries: aerospace and defense, pharmaceutical fine chemicals, and automotive.

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Eben M. Byers was born on 12 April 1880 and died on 30 March 1932. which at the time of his death was one of the world's largest steel companies. In 1928, the Pittsburgh industrialist and one-time U.S. amateur golf champion (1906) injured himself on a party train following a Harvard-Yale football game. At the recommendation of his doctor, he began drinking Radithor, and he continued to do so long after the injury healed - he averaged three bottles a day for two years. Byers stopped consuming Radithor in 1930 when his teeth started falling out and holes appeared in his skull. Perhaps more than anything else, his death in 1932 alerted the public, and much of the medical profession, of the harmful effects of "mild" radium therapy.