Bell Canada

Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from the Bell Canada dated 1986. This historic document was printed by the British American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a globe between an allegorical man and woman, with an underprint of the Famous Bell Logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President ( James Carden Thackray ) and Secretary and is over 16 years old.












Certificate Vignette

In the Winter of 1880, former sea captain, Charles Fleetford Sise, arrives in Montreal armed with a mandate by the American owners of the Bell telephone patents to organize a Canadian company on a national basis and to harmonize the conflicting telephone interests here. He was key to the establishment and development of the telephone in Canada and is considered the founder of The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, incorporated by Federal charter on April 29, 1880. Mr. Sise is also credited with the formulation of the Company's first mission statement : "...this Company...has endeavoured to give the public the best service at the lowest rate compatible with the interests of its shareholders".

Bell Canada is Canada's national leader for communications in the Internet world, provides connectivity to residential and business customers through wired and wireless voice and data communications, high speed and wireless Internet access, IP-broadband services, e-business solutions, local and long distance phone and directory services. Bell Canada is owned by BCE Inc of Montreal.

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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 and realized nice appreciation in value over the past several years.