Raytheon Manufacturing Company

Beautifully engraved SCARCE SPECIMEN certificate from the Raytheon Manufacturing Company. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company in the 1940's and has an ornate border around it. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President ( Laurence K. Marshall ).

Laurence K. Marshall was a founder of Raytheon and served as the first chairman of the Raytheon board of directors from 1948-1950. He served as president of Raytheon Company from 1928 until 1948. In 1922, Mr.Marshall with Vannevar Bush and Charles G. Smith founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge,Mass. The company’s name was changed to Raytheon in 1925.

In 1922, Laurence K. Marshall and Vannevar Bush joined forces with Charles G. Smith who had developed a prototype for a home refrigerator using artificial coolants. Together, the young entrepreneurs founded the American Appliance Company with dreams of prosperity. Unfortunately, the product was a bust and never left the laboratory. Facing failure, Marshall and Bush suggested revisiting an earlier idea of Smith's: a new kind of gaseous tube that enabled radios to operate on electricity, rather than batteries, by plugging them into a wall socket. This gaseous rectifier was perfected in 1925, and marketed under the brand name Raytheon ' meaning a beam of light (rai) from the gods (theon). Also that year, the company officially became the Raytheon Manufacturing Company due to another's claim on the original name.

Since the 1920s, the company has diversified and expanded its operations into the defense sector. Strategic acquisitions and mergers also helped strengthen Raytheon's innovative capabilities, and added to its legacy of technological advancements. Among these were the first commercial microwave oven (Amana Radarange); miniature tubes for hearing aids; the first electronic depth sounder (Fathometer); mass production of magnetron tubes; early shipboard radar; the first missile guidance system (Lark) that could hit a flying target; a space communications system for Apollo XI; mobile radio telephones; the first combat-proven air defense missile system; and the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar.

Today, the Raytheon Company is a global technology leader that operates in three core business segments: defense and commercial electronics; business aviation and special mission aircraft; and engineering and construction. The corporation is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts; employs more than 100,000 employees worldwide; and achieved $20 billion in revenues.

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About Specimen Certificates

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.