The Unbelievable Safe Combine of 1899 That Almost Happened

[Doug MacQueen]

Several years ago at the Cincinnati Historical Society I ran across a couple 1899 newspaper articles regarding a proposal to combine 13 safe companies. I had forgotten about it until recently when I found a short N.Y. Times clip on the net. It was April 23, 1899 and was listed as coming from Cleveland. This combine was to include Mosler, MacNeale & Urban and Herring-Hall-Marvin all of Hamilton ,OH, Diebold (Canton,OH), York Safe, Cary (Buffalo), Detroit Safe, National Safe of Cleveland, Barnes Safe of Pittsburg, Cincinnati Safe, Damon Safe of Boston and a couple I can't remember offhand. Obviously it never happened and I don't know why, but apparently all or most were in agreement. It had something to do with excessive competition in the market place. Unbelievable.

[Tom Gordon]

100 years later and most of the locks sold in Britain are made by two conglomerates....
For all those companies to (almost) agree oin 1899. business must have been truly dire-was there competition from somewhere else or were they just wanting a monopoly?

[Doug MacQueen]

As I remember pricing was the problem and it was definitely not from outside influences as at that time virtually no safes were imported into the U.S. I do know that the newly formed company of Herring-Hall-Marvin was not doing well at all and was actually under the management of Mosler for several years. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act dealing with monopolies was already in effect so it is hard to believe these companies could even contemplate a combine of this size. There were several other smaller companies here that were not included but that list represented by far the vast majority of heavy hitters. Victor was another that was to be included in the combine. Doug

[NatSafeMatt]

"A second safe trust formed"..."New York Times Feb. 5th, 1893"? is that the artical you saw? I will take a picture of what i have and post it. Also sais..."William G. Norris of Norris & Co. of Chicago, representing the National safe and lock co. , which is in the new trust, said: "while the factories are not turned over to the new company yet, the deal will go through inside of thirty days. the combination will boost the prices on safes, which competition has lowered to a suffering extentin the last few years. the firms in the combination have now seven representatives and as many stores in Chicago, the majority of which will be obolished after the trust papers are signed..."

[NatSafeMatt]

here are those pictures...

[Doug MacQueen]

Sure looks like it as it contains all of the same companies, with exception of a few new ones added, especially Herring- Hall -Marvin. This story gets even more interesting seeing this attempt was going on from 1893 to 1899, combined with the fact that Diebold and Mosler eventually ended up absorbing most of the others, but over a much longer time period. Diebold is the now the only remaining old safe maker from that time.

---------- Post added at 07:57 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:50 AM ----------

Matt can you post the whole picture of that ornate chest drawing?

[Dean Nickel]

Several things to keep in mind about that time. They didn't have mail service that was near as fast as today. Today we can email or chat online. Things took longer and were thought out more being it took time to do something. So the fact that 6-7 years transpired is not that big of a deal. I bet they had to deal with the owners egos in this too.

---------- Post added at 09:37 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:32 AM ----------

Also can you post that article's first 2/3s in the same what you did the last part? Make it a bit easier to read.

[Dean Nickel]

Never mind. Found them and a few more.

[Dean Nickel]

And a few more

[Dean Nickel]

From what I was able to find that there were really two sets of mergers going on. The first against pricing and the second to counter the first merger. I could be wrong but that is the general idea I got from the news articles.