Hibbard Rodman Ely or Manganese Steel Safe Co. of New York

Doug MacQueen

As far as I can tell so far H-R-E was in business from about 1898 to 1903 or 04 when the company underwent a name change to the Manganese Steel Safe Co. of New York. Funny in that it remained a corporation of New Jersey. There may be more to the change or it may have only been for marketing purposes. Hibbard was definitely still involved but Sumner Ely did start Ely Norris not long after that though. Manganese Steel Safe was later bought out by Taylor Iron and Steel Co. (TISCO) about 1909. TISCO was the maker of the HRE castings and as far I as know the Manganese Steel Safe castings. I am including two 1901 Hibbard vault door patents. Doug See “ebay round vault door question” in the Valuation section

Doug MacQueen

To the question of security which was posed by 2buy1, it is, after all a bank vault door. Hibbard went through considerable work to ensure that the door would be highly resistant to nitro attacks. And at the time manganese steel was virtually drill resistant. In the info that Wylk found on the Scranton vault mention was made about being “Mob” proof. I have seen this mentioned a couple of other times and was trying to imagine how a large angry group throwing stones and beating on the door with sticks would be of any consequence. It turns out that reference, at least in some cases, was to the possibilty of a cannon attack. Doug

2buy1

Thanks Doug. Have you ever seen the oval version actually installed?

Doug MacQueen

Unfortunately no I haven’t. The two round doors were found in Pittsburgh, which is not too surprising in that Hibbard had a steel processing patent, listing him as a resident there, prior to his HRE patents. It is certainly a distinctive door. Doug

Jack Sullivan

Doug MacQueen wrote
As far as I can tell so far H-R-E was in business from about 1898 to 1903 or 04 when the company underwent a name change to the Manganese Steel Safe Co. of New York. Funny in that it remained a corporation of New Jersey. There may be more to the change or it may have only been for marketing purposes. Hibbard was definitely still involved but Sumner Ely did start Ely Norris not long after that though. Manganese Steel Safe was later bought out by Taylor Iron and Steel Co. (TISCO) about 1909. TISCO was the maker of the HRE castings and as far I as know the Manganese Steel Safe castings. I am including two 1901 Hibbard vault door patents. Doug See “ebay round vault door question” in the Valuation section

I have 16 Hibbard patents in my files. In 1895 he lived & worked near me in High Bridge, NJ, the home of the Taylor Iron & Steel Co. His H-R-E patents were filed from 1898 to 1902. The round vault door figured in US708041 to H-R-E looks very similar to that in the eBay photo. Hibbard’s Manganese Steel patents were filed in 1903 & include 3 round vault door designs. My latest patent to him was filed in 1906 & was not assigned to anyone besides himself.

Hibbard lived in Plainfield, NJ after leaving Taylor. I would imagine the fact that H-R-E was registered as a NJ firm was simply the result of his attorney also living in NJ.

Jack

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Doug MacQueen

Hi Jack If you do a search on here for Hibbard Rodman Ely you will find more postings. At this point I have about 25 HRE patents and a few NYM patents. One of the more interesting things about the manganese cannonballs was how the doors were cast leaving the bolt hole areas to be filled later with a lower temperature and machinable metal. These filled areas are quite noticeable and gives good evidence that manganese was not machinable at that time. Also it seems all or most of the officers of both companies lived in Plainfield or High Bridge so I suspect the New York name was purely for advertising purposes. TISCO did make most of the manganese cannonball castings for several other manufacturers. The only one that I am sure of that wasn’t was Ely Norris. They were cast by what later became the Bethlehem Steel Corp. Glad you found the forum. Doug

Jack Sullivan

Doug MacQueen wrote
Hi Jack If you do a search on here for Hibbard Rodman Ely you will find more postings. At this point I have about 25 HRE patents and a few NYM patents. One of the more interesting things about the manganese cannonballs was how the doors were cast leaving the bolt hole areas to be filled later with a lower temperature and machinable metal. These filled areas are quite noticeable and gives good evidence that manganese was not machinable at that time. Also it seems all or most of the officers of both companies lived in Plainfield or High Bridge so I suspect the New York name was purely for advertising purposes. TISCO did make most of the manganese cannonball castings for several other manufacturers. The only one that I am sure of that wasn’t was Ely Norris. They were cast by what later became the Bethlehem Steel Corp. Glad you found the forum. Doug

Hi Doug & thanks for the welcome!

Manganese safe construction was a very novel approach compared to the prior composite material approaches.

Some further notes on Hibbard:

His earliest patent in 1891 had him living in Pittsburgh, so aopparently that’s where he learned his metallurgy & metal working knoweledge. His last patent, filed in 1921, was assigned to Hibbard Process Corp & involved metal smelting.

A couple of his patents give his place of residence as North Plainfield before he moved a few miles to Plainfield.

I have one patent to TISCO auithored by him in 1895, 24 to H-R-E, 4 by himself to MSS, 1 co-authored by Stone, one by Peck, and one by Gaston. Including one patent each to Fish & Smith, that makes 10 MSS patents in my files. (My totals are skewed a bit because I haven’t included Hibbard’s patents on metal grinding equipment). Hibbard also authored 6 patents with no assignee.

There are also 4 GB patents to Hibbard that I found in the EPO. They have no assignees & I haven’t had the time to match them up with US equivalents if any. They are GB190009001, GB1900200449, GB190115423 and GB190115424. In the British style of the time Hibbard’s occupation was given as ‘Inventor.’

Hibbard was a prolific innovator & an interesting person to study. Interestingly he submitted a number of patents to the USPTO at the same time so a lot of his patents are numbered in sequence.

I found a second Hibbard patent on a ccircular vault door that also looks very similar to that photo on Ebay. It’s attached below.

Jack

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Doug MacQueen

Jack, it seems I should go through my collection to compare which ones we may not have. Wasn’t aware of the British ones but thats because I copied mine at the Cleveland Library back when they had the US patent books readily available. They have been moved to storage now making it difficult. I checked that I have at least 7 NYM and 19 TISCO in addition to the HRE ones. As to the casting of safes, the manganese cannonballs are following a tradition of cast safes going back at least to a patent by Linus Yale Jr in 1856 (I think). Cast chrome iron cannonballs by Marvin go back to around 1868 and the monster Corliss cast iron cannonballs were first introduced in Philly at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. I am not sure I have posted any Marvins but I have put some Corliss stuff on here. Doug

Jack Sullivan

Doug MacQueen wrote
Jack, it seems I should go through my collection to compare which ones we may not have. Wasn’t aware of the British ones but thats because I copied mine at the Cleveland Library back when they had the US patent books readily available. They have been moved to storage now making it difficult. I checked that I have at least 7 NYM and 19 TISCO in addition to the HRE ones. As to the casting of safes, the manganese cannonballs are following a tradition of cast safes going back at least to a patent by Linus Yale Jr in 1856 (I think). Cast chrome iron cannonballs by Marvin go back to around 1868 and the monster Corliss cast iron cannonballs were first introduced in Philly at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. I am not sure I have posted any Marvins but I have put some Corliss stuff on here. Doug

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Hi Doug

I lived in Clevelabd during the 1970s & recall the public library room filled with bound volumes of US patents ( as well as the UP & DOWN only elevators, which I thought were both curious & amusing). Very interesting but without a compterized search capability it was mostly useless to me. My current patent work involves familiarity with online remote dtabase searching & downloading pdf files.

My work on this will hopefully result in a CD-ROM product I might offer on eBay. In the interest of completeness I suggest exchanging pdf files for these specific topics. My email is wa1tej@yahoo.com.

Jack

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Tom Gordon

This is the only British one that I know of -around 1928

Jack Sullivan

I happened on another reference to a manganese steel cannonball safe in US71704 (filed 1904) to Walter Brinton but not assigned to TISCO. This is possibly an oversight by the USPTO examiners but Mr. Brinton was employed by TISCO from 1895 to 1910-11 as superintdent of their manganese steel department, when he resigned & moved to Edgar Allen Manganese Steel Company of Illinois. (See http://tinyurl.com/5u4ajhk)

Jack

(NOTE: Screenshots of patent images using MWSnap 3, a free app).

Jack Sullivan

Jack Sullivan wrote
I happened on another reference to a manganese steel cannonball safe in US71704 (filed 1904) to Walter Brinton but not assigned to TISCO. This is possibly an oversight by the USPTO examiners but Mr. Brinton was employed by TISCO from 1895 to 1910-11 as superintdent of their manganese steel department, when he resigned & moved to Edgar Allen Manganese Steel Company of Illinois. (See Chemical & metallurgical engineering - Google Books)

A slightly later patent (1904 filing) authored by Brinton was assigned to TISCO. It is US793176 & is on Automatic Locking Means for Rotary Vault or Safe Doors.

Jasck

[unknown]

Doug MacQueen

Jack, you dropped a 7 from the beginning of that first patent 771,704. That one shows the same “blown out” or by the re-enforced jamb area typical of the HRE cannonballs but on the lug style rotary door. I don’t know if you have investigated Rodman (the R in HRE) yet but he was the explosives expert from the US army that was in charge of the 1892 government testing of safes. So I have no doubt that nitro testing was a constant with HRE and the later NYM. The inclusion of the chrome steel inserts in the jamb to prevent peening an opening for nitro shows they weren’t just sitting around on their butts. The evidence is fairly clear that the serious makers did put a stop to that threat by 1920’s. Of course by then it was the oxy-gas attacks that the makers had to contend with. Doug

Jack Sullivan

Doug MacQueen wrote
Jack, you dropped a 7 from the beginning of that first patent 771,704. That one shows the same “blown out” or by the re-enforced jamb area typical of the HRE cannonballs but on the lug style rotary door. I don’t know if you have investigated Rodman (the R in HRE) yet but he was the explosives expert from the US army that was in charge of the 1892 government testing of safes. So I have no doubt that nitro testing was a constant with HRE and the later NYM. The inclusion of the chrome steel inserts in the jamb to prevent peening an opening for nitro shows they weren’t just sitting around on their butts. The evidence is fairly clear that the serious makers did put a stop to that threat by 1920’s. Of course by then it was the oxy-gas attacks that the makers had to contend with. Doug

Hi Doug

Well, typographic errors will happen but the full patent number is clearly visible in the expanded screenshots of the patent figure pages. Thanks for pointing out the error in any case.

No, I have not yet come upon any patents to Rodman but if I do I will post the info here.

Jack

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Doug MacQueen

I didn’t mean to imply that Rodman patented anything, just that he was the US Army officer in charge of the US Government safe and vault explosives testing for the US Treasury in 1892. His expertise with nitro and dynamite eventually resulted in his involvement with the Hibbard-Rodman-Ely Safe Co. Now if only someone can come up with some early info on Sumner Ely and how he got to be involved with HRE. Doug

Jack Sullivan

Apparently H-R-E, TISCO & Manganese Steel were not the only firms producing (or at least patenting) cannonball designs based on castings of ‘non-machineable’ or ‘non-workable’ metal (i.e. manganese steel). Victor Safe & Lock Company patented a number of such designs during the same time period as the first mentioned companies (1903-1907 file dates) The thumbnail attachments are from US750792 & US894932, both to Wilber Arnold of Madisonville, OH. US912473 to Hattersley of Victor also describes a cannonball design but no mention is made of the casting metal.

Jack

Jack Sullivan

Jack Sullivan wrote
Apparently H-R-E, TISCO & Manganese Steel were not the only firms producing (or at least patenting) cannonball designs based on castings of ‘non-machineable’ or ‘non-workable’ metal (i.e. manganese steel). Victor Safe & Lock Company patented a number of such designs during the same time period as the first mentioned companies (1903-1907 file dates) The thumbnail attachments are from US750792 & US894932, both to Wilber Arnold of Madisonville, OH. US912473 to Hattersley of Victor also describes a cannonball design but no mention is made of the casting metal.

Jack

Attached is the thumbnail for the Victor US912473.

Jack

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Doug MacQueen

Yes, there were several makers selling cannonball safes in the early 1900’s. Sumner Ely of HRE went on to start the Ely Norris Safe Co., felt by many to be the finest ever made. Diebold, Mosler, Herring-Hall-Marvin, Halls, National, Cary, and Baum were all in the cannonball game. There were a also few smaller companies, some which were not manganese steel. Here is a dusty but otherwise beautifully restored Victor by Geoff Joli of Safeworks in Canada. This one is part of Irving Isacoff’s collection in Ocala, Florida. Doug

wylk

I found a 2008 article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette about the county controller having a 10-ton Hibbard-Rodman-Ely safe (on the second floor!) which was locked in 1973 or earlier. Nobody had the combination or knowlege of what was inside. The safe rests on a concrete pillar. A local expert, Roy Watters, offered to open it for $3900.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/uncategorized/safe-expert-wants-a-crack-at-county-behemoth-396485/

A later article merely 12 days later suggests a local Diebold representative saw the first article and decided this was a great public relations opportunity and offered to open it for free. They succeeded, and in a typical let-down there was nothing of significant value or importance. But at least the article includes a couple of fair images, one of the safe door with the typical HRE flat-bar bolts, and one of the manufacturers’ plaque.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/10-ton-junk-drawer-398026/

wylk

Here’s a nice image of Manganese Steel vault doors, from a postcard with the caption “First National Bank of Englewood, 347-349 W. 63rd St., Chicago, Manganese Steel Safe Deposit Vaults, weight of doors 25,000 lbs. each”. That location is now an empty lot being developed for single family homes. I believe the image is from an auction.