Vintage 1970 Dow Chemical 8.875 Percent Debenture 📜 Brown 25000 Dollar Due 2000 Registered American Bank Note

What Did a Dow Chemical Debenture Look Like? 🧪 The Dow Chemical Company 8.875% Debenture Due 2000, Engraved by American Bank Note

Size: 12" x 8"

This is a registered 8.875% debenture of The Dow Chemical Company, due May 1, 2000, from the 1970 issue. It's a handsome engraved certificate with a rich brown border, a vignette of three powerfully built smiths working at the forge across the top, 8.875% DUE 2000 at each side, and the facsimile signatures of the company's President and Treasurer. Pictures simply can't do justice to how crisp the engraving is on this heavy paper.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• REGISTERED, at both top corners
• THE DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY, 8.875% DEBENTURE DUE MAY 1, 2000
• CUSIP 260543 AE 3
• TRUSTEE'S CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICATION, FIRST NATIONAL CITY BANK, As Trustee
• The corporate seal: THE DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY, CORPORATE SEAL, 1947, DELAWARE
• AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY

The printed interest terms run from May 1, 1970, which dates the issue. These are issued debentures, registered to a holder, authenticated by the trustee and cancelled when they were retired, so each one carries its own paper trail of typed details, stamps, punches and signatures, the life of a working bond rather than damage.

🧪 Herbert Dow's Company

Dow was founded in 1897 by the chemist Herbert Henry Dow, who had invented a new way to pull the bromine out of the brine trapped underground at Midland, Michigan. At first the company sold only bleach and potassium bromide, turning out 72 tons of bleach a day by 1902, and it grew into one of the three largest chemical producers in the world. In 2017 Dow and DuPont merged to form DowDuPont, and on April 1, 2019 Dow Inc. was spun off as its own public company, the parent of The Dow Chemical Company.

⚗️ The Bromine War

The best Herbert Dow story is the fight he picked with the Germans. Around the turn of the century a German bromine cartel controlled the world price and warned him to stay out of Europe. He didn't. When the cartel tried to run him out of business by dumping cheap bromine in America, Dow quietly bought it up, repackaged it and sold it back in Europe, and the cartel ended up having to deal with him. The little company from Midland came out of it a world player, and it went on to Styrofoam in the 1940s, Saran Wrap in 1949 and Ziploc bags in 1968.

📅 1970

Borrowing at 8.875% sounds steep now, but in 1970 interest rates were high and climbing, and big blue-chip companies were paying that kind of coupon to raise money for new plants. The trustee named on this bond, First National City Bank, was the name Citibank went by in those years. It was also a hard time for Dow's reputation: it made napalm for the Vietnam War, and in the late 1960s its job recruiters were picketed on college campuses across the country. The debentures in this issue ran thirty years, to May 1, 2000.

🏦 American Bank Note

The engraving is by the American Bank Note Company, the great New York security printer of stock and bond certificates, and you can see its hand in those three smiths at the top.

🏡 Display

It's a great piece for a chemist, an engineer, a Michigander or anybody who loves old financial paper, and it looks sharp framed in an office or a lab.