Central District and Printing Telegraph Company - Pittsburgh, Pennysylvania 1891 ( Now Verizon )

Beautifully engraved Rare Specimen certificate from the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company is unissued. This historic document was printed by Western Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a signed vignette of an allegorical woman flying on a wheel with sparks and a train down below. The copyright on the vignette is 1891. This is the first time we have seen this certificate for sale and it may be unique.


Certificate Vignette

Verizon History

1879 - The first telephone line is installed in Wheeling (the state capital at the time) by the Central District and Printing Telegraph Co. The next year, 1880, the first exchange is established in Wheeling, with 32 subscribers.

Jan. 1, 1883 - The Southern Bell Telephone Co. establishes the first exchange in Charleston.

1883 - The state's first toll (long distance) line is installed from Wheeling to Steubenville, OH and Pittsburgh, PA.

May 11, 1916 - Our corporate birthday! The Chesapeake and Potomac (C & P) Telephone Company of West Virginia, now Verizon West Virginia, is incorporated. It begins operations on Jan. 1, 1917, assuming the West Virginia operations of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Co., The Chesapeake and Potomac of Maryland and Southern Bell.

Nov. 21, 1925 - Dial service is introduced to West Virginia in the Huntington office. Without dialing, all calls had to be placed manually through an operator. In fact, most phones had no dials at all.

October 1956 - The Wheeling and Moundsville offices of The Chesapeake and Potomac offer "direct distance dialing" for long distance calls. Customers can place calls across the country by dialing "1" + the number. Otherwise, long distance calls must be placed manually through an operator.

Dec. 2, 1973 - The first (analog) electronic switch for serving telephone customers is installed in the Shady Spring office. All lines in a community must be "switched" to place calls. At this time, many switches at this time are noisy, electro-mechanical. They are housed to this day in plain, featureless buildings.

October 1981 - The first digital switching equipment is installed in the Falling Waters and Cheat Lake switching or serving offices. By 1993, all the equipment we used to connect customers' calls are digital.

Jan. 1, 1984 - The Chesapeake and Potomac begins operations as part of Bell Atlantic Corporation, formed after the divestiture of the Bell System.

July 15, 1984 - Charleston becomes the first city in the United States to have a choice of long distance companies when they dial long distance calls using a "1" plus the area code and number. As the nation's first test market, 34,000 customers choose from one of eight long distance companies serving the area.

Oct. 30, 1989 - Party-line service is eliminated for Chesapeake and Potomac of West Virginia customers as technicians convert the last party line in the Berkeley Springs area to private-line service.

May 29, 1993 - The Chesapeake and Potomac converts its last West Virginia switching office, in Milton, to digital switching. Previously, many of these serving offices were analog and up to 50 years old. The Chesapeake and Potomac of West Virginia is the first Bell operating company in the continental United States to have 100% digital switching.

Jan. 24, 1994 - The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of West Virginia begins doing business as Bell Atlantic-West Virginia, Inc.

May, 1994 - In the same year the world wide web becomes popular, the Bell Atlantic WORLD SCHOOL program is launched, the most aggressive deployment of direct Internet connections to schools in the nation.

June 4, 1997 - The nearly 700 K-12 schools served by Bell Atlantic-West Virginia are connected directly to the Internet. Actor James Earl Jones joins a "graduation" party at the Cultural Center in the State Capitol Complex to help us celebrate the milestone.

Oct. 14, 1997 - Gov. Underwood and Bell Atlantic announce the "Bell Atlantic® WEST VIRGINIA 2001SM" program, deploying a $25 million statewide, versatile communications network that allows videoconferencing, data and voice messages to be sent over just one special data line, based on a technology called "ATM" or asynchronous transfer mode.

April, 1998 - Using our statewide network, the West Virginia Supreme Court launches the Courtroom of the Future program. The state court system begins by connecting the Southcentral Regional Jail with the Kanawha County courthouse so persons facing their initial arraignment no longer need to be transported to a magistrate court. Plans are made to expand the program to the state's 55 county courthouses.

August 20, 1999 - Wayne County's Spring Valley and Tolsia high schools become the first K-12 schools in West Virginia to use videoconferencing for distance learning.

March 16, 2000 - Verizon launches a high-speed Internet service called digital subscriber line or DSL to 14 communities, most of them between Charleston and Huntington.

June 30, 2000 - Bell Atlantic and GTE merge, becoming Verizon. Bell Atlantic-West Virginia is now Verizon West Virginia.

History from company press information

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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 were 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 has grown in popularity over the past several years.