Indianapolis Power & Light Company - Indianapolis 1940

Beautifully engraved specimen from the Indianapolis Power & Light Company printed in 1933. This historic document was printed by Columbian Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman. This item has the signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 73 years old.








Certificate Vignette

Indianapolis Power & Light Company is a public utility company wholly owned by IPALCO Enterprises, Inc. The company's operations includes generating, transmitting, distributing and selling electric energy. The company also produces, distributes and sells steam within a limited area. The company owns and operates three coal-fired generating plants in Petersburg, Stout and Pritchard stations to generate electricity. The company primarily provides electric and steam services to the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Electric services accounted for 96% of 1999 revenues and steam services, 4%.

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About Specimens

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.