Finance History | 11 Wall Street — A Bankrupt Electrical Supplier Became American Machine and Metals

People treat AMETEK as a Berwyn instruments group and a serial acquirer of niche factories.

The ticker is older than the name.

By March 1930, months after the 1929 break, Manhattan Electric Supply Company had fallen into bankruptcy. Stockholders folded that wreck, with other properties, into a new Delaware company called American Machine and Metals, Inc.

The new firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AME. The letters were an abbreviation before they were a brand.

Early pieces included the Troy Laundry Machinery works in East Moline, Illinois, Haliwell Electric in New York, and the Trout Mining Company in Phillipsburg, Montana. Headquarters sat on Wall Street. Philip G. Mumford was the first president.

The company ran at a loss for more than a year. By 1932, the worst calendar year of the Depression for many industrial books, it showed a thin profit and reported assets of nearly 5 million dollars in 1932 currency.

The mechanism is a listed shell built to keep operating assets out of a single bankruptcy estate. Creditors of the electrical supplier did not automatically own the laundry machines or the mine.

Later purchases of gauge and motor businesses pushed the firm toward precision parts. Stockholders then shortened the legal name to AMETEK while keeping the three-letter ticker.

The present headquarters is 1100 Cassatt Road in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. No rights-clear photograph of that campus was found on Wikimedia Commons for this pin.

The pin is the public Broad Street facade of the Exchange that first printed AME. The floor is not visitable.

Photo: Arild Vagen, 16 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.