Finance History|11 Wall Street — Twenty-Five Dollars for Houghton Glass

People treat Corning as a fiber and display-glass house that always printed GLW.

The 1945 issuer was Corning Glass Works, a Houghton-family company then ninety-four years old.

The New York Times of 17 April 1945 reported that an underwriting group headed by Harriman Ripley and Lazard Frères would offer that day 50,000 shares of 3.5 percent cumulative preferred at 100 dollars par and 412,340 shares of 5-dollar-par common at 25 dollars a share.

The combined offering totaled 15,308,500 dollars in 1945 currency. The paper called it the first time stock ownership in Corning Glass Works had been made available to the general public.

The preferred was new financing for plant modernization.

The common came from existing holders, several of them descendants of Amory Houghton. The company received none of the common proceeds.

The mechanism is a closely held industrial opening a slice of common while selling preferred for cash.

Public holders bought glass, not optical fiber. Fiber came decades later.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the Corning line later printed as GLW. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

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