Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Twenty-Five Dollars to Pay for Disposable Needles

People treat Becton Dickinson as a Franklin Lakes campus that always printed BDX.

The listed company was a privately held needle maker that sold stock to fund a shift to sterile disposables.

Becton, Dickinson and Company's own investor FAQ records an initial public offering on 23 April 1962 at 25 dollars a share in 1962 currency.

Encyclopedia.com, drawing the same corporate history, states that the conversion from reusable products to sterile disposable products required that 1962 float.

The following year the shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Dividends had been paid most years since 1909 while the firm was still private. Regular quarterly dividends continued after the listing.

The company had been incorporated in 1906 and traces its partnership to 1897. Headquarters later moved to 1 Becton Drive in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.

On 1 April 2022 BD distributed one share of Embecta Corp. for every five BD shares held as of 22 March 2022, spinning the diabetes-care book onto Nasdaq as EMBC. BDX stayed on the Big Board.

The mechanism is a medical supplier using a mid-century public issue to finance a product change, then keeping the original ticker through later separations.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

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