Shredded Wheat Co. - Specimen Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company. Rare Topic! "Niagara Falls" engraving. Great! In the early 1890s, while staying at a hotel in Nebraska, Henry Perky, who was suffering from diarrhea, noticed another guest with the same ailment eating boiled wheat with cream. This sparked an idea for Perky, and in 1892, he took his concept of creating a product from boiled wheat to his friend William H. Ford, a machinist in Watertown, New York. Together, they developed a machine to produce what Perky referred to as "little whole wheat mattresses," now known as shredded wheat. They showcased this invention at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, possibly while Perky was also seeking buyers for his cylindrical steel rail passenger car.

Initially, Perky intended to sell the machines rather than the biscuits themselves. He returned to Denver, where he began distributing the biscuits from a horse-drawn wagon, hoping to popularize the concept. This led to the founding of the Cereal Machine Company. On October 15, 1895, Perky was granted United States Patent Number 548,086.

As the biscuits gained popularity, surpassing interest in the machines, Perky decided to shift his focus. He moved east and opened a bakery in Boston, Massachusetts, and later in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895. He retained the name Cereal Machine Company but added the name Shredded Wheat Company to reflect the growing success of his product. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Perky#Shredded_Wheat_Company