I've done no research on this but as I recall ANACs started the whole thing with their picture grading and "encapsulating" service.
I will stick a monkey in your works; from http://sampleslabs.com/acg.html. ANACS was the first to authenticate coins, but they did not slab them until 1989. I believe that PCGS and NGS followed these 2 (ANACS and ACG), but close in the race were a company called Hallmark and Blanchard.
The 70 pt. numerical system was developed in the late 1940s by William Sheldon. TPGs took off in the 1970s/mid80s. An easy summary on Wiki about TPGs to get you some background. Haven't ever read what was the first coin by each TPG each company graded. Hope someone will post that info about those coins if known, should be out there in the net I'd imagine.
What about the Morgan dollars in those Paramount plastic holders labelled MS 65? Aren't those from the 1970's?
Used to I liked monkeys until I rescued one. Their natural habits would not be on a '50's TV show. They bite, throw stuff, stink and......ok....I like monkeys, too. I just have to refrain myself from doing what they don't refrain themselves from doing.:bigeyes:
All true, but they are fun to watch, in the wild of course, though some were real hams in the spotlight despite their depravity. I have seen the zoo chimps throwing poo... not funny.
Close, ACG was first to slab them in '84. However, there was another company called AGA that graded & sealed coins in plastic flips in the mid '80's. PCGS followed in '86, NGC followed in '87. ANACS followed in '89. Pretty much everybody else came after that.
From the beginning to the start of PCGS. One other correction which isn't mentioned in this because I didn't know it at the time. but the very FIRST firm to slab to grade and slab other than Paramount with the Redfield hoard coins was SAGCE, South Africa Gold Coin Exchange in 1975, but they only graded and slabbed Proof Krugerrands on a scale that went up to, for some unknown reason, PF 105 The closest information I have on the first coin slabbed for any given service is the first ANACS slab which was a 1918 mercury dime. I was unable to buy the piece myself and the purchaser who did cracked it out to resubmit it to PCGS. However he was kind enough to send me the label. (And he did confirm with ANACS that it was the first coin they slabbed.) A CHRONOLOGY OF SLABBING While counterfeits have always been something of a problem, in the early 1960's large numbers of new counterfeit gold pieces began flooding into this country from the middle east. Beginning in early 1968 Abe Kosoff, Virgil Hancock, and John J Pitman began advocating the formation of a service that would accept submissions of coins from the collecting public and authenticate them. (Virgil Hancock originally made a proposal to the ANA Board on his own in 1965.) The coins would then be returned with a photographic certificate of authenticity. The idea behind the photograph was that a purchaser could use a magnifying glass to compare the coin with the photograph to be sure that the coin was actually the same coin that had been authenticated. Even though it seems obvious to us today that such an organization would have been of great benefit, it was two or three years before they could arouse enough interest in the numismatic community to raise the $50,000 dollars required to set up the program. Even the ANA made only a marginal pledge of $500 as part of the seed money. (During this period, in April of 1970, Abe Kosoff mentioned in his Coin World column that he had reports of two authentication services starting up, one in New York and the other on the west coast. Supposedly the west coast firm had already been in operation for two months. Unfortunately he provides no names. If this company could be found it would have a strong claim to being the first third party authentication service. Later in 1970 he reported that the Professional Numismatic Guild, PNG, had begun issuing certificates of authenticity. Could this have been the “west coast firm” he had alluded to earlier?) The ANAT, American Numismatic Authentication Trust as it was then known, reached it’s funding goal August 21st 1970 at that years ANA convention. Even after the money was raised though, it still took some time before everything was in place. Finally on June 12th 1972 ANACS opened in Washington DC under Director Charles Hoskins. Until this point the only other independent “organization” one could turn to was the U. S. Mints own laboratory, which wasn’t always the best place to send your coins. (In 1971 A-Mark submitted an AU 1893-S dollar to the mint lab for authentication. The mint technicians thought it had an added mintmark and they tried to pry the mintmark off with the point of a knife, adding gouges and tooling marks around the mintmark. It was later determined that the coin was genuine!) While this was going on the first “firm” to issue the equivalent of a certified coin, the General Services Administration (GSA), was preparing to sell off the three million plus silver dollars left in the Treasury vaults. In December of 1971 the coins were transferred to West Point and sorting, grading, and packaging of the dollars began. The coins were sorted into four groups, first the non-CC dollars were separated from the rest and then each group was sorted into “circulated” and uncirculated. Each group was then sealed into the appropriate holder (See GSA). Four months after ANACS began issuing certificates of authenticity, the government began selling “officially graded” coins. Between Feb of 1973 and April of 1974 the GSA conducted five sales attempting to dispose of the Treasury hoard. They were unsuccessful in disposing of all of the coins and further sales would be required later. Even so the effective promotions of the GSA allowed close to three million silver dollars to be released without hurting the silver dollar market. In fact prices were actually a little higher after the sales than before. In 1975 the third certification company opened for business. In Washington DC the International Numismatic Society Authentication Bureau (INS) began operations authenticating both US and foreign coins. Photo-certificates were issued for genuine pieces. Grading of the coins would begin in mid 1978. Also in 1975 the ANA began taking the first steps toward the establishment of a grading system. In May, a grading arbitration board was set up to settle grading disputes between dealers and collectors. This resulted in the disbandment of a similar “editorial” board set up by Coin World. Then in July an ANA grading task force was created to begin the process of creating a set of standards for the grading of coins. In January and February of 1976, the Redfield estate hoard of over 600,000 silver dollars were sold during a courtroom auction for 7.3 million dollars to Steve Markoff of A-Mark. After the sale a large number of the dollars were very effectively marketed by A-Mark through Paramount Coin and Stamp (Paramount). So effective was this promotion that for a while coins in the Paramount Redfield holders actually brought more money than the same dates and conditions that weren’t Redfield coins. Paramount capitalized on this by placing some of their own stock silver dollars in holders that looked like the Redfield holders but did not have the Redfield name on them anywhere. They were very careful though to avoid selling the two groups of dollars together or if they did they in a print ad they listed them with a bold heading NON-Redfield dollars and showed no pictures of the holders. They were quite effective with their sales too. So much so that even today many people do not realize that there is a difference and both types of holders can commonly be found being sold today on eBay as “Redfield” dollars. In Sept of 1976 it is reported that ANACS’s Washington DC office was the object of a “burglary”. Someone hid in the offices and over a weekend apparently copied the ANACS archive of key date coin diagnostics. This leads to the resignation of Charles Hoskins as director. Mr Hoskins went on to become the President of INS. The directorship of ANACS was then filled by John Smies July of 1977 saw Glen Smedley appointed to head the final editing committee for the ANA grading standards. The finished product, The Official ANA Grading Guide of United States Coins, went to press four months later. As originally published the only Mint State grades listed were MS-60, MS-65, and MS-70 which was listed but considered as a theoretical grade that would not actually be used. The year 1978 was slow. In April the House Banking Subcommittee held hearing to determine what to do with the remaining GSA dollars but in November legislation which would have allowed their sale was vetoed because of an unrelated trade legislation amendment. The GSA would finally receive authorization in March of 1979. The one really significant item of the year occurred in Sept when the ANA Board of Governors decided to conduct a six month long experiment permitting ANACS to grade coins as well as authenticate them. The six month grading period actually began March 1st of 1979 and never stopped. There were several changes that took place at ANACS in 1980. The ANA board voted to add the additional grades of MS-63 and MS-67 to the list of grades approved for use. The continuing problems of low wages and high turnover of personnel at ANACS led to the resignation in protest of ANACS co-founder Virgil Hancock from the Board of Governors . In August of 1981, John Smies resigned as director of ANACS. Two months later INS scored a coup when they authenticated the second known specimen of the Gloucester County shilling. ANACS started off with new troubles in 1982. They were suffering from a huge backlog of submitted coins. This was a major source of concern and steps to reduce turnaround were either taken or proposed several times during the year. Some procedures were put into effect in January, but further proposals to speed up the process were put on hold in March by the ANA Board of Governors until after the completion of ANACS’s move to the new ANA Headquarters in June. In their February 24th issue, Coin World ran a story in which ANACS confirmed that counterfeit ANACS certificates were being used to sell coins in the marketplace at higher grades than they warrant. (I do not know what variety of ANACS certificate was being counterfeited. It could have been either ANACS 3 or ANACS 4) The news got better though with the report in March that ANACS was instrumental in the recovery of the DuPont Class III specimen of the 1804 dollar which had been stolen in an armed robbery at the DuPont estate in 1967. In July, Ken Bressett assumed the directorship of ANACS which had been vacant since Smies resignation the previous August. Ken proposed several changes to be made at ANACS, an educational program to introduce the divisions authenticators to the collector and dealers, and procedures to be taken to decrease the turn around time for submitted coins In August the Vice President of the ANA, Q David Bowers, submitted several proposals for new procedures at ANACS including yet another reduction in turn around times, an arbitration committee, identification of the authenticator on the certificate, and a return to adjectival grading instead of the numerical system. Modified versions of some of his proposals were accepted by the board but the numerical grading was here to stay. A new set of proposals for ANACS was put forth in March of 1983 but these would not be popular ones. Because of an operating deficit in the ANA, the Board passed a series of fee hikes for ANACS and also raised the possibility of pay cuts for the staff. INS describes for the trade press, information about how some artificially frosted cameo coins are being created. Then in Sept the first known counterfeit 1795 half dimes are identified by INS. In April of 1984, Thomas K DeLorey resigned as the senior authenticator at ANACS. At the annual ANA Convention, ANACS director Bressett announces that by the end of the year the turn around time for submissions should be reduced to two weeks. The third major authentication firm entered the fray in June. Accugrade, owned by Alan Hagar, also introduced a “new” feature to the certification. For the first time the coins are sealed into a hard plastic tamper proof holder with the photograph of the coin. This encapsulation concept was patented by Hagar and was later licensed to other firms. I don’t know why the patent was granted since the Paramount Redfield holders of almost a decade earlier clearly seem to show that the Accugrade use was not completely original. Possibly it was granted because the earlier users hadn’t bothered to apply for patent protection. The fourth major grading service began late in the year with Jim Halprin of Heritage forming a new company, Numismatic Certification Institute NCI. Originally located at a separate location, by early 1985 the company had moved into the same building as Heritage. Turn around time may have been reduced but other problems kept cropping up for ANACS. In December Board Governor Bob Medlar delivered to ANA President Q David Bowers an unofficial report that confirmed the “rumored improprieties and exploitations involving the grading service”. As a result of this report at least one authenticator/grader, possibly more, was terminated. In at least one case though the termination didn’t last and the ANA board voted to reinstate David Jones effective 1/7/85. ANACS recalled 20 certificates in September of 1985. The certificates had been issued for Lincoln zinc cents that were missing the outer copper plating. After the certificates had been issued, ANACS discovered another way that such coins could be altered after minting which would not have been detected in their earlier examination. In October, INS reported the discovery of excellently made counterfeit 1917-S Walking Liberty halves. The new year of 1986 started off with yet another attack on the numerical grading system. This time it was Board Governor David L Ganz who submitted a proposal to eliminate numerical grading and return to the older adjectival grading system. In February a Minnesota judge ruled against a defendant who contended that ANACS had changed their grading standards. He had sold ANACS coins to a collector with a promise to buy them back at the same grade when the collector wanted to sell them. When that time came though, he contended that ANACS had gotten stricter with their grading and the coins would no longer be graded at the level indicated on the holder. A month after the ruling, the ANA board did publicly admit that there had been a change at ANACS and that the grading had gotten stricter and that most previously graded coins would be graded lower under the current standards. With this new admission, the defendant attempted to be granted a new trial. The judge turned down the request stating that even though the ANA said that standards had changed he did not believe that they had. On February 3rd of 1986 PCGS began operations authenticating and slabbing coins. PCGS promised to be much more selective in the coins they slabbed promising to only encapsulate no problem, original surface coins that were not damaged and had not been cleaned. Unlike all previous companies PCGS only accepted submissions from a set of authorized dealers. These dealers were to act as “pre-screeners” for the submissions, the idea being the dealers would weed out those coins that PCGS would return as ungradeable and save the submitters the fees that they would have spent on the coin. (Also opening and closing that same month was NES. See company listings below.)
Great info there Conder101. Really informative and something I printed out. Although a little dissapointing since I always thought GDJMSP slabbed the first coins way back for Ceasar and since no plastic yet, had to be done in stone.
