I got my first credit card when I was in graduate school in the 1970s. I was a student at Ohio State University on a fellowship and had enough money to warrant a card. It was a plastic MasterCard, just like the ones I carried for years before I switched to Visa through my old company’s credit union.
At auction last weekend, I stumbled on a predecessor to my easy-to-use plastic. I opened up a paper wallet in a box of seemingly dissimilar items to find five small metal plates that looked like they should’ve been hanging on a key ring. I pulled one out and saw the embossed name and address of the man whose estate we buyers were combing through. On the flip side was a paper insert with the name of a famous Philadelphia department store, John Wanamaker, and a line for the man to sign his name, which he apparently left blank.
I was holding in my hand an early charge card, but back then they were called charge plates. The burgundy case contained plates from other Philadelphia stores – Snellenburg’s, Strawbridge & Clothier, another Wanamaker’s and Charga-Plate Association Inc. Philadelphia. They were tucked inside slots with the metal back showing, and the man had typed the names of the stores on paper and glued them to the slots.
He had also left behind receipts from those department stores and two others, Gimbles and Lit Brothers – both well-known and no longer operating in the city. In fact, none of the stores are still around; most of them were shut down or absorbed into other chains. The venerable Wanamaker was one of the country’s first department stores.
None of the plates had dates on them, and most of the receipts had only the month and day. One receipt had 4/58, which I assumed was 1958. The date 1-22-59 was written on a slip of paper.
I’m always fascinated by these bits of ephemera because they tell me a whole lot about people – in this case, where he shopped (and the important stores of his lifetime), his economic standing, how much stuff cost, how he paid for it. He charged two shirts at $10.95 each at Wanamaker’s, which was known for its quality merchandise. In two transactions at Lit Brothers, he bought a hat for $4.95 and shoes for $13.98. The receipt showed an imprint of his charge plate. Some receipts did not indicate what he bought, only the cost.
I reached back into my head to recall if anyone in my family ever used these charge plates but I could conjure up nothing. I remembered that we paid in cash – which we never seemed to have enough of – and if anyone did have a charge they didn’t flaunt it. In some small mom and pops, store ledgers were used to record credit.
I went searching to find out more about these metal plates, and learned that they were introduced in 1928 by Farrington Manufacturing Co. of Boston.
Called Charga-Plate, they were used from the 1930s to the 1960s, and were the forerunner of the credit cards we use today. Those gained a foothold in the 1970s. Some of the earliest plates were issued in the 1920s for purchase of gas. Sometimes the plates remained in the stores and were pulled out when a customer charged an item. The plates were used much like early credit cards: hand the plate to a salesperson who placed it on a machine that pressed and inked your information onto the receipt.
In 1949, Diners Club issued the first general credit card, followed by Carte Blanche and American Express.
Before the plates, according to one site, metal charge coins were issued as early as the 1860s by department stores, with the customer’s name and a logo or image depicting the store. I came across a fancy Lit Brothers charge plate from the 1920s with a hole for a key chain.
Although the plates were initially used by individual merchants, stores in major cities formed associations allowing for the use of one plate at several stores. Apparently, that was the case with the Charga-Plate Association one in my auction lot. An association plate I found on eBay listed all of its member stores.
For collectors, one site noted that the plates were more valuable with their cases and that celebrities’ plastic credit cards were more valuable. Like any other self-respecting item, credit cards have their own collectors group, the American Credit Card Collectors Society.
