If the door of your safe says Diebold, it came from a firm that started as a small Cincinnati safe shop, moved to Canton, Ohio, in 1872 and became one of America’s big three makers of safes and bank vaults. Here’s what the records say, what the adverts claimed, and how to date yours.
1872
works moved from Cincinnati to Canton, Ohio
800+
Diebold safes in the Chicago fire, by the agent’s own count, 1871
$100,000
safe deposit vault for San Francisco, 1875
$40m
wartime sales in 1942, up from about $3m a year
Key takeaways
- Charles Diebold and Fred Bahmann started the firm in Cincinnati, usually dated 1859. It traded as Diebold, Bahmann & Co., then Diebold & Kienzle, then Diebold, Norris & Co., and from 1876 as the Diebold Safe & Lock Co.
- The name and town on the door are the best dating clue: “Cincinnati” means before about 1874, “Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Canton” means 1876 to 1943.
- The famous “878 safes” of the 1871 Chicago fire is an advertising figure. In October 1871 the firm’s own agent claimed over 800 safes and admitted two failures.
- We know of no published Diebold serial number list, so safes are dated by plate wording, decoration, locks and comparison with dated examples.
In This Article
Diebold at a glance
| Country | United States (Cincinnati, Ohio, then Canton, Ohio, from 1872) |
| Founded | 1859 by most accounts; an 1875 profile says 1857 |
| Founders | Charles Diebold and Fred Bahmann; Jacob Kienzle joined in 1861 |
| Trading names | Diebold, Bahmann & Co. (to 1870); Diebold & Kienzle (1870–1874); Diebold, Norris & Co. (1874–1876); Diebold Safe & Lock Co. (1876–1943); Diebold, Incorporated (from 1943) |
| Works | Cincinnati; Canton, Ohio, on Mulberry Street beside the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railway (1881) |
| Known for | Fire and burglar-proof safes, bank vaults and safe deposit boxes, time locks, later office equipment and ATMs |
| Takeovers | York Safe & Lock Co.’s safe and vault business (1946); Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co. (1959) |
| Today | Diebold Nixdorf, North Canton, Ohio, best known for cash machines |
Sources for the table are given in the sections below.
History of Diebold safes
Cincinnati beginnings, 1859–1872
Charles Diebold, a German-born safemaker (1824–1894 by the company’s account), set up in Cincinnati with Fred Bahmann.1 Canton’s historian Edward Heald checked the Cincinnati city directories and found that the first partners were Diebold and Bahmann, that Jacob Kienzle joined in 1861, and that when Bahmann left in 1870 to go into partnership with Gustav Mosler, the firm became Diebold & Kienzle.2 Bahmann’s new firm, Mosler, Bahmann & Co., is part of the story of Mosler safes, so two of America’s biggest safe names share a founder.
Even the founding year is a little slippery, and less certain than the company’s “since 1859” suggests. A Cincinnati trade book of 1875 says the business had existed “since 1857”.3 Business Week in 1946 and Heald in 1959 both give 1859.4,2
By 1870 the Cincinnati safes were selling well beyond Ohio. A Chicago trade review of that year reported nearly a thousand Diebold & Kienzle safes in use in Chicago alone, 500 owned by the United States Express Company and 250 by the American Merchants’ Union Express, and said Wells, Fargo & Co. bought all its travelling safes from the firm. For a safe maker, that’s about as good a reference as you could ask for. Diebold & Kienzle was then making safes of welded steel and iron and bringing out a combination lock called the Peerless.5
Timeline
- 1859 Diebold, Bahmann & Co. in Cincinnati (1857 in an 1875 account).
- 1870 Bahmann leaves to join Gustav Mosler; the firm becomes Diebold & Kienzle.
- 1871 The Great Chicago Fire; Diebold advertises its safes’ record.
- 1872 The works move to Canton, Ohio.
- 1874 The firm becomes Diebold, Norris & Co. (February).
- 1875 Record safe deposit vault erected in San Francisco.
- 1876 Incorporated as the Diebold Safe & Lock Company.
- 1892 Joins the short-lived Diebold-Mosler-Damon safe combination.
- 1943–1946 Renamed Diebold, Incorporated; buys York’s safe and vault business.
- 1959 Buys the Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., leading to an antitrust case.
The move to Canton
Canton’s 1955 sesquicentennial history credits a local businessman, Louis Schaefer, with selling Canton to Diebold when the firm needed room to expand, and dates the move to 1871–72.6 An 1881 trade article explains that the business had simply outgrown Cincinnati and that the Canton buildings were designed from scratch for safe-making. In February 1874, two years after the move, the firm became Diebold, Norris & Co., and in 1876 a joint stock company was formed as the Diebold Safe & Lock Company.3,7
The Canton works were big for their day. In 1875 they covered two acres, employed 300 to 400 hands and turned out “a finished safe every hour”, with a private half-mile siding, a lock department making its own castings and screws, and a telegraph office in the counting room.3 By 1881 the brick main building had a 400-foot frontage on Mulberry Street, the company offered 78 styles of safe, and its officers were W. W. Clark (president), John W. Norris (vice-president) and D. Tyler (secretary and treasurer).7
Both accounts also describe how the safes were built, which tells you roughly what’s inside the walls of a Canton-made Diebold of these years. The fireproof kind had an outer and inner shell with cement between them. Burglar-proof work was faced with steel, joined tongue and groove so that powder and wedges couldn’t get in, and by 1881 the plates were cast as layered iron and steel ingots and rolled into slab.3,7
The 1871 Chicago fire: advert and evidence
Every Diebold history repeats one story: when the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 was over, all 878 Diebold safes in the burned district had kept their contents safe. The contemporary record is more modest, and more interesting.
On 21 October 1871, less than two weeks after the fire, Diebold & Kienzle’s Chicago general agent, D. S. Covert, telegraphed the firm’s Pacific coast agents: “Over 800 of our Safes in the great fire. Not one with the Patent Concrete failed, and with two exceptions, the old style are all right.” The agents, Spawn & Bryant of San Francisco, printed the telegram as an advert.8 In Chicago, Covert’s own advert, now trading from 446 State Street, claimed that the safes had “in almost every case” kept their contents in excellent condition.9,10
“No other Safes in the fire were so uniformly successful in protecting their contents.”
D. S. Covert, Diebold & Kienzle’s Chicago agent, 1871
So the firm itself spoke of “over 800” safes and of failures among the older pattern. The exact figure of 878, with the claim that “none succumbed”, came later: the earliest version we’ve found is in a trade paper of 1881, ten years after the fire.7 From there it passed into local histories and company chronicles.6,2 The number isn’t absurd in itself: the 1870 review counted nearly a thousand Diebold safes in Chicago.5
But no independent count was ever made, and contemporary reports show the fire’s safes came out mixed: “Many of the safes came up in excellent condition, while others were the most deplorable wrecks.” One reporter found a Herring safe with its papers charred and a Harris safe “found to be worthless”.9 For how fire safes were meant to work, see the invention of the fireproof safe.
Bank vaults, time locks and the safe trust
The San Francisco vault, 1875
Company histories tell a good story: Wells Fargo ordered the world’s largest vault from Diebold in 1874, and it went west on a 47-car train.11 The reports of 1875 name a different customer. In February 1875 a San Francisco weekly reported that workmen from Diebold, Norris & Co. had arrived, with Mr Norris himself, to set up the vault the Safe Deposit Company had ordered for $100,000 in its new building at California and Montgomery Streets.12
It was a room more than a safe. An Ohio trade book of the same year gives the finished vault as 27 by 32 by 12 feet, weighing 800,000 lb (about 363 tonnes), shipped in 40 railway cars, with three doors, five locks and 4,600 safe deposit boxes. (The weekly had expected 30 by 25 by 9 feet and 4,500 boxes.)3 Wells Fargo does belong in the Diebold story, but through the travelling safes of 1870.5
The same 1875 account lists safe deposit vaults for the State Savings Institute of Chicago, the First National Banks of Grand Rapids and Milwaukee and the New Orleans Savings Institution, and vaults for the Equitable Life buildings in Boston and the Custom House and Post Office at Indianapolis.3
Burglars, explosives and time locks
The poster at the top of this page, printed in 1879 for Diebold’s Cleveland agent Thomas Brett, shows the threat banks feared most: devils with sledgehammers, tools, blasting powder and nitroglycerine failing against a Diebold Safe & Lock Co. door.13 Diebold’s 1881 answer was solid steel corners, a tongue-and-groove door edge and the “Burton cut-off spindle”, which kept the dial spindle from leading straight into the lock.7 Our history of safe-cracking covers the methods it was up against.
Time locks, which keep a vault shut until a set hour, were a separate speciality. A time lock collector’s survey dates Diebold’s first time lock to 1894, with movements from E. Howard and later Seth Thomas, and says Diebold bought the Chicago Time Lock Company around 1908.14 The Winona door shown here has a four-movement lock behind its glass cover; a notice on the door gives its weight as 22½ tons.15
The 1892 safe trust
In 1892 Herring, Hall and Marvin merged into what became Herring-Hall-Marvin. Their rivals answered with the Diebold-Mosler-Damon Company, incorporated in New Jersey on 15 November 1892 with $5,000,000 capital. It was to unite Diebold, Mosler Safe & Lock, Damon of Boston, National Safe Lock of Cleveland, York, Barnes of Pittsburgh, Miller of Baltimore, MacNeale & Urban, Mosler, Bahmann & Co. and Cary of Buffalo, with Diebold’s W. W. Clark as a vice-president.16,17 For all that capital, the combination made little mark: trade directories of 1899 still list the Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Canton, under its own name.18
Diebold in the 20th century
Before the Second World War Diebold was the third-largest American safe and vault maker, behind Mosler and York. War work changed it: sales of about $3 million a year became $40 million in 1942, and the company advertised armour plate made with “80 years experience” of resisting “bandits, bullets and fire”.4,19 Canton’s 1955 history credits it with armour for more than 36,000 scout cars and half-tracks.6 The firm became Diebold, Incorporated in 1943.11
The next name is one you might not expect on a safe maker’s board. Eliot Ness, the former Prohibition agent and Cleveland safety director, joined in 1944 representing the largest shareholders and became board chairman. Under him Diebold announced on 3 January 1946 that it was taking over all of York Safe & Lock’s safe and vault business, patents and sales branches.4 In September 1959 it bought the Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co. of Hamilton, Ohio.11 The government sued under the Clayton Act; the district court accepted that Herring-Hall-Marvin was a failing company, but in 1962 the Supreme Court sent the case back for trial, and in 1963 Diebold agreed to sell the safe and vault side of the business.20,11
If you’ve come here looking for a “Diebold data safe”, you’re after a later product: from the 1960s Diebold sold Data Safes for computer tapes, advertised as keeping the inside below 150°F in a fire, and by 1979 with one-hour or four-hour Underwriters’ Laboratories listings.21,22 From the 1970s the company moved into cash machines; it bought Mosler’s assets out of bankruptcy in 2001 and became Diebold Nixdorf in 2016.23
How to identify and date a Diebold safe
Start with the door. Diebold safes carry the maker’s name there: painted in gold on most surviving Victorian doors, and on plates or etched glass on later vault work. The wording is the quickest guide to age, because the firm changed its name every few years until 1876, which is a nuisance for historians and a gift if you’re dating a safe. The general method is in our guide to dating an old safe.
| Diebold, Bahmann & Co., Cincinnati | About 1859 to 1870 |
| Diebold & Kienzle, Cincinnati | 1870 to 1874 (works in Canton from 1872) |
| Diebold, Norris & Co., Canton, O. | February 1874 to 1876 |
| Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Canton, O. | 1876 to 1943 |
| Diebold, Inc. / Diebold, Incorporated, Canton | 1943 onwards |
| York Safe & Lock Co., Division of Diebold | 1946 onwards |
Name changes are from Heald, the 1875 and 1881 trade accounts and the company’s later history.2,3,7,11,4 Agents went on using old names in their adverts for years, so treat the dates as when a name was correct, not as hard limits.
Paintwork, scenes and agents’ names
Many surviving Victorian Diebold doors are dressed like furniture: black ground, gold and coloured lining, scrollwork and a small painted landscape above the dial, as on this door in Bellingham’s old City Hall.24 Original decoration is fragile, so photograph it before any cleaning, and don’t repaint a door you want dated.
Many Diebold doors also carry a sales agent’s name, which tells you where the safe was sold. This one reads “C. S. Parcells, Agt., San Francisco, Cal.” Other agents in the records include D. S. Covert in Chicago, Spawn & Bryant and later Bryant & Taylor in San Francisco, and Thomas Brett, 103 Superior Street, Cleveland.24,8,25,13 If your door has one, it’s worth looking him up: matching an agent to the years he held the agency, from city directories and newspaper adverts, can narrow the date.
Clue 1
Serial numbers
We know of no published Diebold serial list. Owners report numbers stamped on the door edge, a hinge or the bolt work, sometimes with a separate model code. Collectors date them by comparison with dated safes.26
Myths and unverified claims
All 878 Diebold safes survived the Chicago fire with their contents intact.
In 1871 the firm’s agent claimed “over 800” safes, with two old-style failures. The 878 figure appears in print in 1881.
A plate reading “Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Cincinnati” marks the earliest safes.
The Safe & Lock Co. name dates from 1876, after the move to Canton. Cincinnati safes were made by Diebold, Bahmann & Co. or Diebold & Kienzle.
The record vault of 1874–75 was built for Wells Fargo.
Reports of 1875 name the Safe Deposit Company of San Francisco. Wells Fargo bought Diebold’s travelling safes.
I have a Diebold safe: what now?
Weight
How heavy is it?
Even small Diebold office safes are heavy, and bank pieces run to tons. Check the floor before moving one and see how much an old safe weighs.
Opening
Combination lost?
Call a qualified safe technician (in the US, a member of SAVTA, the Safe & Vault Technicians Association). Drilling or forcing an old door can ruin the lock and the paintwork.
Value
Is it worth anything?
Collectors value original paintwork, a working combination and early names such as Diebold & Kienzle. Overpainted or drilled safes are worth far less. Moving costs often decide the matter, so price the move before anything else.
Want help dating yours? Send us photos of the name on the door, the dial and any serial number and we’ll tell you what we can.
Frequently asked questions
How old is my Diebold safe?
Start with the name and town on the door: Cincinnati names mean before about 1874, “Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Canton” means 1876 to 1943, and “Diebold Inc.” means 1943 or later. Decoration, the lock and any agent’s name narrow it further.
Can I look up a Diebold safe serial number?
Not online, as far as we know. No Diebold serial register has been published, so dates come from comparing your safe with dated examples. Send us the number with photos and we’ll help where we can.
Did all Diebold safes survive the Chicago fire?
That’s the later advertising version. In October 1871 Diebold’s own Chicago agent claimed over 800 safes in the fire and admitted two failures among the older pattern.
What is a Diebold data safe?
A fire-resisting safe for magnetic tapes and other computer media, sold from the 1960s and advertised to keep the inside below 150°F in a fire.
How do I open a Diebold safe without the combination?
Ask a qualified safe technician. They can usually open it with minimal damage and reset the combination.
Is Diebold still in business?
Yes, as Diebold Nixdorf of North Canton, Ohio, known mainly for cash machines. To our knowledge, it hasn’t made its historic safe records public.
Sources:
- Wikipedia, “Charles Diebold”, citing the company’s own history (used for his dates only). ↩︎
- Edward Thornton Heald, The Stark County Story, vol. 4: The American Way of Life (Canton: Stark County Historical Society, 1959), section “Company Foundations at Cincinnati, 1859–1871”, via Internet Archive (lending library; quoted from the full-text search). ↩︎
- W. J. Comley and W. D’Eggville, Ohio, the Future Great State: Her Manufacturers (Cincinnati: Comley Bros., 1875), “Diebold, Norris & Co., Safe Manufacturers, Canton, O.”, pp. 432–433, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- “Diebold Annexes York’s Line”, Business Week, 12 January 1946, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Annual Review of the Trade and Commerce of the City of Chicago (Chicago, 1870), “Fire and Burglar Proof Safes: Diebold & Kienzle”, pp. 83–84, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Canton Sesquicentennial: 150 Years of Progress (Canton Sesquicentennial Corporation, 1955), via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- “Diebold Safe and Lock Company, Canton, Ohio”, The Trade Review (Cleveland), 19 March 1881, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Morning Oregonian (Portland), 1 November 1871, p. 2, “From Chicago” (Spawn & Bryant, agents), via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- The Doomed City! Chicago during an Appalling Ordeal! (Detroit: Michigan News Co., 1871), Diebold & Kienzle advertisement signed D. S. Covert, and “Safes” report, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Full Account of the Great Fire; and New Business Directory (Chicago: New Tremont House, 1871), via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- “Diebold Incorporated”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Reference for Business. ↩︎
- The Pacific (San Francisco), 4 February 1875, report on the Safe Deposit Company’s building, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs, “Thos. Brett, Cleveland, O. Diebold Safe & Lock Company”, lithograph, W. J. Morgan & Co., 1879 (public domain). ↩︎
- my-time-machines.net (time lock collection), “Diebold Safe & Lock Co., Canton, Ohio, 1894 through today: introduction”. ↩︎
- Jonathunder, “Winona Savings Bank vault”, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons (etched name and sign read from the photograph). ↩︎
- Engineering and Mining Journal, 19 November 1892, note on the Diebold-Mosler-Damon Safe Company, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 11 February 1893, “Diebold-Mosler-Damon Company”, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Seeger and Guernsey’s Cyclopaedia of the Manufactures and Products of the United States (New York, 1899), safe makers’ listings, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Diebold Inc. armour plate advertisement, Ordnance, November–December 1944, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- United States v. Diebold, Inc., 369 U.S. 654 (1962), via Legal Information Institute, Cornell. ↩︎
- Diebold Data Safe advertisement, Datamation, January 1965, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Diebold Data Safe advertisement, Datamation, November 1979, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Wikipedia, “Diebold Nixdorf”, and the company filings it cites. ↩︎
- Joe Mabel, “Whatcom Museum: City Hall safe”, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (plate and agent’s panel read from the photograph). ↩︎
- Mechanics’ Institute, Report of the Tenth Industrial Exhibition (San Francisco, 1875), awards list: “Diebold, Norris & Co. (Bryant & Taylor, Agents)”, via Internet Archive. ↩︎
- Lock Picking 101 forum, thread on restoring and dating a Diebold safe (owners’ reports, anecdotal). ↩︎
