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"Lamson Company" was the simplest name of various companies deriving from the original Lamson Cash Carrier Company.

The original company was founded by William Lamson in January 1882 to exploit his invention of a cash carrier system for his shop to carry payments from the sales assistant to the cashier and to carry the change and receipt back again. Due to mergers, takeovers, and new interests over the years, the company had various names and it also had offshoots in other countries. There is a separate article for the Lamson Engineering Company Ltd. based in England.

William Stickney Lamson was born in Newburyport, Mass. in 1845. He opened a shop in Merrimack Street, Lowell, Mass. in February 1879. There are several versions of the story of how he made his invention. It is claimed that he first experimented with tying up the money in a handkerchief and throwing it over the heads of customers. Another is that he was breakfasting one morning and digging out the contents of two halves of an orange with a spoon. "Why wouldn't a hollowed-out ball", he mused, "make a good carrier for change to and from the cashier? It could travel over the heads of the crowds!" A Lamson advertisement of March 1915 claims that the original equipment consisted of a hollowed-out croquet ball and a wooden trough.

His system soon attracted the interest of other shopkeepers and in January 1882 the Lamson Cash Carrier Company was incorporated. The initial stock capital was $65,000 and was later increased to $130,000. The factory was on Walker Street, Lowell and the office was at 175 Devonshire Street, Boston. By the beginning of 1884, Lamson carriers were used "in over 250 of the busiest stores in the United States". As the company grew and absorbed rivals there were several changes of name. In March 1883 it was consolidated with the Holbrook manufacturing company of Chicago and the Automatic parcel delivery company of New York to form the Lamson Cash Railway Company.

In 1885, after buying out the Continental Cash Car company of Baltimore and the New York Store Service company, it became the Lamson Store Service Company with a capital of $5M. It then had all the business in the US and in the world in cash and parcel carriers with the exception of five or six small companies and its foreign business comprised 60 or 70 stores. It owned 125 patents and offered three systems - the original ball system, the level wire system and the bundle-carrying system. . In 1888 it became the Lamson Consolidated Store Service Company. By 1893, over 5,000 firms had already been served with Lamson devices, either on a rental or sale basis.

Lamson's cash register business was transferred to the National Cash Register company (now NCR Corporation) at Dayton, Ohio along with the Kruse Cash Register company of New York in March 1893.

Lamson adopted an agressive policy toward rivals. There were prolonged arguments in 1884 with the Dennis Cash Carrier Company over ownership of the patents for the ball and switch (point) with Dennis threatening to prosecute users who had systems installed by Lamson. The Martin & Hill Cash Railway Company wrote that "a certain Store Service Company, having been defeated in a lawsuit with us, is obliged to take desperate methods to keep its customers from exchanging their systems and to prevent merchants from leasing the Martin & Hill Cable Cash Railway". An Indenture of Trust between the American Pneumatic Service Company (which owned 64,978 shares of the capital stock of Lamson) and the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, dated 1 October 1903, stated that the Lamson Consolidated Store Service Company, by reason of its ownership of stock, owned and controlled the following companies:

Bostedo Package and Cash Carrier Company, Bostedo Pneumatic Tube Company, Barr Cash and Package Carrier Company, Martin Cash Carrier Company, Meteor Despatch Company, Automatic Delivery Company, Standard Store Service Company, Fuller Cash Carrier Company, McCormick Cash Carrier Company, Martin and Hill Cash Carrier Company, Lovejoy Store Service Company, United States Store Service Company, Transit Apparatus Company, Algie Company, American Cash Railway Company, Gilman Cash Railway Company, Merchants Store Service Company, Rapid Service Store Railway Company, Skinner Cash Transmitter Company.

The name was simplified to the Lamson Company Inc. in 1912. By ca. 1917, over 100,000 stations of wire carriers were in use and there were 23 sales and service offices throughout the US plus two in Canada. The General Office was 100 Boylston Street, Boston and there were works in Lowell and Toronto, Canada.

William Lamson died in 1912. William Fessenden Merrill became vice president and general manager of Lamson in 1916. The following year he became president and in 1922 he moved the business from Boston to to Syracuse, NY. By then it was a subsidiary of the American Pneumatic Service corporation. In 1941 the company became the Lamson Corporation of Delaware.

Lamson became involved with pneumatic tube systems through the purchase of several specialist companies and were exhibiting their own systems by 1893. One of the competitors they bought out was the Bostedo Package and Cash Carrier Company.

The company was acquired in 1965 by Diebold Nixdorf, which produces automatic teller machines for banks. In 1980 it was purchased by two French brothers, Jacques and Louis LePage. By 1990, Lamson produced only centrifugal blowers and employed 150 in Syracuse and 186 worldwide.