Scranton Button Company

The Scranton Button Company was a U.S. corporation, founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1885. For much of its early history it was controlled by Canadian immigrant William Connell. Connell's family moved to Scranton when he was a small child, and at the age of 7 he left school to work in the coal industry to help support his family. With time he moved up to supervisory positions and became rich enough to buy the company when its charter expired, and Connell became an influential Scranton businessmann, serving on several boards of directors. He purchased the Scranton Button Company shortly after its founding. Besides buttons, the company manufactured parts for telephones and advertising novelties. By 1915, the company was pressing 3 million buttons per day. Since many of the buttons were made out of shellac, the company had the ability to work with this material and in the 1920s it branched out from making buttons into pressing gramophone records out of the same material. It offered full-service record production to any retailer that desired its own label.