The crow-and-marble trademark on every Akro Agate box reads like an origin story. The company's own federal filing, and a federal judge thirty years later, both tell a different one.
The short version
- Akro Agate is the name collectors reach for first when they mean an old-fashioned glass marble, but the company's own federal trademark filing shows it started out reselling a rival's marbles, not inventing the machine that made them.
- M.F. Christensen's twin-roller marble machine, U.S. Patent 802,495, was filed in 1902 and granted October 24, 1905 — six years before Akro Agate's Akron founders filed their own trademark.
- That trademark, AKRO A AGATES, was first used in commerce February 27, 1911, filed March 23, 1911, and registered August 22, 1911 — a firmer date than the "1910 or 1911" spread across secondary company histories.
- The seamless spiral collectors call a "corkscrew" traces to two patents Ira H. Freese filed in 1922 and 1923 and was granted in March 1925, not to the "1924 breakthrough" repeated in collector guides.
- In 1937, a federal court hearing Akro Agate's own infringement suit against a rival ruled the Freese patent claims void outright — too broadly written to enforce, and anticipated by an earlier machine nobody at Akro built.
- Loose corkscrew marbles ask $12 to $14 apiece today. A boxed, mint set of 25 sold for $2,603 at auction in October 2023 — original packaging moves the price, not the glass by itself.
On this page
- What collectors mean by "Akro Agate"
- The trademark that dates the company
- The patent that came six years earlier
- How Akro Agate actually started
- The corkscrew patents, and the lawsuit that voided them
- How to tell a real Akro Agate marble
- The look-alikes
- Where the records disagree
- What they sell for now
What collectors mean by "Akro Agate"
Marble collectors use "Akro Agate" as shorthand for an entire category of early twentieth-century American machine-made marbles: corkscrews with a single spiral or several running pole to pole, oxbloods with their dark rust-red filaments, patches, slags, and the milky "moonie" opaques that turn up in nearly every found box of old marbles. The company's trademark, a crow flying through the letter A while carrying a marble in its beak and one in each claw, appeared on cardboard boxes and on the underside of the pressed-glass dishes and flowerpots Akro also made starting in the 1930s. It never appeared on the marbles themselves. No Akro Agate marble carries a maker's mark of any kind, which is the first fact any authentication has to work around rather than with.
The company most people mean when they say "Akro Agate" ran from Akron, Ohio, then from Clarksburg, West Virginia, and closed in 1951. What gets left out of most short histories is what the company was doing in its first years, and how much of the actual invention behind its best-known marbles belonged, on paper, to somebody else.
The trademark that dates the company
Company histories give Akro Agate's founding as 1910 in one account and 1911 in another. The federal trademark record settles the question more precisely than either. AKRO A AGATES, serial number 71055262, was filed with the U.S. Patent Office on March 23, 1911, and registered August 22, 1911, with a stated first use in commerce of February 27, 1911. The registration covered "games and playthings; gymnastic and sporting articles not included in other classes; decorations for Christmas trees," and it stayed in force until it expired in 1992. Whatever informal manufacturing happened before that date, February 1911 is the earliest documented point at which Akro Agate marbles were already being sold under that name.
The company itself was founded in Akron by three men: George T. Rankin, Gilbert Marsh, and Horace C. Hill. Rankin and Marsh conceived of selling marbles retail through Marsh's own shoe store; Hill supplied the manufacturing know-how. "Akro" is a contraction of Akron, the company's original home. The crow-carrying-marbles trademark is commonly explained by collector sources as a pun on that name — a crow, in other words, in place of "a-kro" — though this guide could not locate a primary company statement confirming that the pun, rather than a coincidence of the bird motif, was the design's actual intent.
The patent that came six years earlier
Machine-made glass marbles did not begin with Akro Agate. Martin Frederick Christensen, a Danish immigrant who had settled in Akron in 1880, filed a patent application on December 19, 1902, for a machine that rolled molten glass into perfect spheres between two counter-rotating grooved rollers, one of them spring-mounted so it could yield as the finished marble hardened and discharge without damage. It was granted as U.S. Patent 802,495 on October 24, 1905. Christensen and his son Charles formed the M.F. Christensen and Son Company in Akron in 1903 to build and run the machines; by 1914 the firm was turning out roughly a million marbles a month. Production stopped for good not long after World War I, when a disruption to Akron's natural gas supply cut off the fuel the furnaces needed — a closure this guide found reported consistently in secondary accounts of the company, though without a company record locating an exact final date.
By the time Akro Agate's own founders filed their trademark in 1911, Christensen's machine had already been patented for six years and in commercial production for eight. Akro did not invent the process that made a mass-produced glass marble possible. It arrived after that problem was already solved, in the same city, by somebody else.
How Akro Agate actually started
According to the Akro Agate company reference maintained by the collector site Marble Collecting, Akro's earliest business was not manufacturing at all: it began by repackaging M.F. Christensen's own marbles for retail sale, before it built machinery of its own. Only after that did Akro develop the equipment and processes that would eventually make it, in the words of the West Virginia Encyclopedia, "among the nation's most productive marble makers."
The company moved from Akron to Clarksburg, West Virginia, in 1914, chasing the same two resources — cheap natural gas and local glass sand — that Christensen's own Akron operation would run short of within a few years of Akro's departure. Once in West Virginia, Akro built out its own line of variegated marbles, and it is that later production, not the reselling that started the company, that collectors mean today when they say "Akro Agate."
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The corkscrew patents, and the lawsuit that voided them
The pattern most identified with Akro Agate is the corkscrew: one or more ribbons of color spiraling from pole to pole without ever crossing. The technique behind it — injecting a stream of differently colored molten glass into the center of a larger flowing stream, before the whole thing is cut and rolled into a sphere — was patented by Ira H. Freese in two filings: a method patent, U.S. 1,529,947, filed April 15, 1922, and an apparatus patent, U.S. 1,529,948, filed March 5, 1923. Both were granted the same day, March 17, 1925.
Akro Agate also came to hold a second, later patent covering an improved marble-rolling machine: U.S. 1,761,623, filed March 22, 1926, and granted June 3, 1930, to an inventor named John F. Early and assigned directly to Akro Agate Co. Early's design offset the helical grooves on the machine's rollers so the forming glass rotated on constantly shifting axes rather than one fixed axis, producing a rounder marble.
In 1937, Akro Agate sued a competitor, Master Marble Company of Anmoore and Bridgeport, West Virginia — the same firm that had exhibited millions of marbles at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair — for infringing both the Early and the Freese patents. The case, Akro Agate Co. v. Master Marble Co., 18 F. Supp. 305 (N.D.W. Va. 1937), was decided against Akro Agate on every point. Judge Baker found that Master Marble's machine lacked the offset-groove feature at the center of Early's 1930 patent and used stationary delivery buckets rather than Early's oscillating guide, so there was no infringement there. The Freese claims fared worse: the court held them void outright, ruling they failed to specify the cross-sectional shape of the injected color stream closely enough to be enforceable, and that in any case the technique had already been anticipated by an earlier, uncredited machine built around 1920 or 1921 by a group the opinion names only as Miller, Nivison, and Weiskopf.
The process behind the pattern collectors most associate with Akro Agate — the corkscrew — was never, as a matter of law, Akro's alone to control. A federal court said so directly in 1937, fourteen years before the company stopped making marbles at all, and Akro kept selling corkscrews under its own name for the rest of its run regardless.
How to tell a real Akro Agate marble
Because no Akro Agate marble carries a printed mark, authentication rests entirely on how the glass itself was made, not on a stamp to check.
- No seam. Akro's mature corkscrews and slags characteristically show no visible mold seam, unlike the cut-off pontil marks left on M.F. Christensen's earlier, hand-fed single-color marbles or the fine white feathering that shows up in Peltier Glass Company's swirls. Very early Akro corkscrews, from before the Freese-patent process matured, can still show faint feathering at the spiral ends; later examples are smoother.
- Popeyes. A transparent clear-glass base carrying opaque white filaments plus two additional colors, most often red and yellow or green and yellow.
- Oxbloods. An opaque, dark rust-red with fine black filaments running through it, layered over a range of base colors — clear, milky white, chocolate brown, silver, limeade, egg yolk yellow, carnelian, blue, orange, or lemonade.
- "Ade" corkscrews. A translucent, slightly milky off-white base carrying translucent colored spirals — the marbles collectors call lemonades, limeades, orangeades, and cherryades.
The look-alikes
| Maker | How it differs |
|---|---|
| M.F. Christensen & Son (Akron, 1903–c.1917) | Akro's own predecessor and, briefly, the marbles Akro itself resold. Simpler single- or two-color designs, with cut-off pontil marks at the poles from hand separation that Akro's later, fully machine-finished production does not show. |
| Christensen Agate Company (a separate, later Ohio maker, unrelated in ownership to M.F. Christensen & Son) | Produces some of the machine-made marble market's most valuable pieces, known to collectors as "guineas" and "flames." Runs to brighter, more saturated color combinations over a shorter production span than Akro's, and regularly outprices Akro Agate at the same auctions today. |
| Peltier Glass Company (Ottawa, Illinois; "National Line Rainbo") | Shows fine white feathering within its swirl patterns that Akro's mature corkscrews and slags lack. |
| Vitro Agate (Vienna and Parkersburg, West Virginia, 1932–1987) | Continued making marbles for decades after Akro closed in 1951. Its tri-color patch marbles can be nearly indistinguishable from Akro's own, though Akro's surface colors typically read duller by comparison. |
Where the records disagree
The founding year is given as both 1910 and 1911. One collector reference dates Akro Agate's founding to 1910; the West Virginia Encyclopedia and the Glass Encyclopedia both give 1911. Neither this guide nor the sources it drew on could locate a company incorporation record to settle the question directly. The company's own federal trademark filing does not resolve it either, but it does put a hard, documented floor under the later date: organized retail sale under the Akro Agate name was already underway by February 27, 1911, whatever informal activity may have preceded it.
The "1924 Freese improvement" predates its own patent by a year or more. Several marble-identification guides date the seamless color-injection technique behind the corkscrew to 1924. The two Freese patents that actually describe the method were filed in 1922 and 1923 and were not granted until March 17, 1925. Both dates can be true at once — a manufacturer can put a patent-pending process into production well before the patent office acts on it — but this research located no document, filing, or dated advertisement from 1924 itself. The date appears to function as collector shorthand rather than a citable event, and is presented here as unconfirmed.
A federal court's 1937 ruling undercuts the corkscrew's own origin story. The Freese patents were not merely found uninfringed by a competitor — they were ruled void, for insufficient specification and for being anticipated by an earlier, uncredited machine the opinion attributes to a group named only as Miller, Nivison, and Weiskopf, working around 1920 or 1921. This guide could not independently trace that group beyond the court's own reference to them. If the ruling is read at face value, the technique most associated with Akro Agate's name may not have originated inside the company at all — a possibility the collector literature surveyed for this guide does not raise.
What they sell for now
Loose, single Akro Agate corkscrew marbles currently ask $12 to $14 apiece on eBay, regardless of whether they date from before or after the Freese-patent production era. No verified realized sale price for a single loose marble, as opposed to a set, could be located for this guide; the figures above are asking prices only, and are labeled as such.
Original factory packaging changes the arithmetic by roughly two orders of magnitude. A boxed, mint-condition set of 25 Akro Agate "Cardinal Red" marbles — 7/8-inch red slag glass, manufactured in Clarksburg between 1925 and 1932 — sold for $2,603 at Block's Marble Auctions in October 2023, against a presale estimate of $1,000 to $2,000. That is a genuine realized price, not an asking figure.
Akro Agate is not the top of the machine-made marble market even so. At the same auction house, twelve of the top twenty highest-priced lots in one sale went to Christensen Agate Company marbles rather than Akro's, and the house's own all-time record, $19,200, went to a handmade German marble — a reminder that "machine-made and American" and "most valuable" are not the same category, even within a hobby Akro Agate did as much as any single company to popularize.
For another case where the patent record and the popular company history disagree, see this shop's guide to the Dietz cold-blast lantern. For a different object whose accepted "first" turns out to have a forty-one-year-older patent behind it, see the guide to the PhoneMate 400. For a photographic process with its own rival-patent dispute from the same general era, see the tintype guide. See more Field Guides
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Sources
- U.S. Patent 802,495, Martin F. Christensen, marble-making machine, filed December 19, 1902, granted October 24, 1905, for the Christensen patent record.
- Martin Frederick Christensen, Wikipedia, for Christensen's biography and the M.F. Christensen and Son Company's founding and production history.
- AKRO A AGATES, Registration No. 0083121, Serial No. 71055262, Justia Trademarks, for the trademark filing date, first-use date, registration date, and goods description.
- Akro Agate Glass, Glass Encyclopedia, for Akro Agate's founders, founding story, and trademark description.
- Akro Agate Company, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, and Marbles, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, for company founding, relocation, closure, and the broader West Virginia marble industry.
- Marbles by Akro Agate Company, Marble Collecting, for the company's early reselling of Christensen marbles and identification detail.
- Akro Agate Marbles, BuyMarbles.com, for seam, pattern-name, and look-alike identification detail.
- U.S. Patent 1,529,947 and U.S. Patent 1,529,948, Ira H. Freese, variegated-glass method and apparatus, filed 1922 and 1923, both granted March 17, 1925.
- U.S. Patent 1,761,623, John F. Early, marble-making machine, filed March 22, 1926, granted June 3, 1930, assigned to Akro Agate Co.
- Akro Agate Co. v. Master Marble Co., 18 F. Supp. 305 (N.D.W. Va. 1937), for the infringement suit, the patents at issue, and the court's holding.
- Block's Marble Auction Sets New House Record, Antiques and The Arts Weekly, for the boxed Cardinal Red set's realized price and the Christensen Agate and record-lot context.
- eBay listings for individual Akro Agate corkscrew marbles, for this guide's asking-price figures, each labeled as an asking price rather than a confirmed sale.
- Wikipedia, for Martin F. Christensen's Marble Machine Patent illustration used as this guide's figure (image placed by this session unseen; orientation and legibility should be confirmed before any larger use).
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