THE VALVE BAG IS 111 YEARS OLD!
by Ken Goodworth
(Paraphrased from an Article by Edgar Hoppe, 1942)

     Near the end of the nineteenth century, the late Adelmer Bates was a salesman of salt. His title was Saltcellar. Evidently, he was a very good salesman and was selling salt much faster than his company was able to package it. When he visited the plant to see where the bottleneck was, he found baggers filling cloth bags with scoop shovels, weighing bags, and hand sewing the open end. He knew there had to be a better way to handle bag filling and bag sealing, and his commission check was being affected by the lack of efficiency. The bagging superintendent said that if Bates could find a better way, they would be glad to use it! One night he had a dream in which the idea of the valve bag was revealed to him. He awoke, jumped out of bed, tore off the tail of his shirt, and with the aid of some pins made the first crude Bates valve bag.

     Patent applications were filed in July of 1898. A few years later, patents were granted covering the broad idea of the invention. Though the valve bag was developed for packaging, there was yet no way to fill the bag. Bates built a crude wooden frame bagging machine (many equipment patents followed), but had no money or means to advance his ideas. He eventually teamed up with Mr. John Cornell who was the proprietor of the Hyde Park Hotel in Chicago. Cornell was an adventuresome soul and teamed with Bates to further his inventions. Formal arrangements were made, and the Bates Valve Bag Company was organized in 1901. By 1907, Bates had licensed most of the major salt manufactures to fill small valve bags on his bag filling machines. In an effort to expand the business, Bates attempted to build a bagging machine to bag or package flour, but had very little success. He soon realized that the largest market for his bag and bag filling machine combination was in the rock products industry (cement, plaster, and lime). He made modification to his basic bagger machine to allow it to handle these specific products. These resulted in numerous additional patents. Bates was firmly entrenched in the industry by 1909, with a machine that could fill bags at an unheard of rate.

     Bates and Connell developed a paper valve bag. This also received a patent (15 patents were awarded to the company over a 14 year period). He licensed the technology to a number of paper companies. His bag filling and bag closing machines were sold worldwide, but in the United States, the machines were leased with the agreement that customers pay between $0.75 and $1.50 per thousand bags filled. The Bates Valve Company enjoyed much success from 1910 until 1929 when the company was acquired by St. Regis Paper Company.

     2001 commemorated the centennial of the founding of our direct ancestor, the Bates Valve Bag Company. Some of our competitors claim ties to Bates. In reality some of today¡¯s competitors were given permission to use the name by St. Regis during a period of time when St. Regis had developed a strong network of international licensees. They were given the right to manufacture both the valve bags and bag filling equipment for which St. Regis held patents. However, they were not given the rights to all of the intellectual property of Bates or St. Regis; this became our inheritance.

     St. Regis Paper Company purchased the Bates Valve Bag Company in 1929. Champion International purchased the St. Regis bag division in 1984. In 1985 Stone Container Corp. purchased the group, and held it until 1998 when they merged with Jefferson Smurfit to become Smurfit-Stone. In 2006 Smurfit-Stone spun off its bag manufacturing and bagging equipment groups to Texas Pacific Group which formed Altivity Packaging, LLC. In 2008 Altivity merged with Graphic Packaging. Finally in May 2009, Premier Tech Systems acquired Graphic Packaging bagging division and made it its own product line. STONEPAK was born.