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Scot Reader (ebay: sreader3)
Circulation
The total number of T206 cards circulated is anyone’s guess. However, cigarette sales data published in the U.S. government’s Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Tobacco Industry, Part III Prices, Costs and Profits (GPO 1915) provide circumstantial evidence that the number could have reached an astounding 370,000,000!
In 1910, the total number of cigarettes produced in the U.S. was roughly 10 billion. Cigarettes were divisible at the time into three classes: domestic, Turkish blend and Turkish. Domestic cigarettes were made from the bright yellow domestic tobaccos of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Turkish blend cigarettes were made from a mixture of these domestic tobaccos with Turkish leaf tobaccos grown principally in Turkey. Turkish cigarettes were made entirely from Turkish leaf tobaccos.
Most of the 10 billion cigarettes produced in 1910 were in the domestic class. And here, ATC was the dominant player. ATC sold fully 5.3 billion domestic cigarettes that year, under major brand names such as Piedmont, Hassan, Mecca, Fatima and Sweet Caporal. While the popularity of the once dominant Sweet Caporal brand was waning, the output of some of the newer domestic brands--Piedmont, Hassan, Mecca and Fatima--exceeded 1 billion cigarettes each.
Using the one billion production number for Piedmont cigarettes in 1910 as a marker, one can extrapolate a T206 circulation number in the neighborhood of 370 million. In particular, it is known that there were 10 cigarettes in a Piedmont pack, and that a Piedmont pack contained one T206 card. Assuming pack-only distribution of Piedmont cigarettes, and further assuming every Piedmont pack had a card, the number of Piedmont-backed T206 cards produced in 1910 is estimable at about 100 million. Furthermore, it is known that Piedmont backs are on approximately half of all T206 cards. Thus, one can assume that the total number of T206s produced in 1910 was in the neighborhood of 200 million. Assuming an additional seven months of production in 1909 and three months in 1911 at equivalent rates to the 1910 production, and the total production estimate for T206 cards nearly doubles to a whopping 370 million.
Survival
While T206 production quantities likely dwarfed those for most if not all other card sets ever made, the high production volume has been offset by a low survivability rate. A low survivability rate can be assumed for several reasons. First, T206 cards were distributed as a premium rather than as a primary product. Most early 1900s cigarette purchasers were interested in a smoke, not a small cardboard insert depicting a baseball player. As painful as it is to ponder for those of us who love T206, tens of millions of T206 specimens were probably discarded without so much as an initial viewing. Second, T206 cards were distributed to an adult population. Most adults are far less interested in saving novelty items than kids. Third, baseball cards had no economic value at the time. There was accordingly no economic incentive to keep them. Only those who had developed a passion for a relatively new sport--or at least knew someone else who had--would have bothered to hold on to the cards.
All this is not to mention the significant obstacles to survival posed in the near-century bridging original distribution with the present day. These include the passing of several generations of T206 owners, countless moves, harsh storage conditions and World War II paper drives, to name just a few. It must be remembered that T206 cards must have survived all this despite their fragility and worthlessness from an economic standpoint until only recently.
One speculation-laden analysis would place the surviving number of T206 specimens somewhere in the 1.6 million range. Such an analysis extrapolates that figure from an estimate of the surviving quantities of two rare subjects, Demmitt (St. Louis) and O’Hara (St. Louis). These subjects are known only with the Polar Bear reverse; however, they are not notably scarcer with that back than other 350-only subjects. The Polar Bear back is seen on about 6.6% of the total population of 350-only series subjects. Thus, if one assumes that roughly 200 of each of these rare subjects remains in existence, and further assumes that survivability rates for these subjects conform with those of other subjects, the surviving quantity of a typical 350-only subject is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000. Finally, assuming for the sake of rough-and-ready calculation uniformity of survival among series, the total number of T206 specimens in existence today is estimable in the general vicinity of 1.6 million. Of course, if one assumes there are 400 survivers each of Demmitt (St. Louis) and O'Hara (St. Louis), the estimated total number of T206 cards under this analysis doubles to 3.2 million, or about 6,000 examples of a typical subject.
Accordingly, of the likely hundreds of millions of specimens initially produced, the number of T206 cards in existence today may reside somewhere the low millions (maybe half of one percent of the original production), with the vast majority of these survivors being in lower grade.