I’m really excited to share today’s blog post. I recently received an email from Chris Blake with some amazing history that I don’t believe has been shared previously online. Chris shared that his great uncle was Ivan C. Blake, who was the CEO for Yardney Electric Corp. As I understand it, much of Ivan’s work was focused on work that Yardney did as a government contractor.
If you recall, I did a former post on Yardney and they produced silver ingots that were given as gifts. They ingots were minted at the direction of Ivan and given as corporate gifts. Each ingot came with its own little box and included a certificate. The original bar belonged to Ivan with serial number 00000 and had his initials engraved on the bar. Chris made the point in our correspondence that Yardney was famous for their silver-zinc batteries and this may have been the impetus for the silver ingot gifts for employees and friends
The following passage was written by Chris through our correspondence, and I’m please to share this history with our readers.
“My great Uncle (like all of his brothers) was a renaissance man who had a comprehensive knowledge of many things. He was born and raised in Knoxville TN. My Grandfather (Ivan’s little brother) said that he had a photographic memory. He spent his career inventing and producing batteries. He worked on batteries as early as 1945. At that time, he worked for the Burgess Battery Company. By the 1960s, he had moved on to working on government contracts at Yardney Electric Corporation, where he became president and CEO. One particular project which I remember him speaking about the production of new batteries capable of storing vast amounts of power from the reactors on nuclear submarines. That was cutting-edge technology at the time, and likely would’ve been protected at least to an extent by the government to prevent those advancements from falling into the wrong hands. Because of the secrecy inherent in such work, we do not know a lot about it. There is a massive gap in records of his professional activity from 1956-1973. We do know that Yardney was involved the production of batteries for missiles and many rockets (Delta II/IV and Atlas V). We have at least been able to confirm that Ivan was involved with NASA through this report: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19740009678/downloads/19740009678.pdf . That project took place the same year that the first bars were produced (1973.)
While working at Yardney, Ivan was asked to help negotiate with a union leader. We presume the negotiations must have gone well, as he ended up marrying her, and they remained married until her death from cancer. In his final months, he lived here in Knoxville until he also died of cancer around 2002. “
I can’t thank Chris enough for sharing this. I believe everyone will really appreciate learning about Ivan and how these ingots originated. Hope you all enjoyed this!
