Orkin
American pest control company
Orkin is an American pest control company that was founded in 1901 by Otto Orkin. Since 1964, the company has been owned by Rollins Inc. Orkin has held research collaborations with universities around the country and with organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dating back to 1990 for pest biology research and pest-related disease studies.
History
Otto the Rat Man
Orkin was founded in Walnutport, Pennsylvania in 1901 by Otto Orkin, who began selling rat poison door-to-door at age 14. One of six children of a Latvian immigrant family, Orkin was responsible since an early age for shooting and poisoning rats to keep them out of the family's food stores and away from their farm animals. At age 12, Orkin began experimenting with different methods to poison rats in order to discover the most effective ones. At the age of 14 Orkin borrowed 50 cents from his parents to buy arsenic in bulk, and he began consulting with apothecaries about the best proportions and mixtures to use. His initial rat poison formulas contained a combination of arsenic and phosphorus paste, mixed with fresh food scraps or red-dyed flour or sugar (so that it would not be mistaken as edible). He began offering his preparations to his neighbors for free.
Orkin carried in what would become his signature black satchel a number of measured amounts of poison in paper bags that bore the word POISON along with a drawing of a skull and crossbones.
“Orkin” enters the record as american pest control company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Orkin, American and pest can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Orkin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Orkin, American and pest provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7102943. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1964 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Orkin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.