The first Waterman pencils

George Kovalenko has just posted a reference to the earliest mention of a Waterman-made mechanical pencil found to date. It appears in The American Stationer, November 26, 1921, p. 26:

[Waterman Boston store] Manager Chaplin is introducing to private trade a new pencil which he predicts will be a 1922 winner. It is of hard rubber, contains 18 inches of lead in six leads, light in weight, non-breakable, non-dentable and is equipped with a regulation Waterman pocket clasp.

Prior to this, the earliest mention I had found was this note in The Rotarian of March 1922, p. 142:

The eighth annual Press Breakfast of the Tampa Rotary Club, entertaining the editors of the state and distinguished visitors, was held February 8th. William Jennings Bryan, now of Florida, was the guest of honor. The breakfast was served to a crowd of more than 400 at the Tampa Bay Hotel . . . More than a hundred valuable prizes were given to the guests. . . Every person present received a Waterman automatic pencil and numerous other souvenirs.

Waterman president Frank D. Waterman was, of course, an active Rotarian, and owned the Fountain Inn in Eustis, Florida. What is not clear is if the pencil was yet in general release at the time of the Rotary event (the November 1921 citation is explicitly pre-release). One would think that Waterman would not have hesitated to release and promote such a promising product, yet there is a surprising paucity of mentions of the new pencil throughout 1922. It is only from 1923 on that ads and other references proliferate. The first mention of the pencil that I have been able to find after the Rotary reference is in The Jewelers' Circular of September 6, 1922, p. 156b, in a description of the Waterman exhibit at the American National Retail Jewelers' Association convention:

A general line of fountain pens and pencils were shown, but the display was arranged to demonstrate the possibilities of expensive pens in a jewelry store. Pens trimmed with solid gold and with gold trim set with diamonds up to a selling value of $250 were shown. Mr. Waterman takes pride in his pencil because it "looks like a pencil, feels like a pencil and writes like a pencil."

A full-page Christmas ad then appears on p. 120 of the September 20 issue, featuring "Waterman's Combination Writing Sets" (two ringtop sets are shown, one plain black with gold filled trim, the other silver Filigree). It is apparent that by this time Waterman was already producing pencils in all sizes and patterns.

Though it was published only in November, the brief profile of Waterman's new pencil that appeared in Business Equipment Topics, vol. 52, p. 252 may have been based upon an earlier company press release. The illustration certainly does seem to show one of the earlier examples of the new pencil.

Waterman's Automatic Pencil

The L. E. Waterman Company have entered the field of automatic metal pencils with a product which we illustrate herewith. The simplicity of the new product is shown by the fact that it has but six parts: barrel, hard rubber point section, cap, alluminum [sic] propeller case, lead propeller and lead magazine. Backed by reputation for good goods and national advertising, which will be undertaken soon, the Waterman Automatic pencil is offered with assurance of a demand which should prompt dealers to stock them.

We can hope that discovery of further records, many perhaps not yet digitized, will help fill in the chronology of the Waterman pencil. One big question, however, is raised not by the written record, but by actual early examples. In particular, there are Waterman pencils that are clearly early production, in appearance very like the earliest illustrations, with a mechanism that is peculiar and entirely distinct from the typical design as described by Gabriel Larsen's US patent 1,511,225, filed May 17, 1922 and issued Oct 14, 1924.

An example of one of these mystery pencils is shown above. The interior of the hard rubber barrel is threaded; a block with matching threads protrudes through the slot in the aluminum inner barrel and is attached to a propelling pin. When the nose cone, which is attached to the inner barrel, is turned, the block is pushed forwards. This would push the entire inner barrel out of the outer barrel, but it is held in place by the end cap, which screws into the inner barrel. This design is actually simpler and more easily serviced than the standard mechanism. All examples that I have seen, however, have a puzzling idiosyncrasy -- they appear to be left-handed: holding the pencil tip-upwards, one turns the nose cone counterclockwise to extend the lead, not clockwise. It must have been intended that the end cap be turned instead, since when assembled, the inner barrel, nose cone, and end cap all rotate together -- and turning the end cap clockwise (the same motion that turns the nose cone counterclockwise) to extend the lead does feel "correct" to a right-hander. This is certainly the way all crown-operated mechanisms work, epitomized by the market leader, the Eversharp, but it appears that the designers of this mystery pencil failed to anticipate that given both a turnable crown and a turnable cone, consumers would overwhelmingly reach for the cone.

I have not yet been able to find a patent that describes this mechanism, nor have I found an example with imprints that help much in dating. The temptation is to identify this as an early design, but caution is always wise. The fact that the Larsen patent application was filed only several months after Waterman began pencil manufacture may be telling, however. Would Waterman really have waited so long to file? And is it possible that publicizing the new pencil was put on hold for several months after the decision was made to redesign it in response to customer complaints that it was made backwards?

PS To be expanded upon later, but it should be noted that while fountain pens and mechanical pencils were occasionally sold together from an early date, this remained the exception until Wahl, after acquiring Boston, began to systematically market pens and pencils as sets. Prior to this, few companies that made fountain pens made mechanical pencils, and even long after pen-pencil sets became the norm in the 1920s, the extent of specialization was great enough that most penmakers continued to buy pencil mechanisms from established mechanical pencil firms.

The collapse of B. B. Stylo

The Bird Bill Pen Company (previous post here) had little success with its namesake product, but found a solid seller in its stylographic pen, the B. B. Stylo. At the beginning of the 1920s it all seemed very promising, yet in the space of some two years something went wrong and by the end of 1924 the company had gone bust.

Office Appliances, Dec 1921, p. 122

There are still many pieces missing from the puzzle, but the reason for the collapse now seems clear. While B. B. Stylo was making pens, the real action was in flogging its overpriced stock to naive investors. It seems the prime culprit was Arthur A. Smallwood, an operator best known for his machinations in the early film industry ("greedy" and "scheming", in a modern historian's assessment, along with his brother Raymond C.). Smallwood's connection to the company becomes visible only relatively late in the game, when he joins Albert S. Zimmerman and his son Albert I. (replacing his mother, Cora D.) as a B. B. Stylo director in the 1922 Brooklyn and Queens, New York, Copartnership and Corporation Directory (p. 390). Yet the shenanigans had already begun years before, as the following ad from the New York Herald (Nov 2, 1919, p. 20, col. 2) demonstrates.

Nib talk

The manner in which tipping material was applied to nibs a century ago often differs markedly from how it is done today. This is particularly pronounced with broad nibs; two good examples recently crossed my repair bench, one of which is shown above (the other was a Waterman slender #2 New York nib, mounted in a 402 straight-cap). At first glance, it seems there is no tipping at all.

Flip the nib over, however, and it is apparent that there is a healthy chunk of tipping present -- but attached so as to be covered with gold when viewed from above. The tip has not been worn down; rather, the tipping material was soldered into a recess ground into the underside of the nib's tip, so that the gold of the nib wraps around and supports the tipping material to the greatest extent possible.

This nib is a New York-made Mabie Todd #3, from a slip-cap eyedropper with an ebonite underfeed and a gold overfeed. Note that the forepart of the nib's underside has deliberately been roughened: a carryover from gold dip pen nib manufacturing practice, soon abandoned for fountain pen nibs.

A Waterman clip discovery

A friend acquired the pen shown above earlier this year. Our page on Waterman overlay patterns describes it as follows:

An uncommon Filigree pattern from c. 1905-07 . . . found in both gold filled and sterling silver; a solid gold version was also offered in #4 size. This sinuous, abstract scrolling pattern appears to have been the first Filigree offered in materials other than fine silver.

Uncommon as this pattern is, this pen has a feature that is more unusual still. The clip bears a "PAT. APL'D FOR" imprint -- a mark that I had postulated existed, but had not found despite several years of searching.

I had suspected that Waterman had begun using its "Clip-Cap" clips prior to September 26, 1905, the date of issue of the US patent for that clip design (800141). But since the patent was granted relatively quickly (the application was filed on April 7, 1905), the "PAT. APL'D FOR" clips would have been made for less than six months -- and given how scarce they have proven to be, perhaps for a much shorter time than that. The picture below shows a clip bearing the post-issuance imprint with the September 26, 1905 date.

Our story has an unfortunate postscript. The pen with the "PAT. APL'D FOR" clip was recently stolen and is still missing. If it should resurface, do not hesitate to let me know so I can alert its owner.

1942 Sugar Bowl pin

An ongoing project, eventually to be published in the PCA's magazine, The Pennant, has centered on a small number of early Parker 51s with smooth sterling caps and applied emblems for the 1942 Sugar Bowl. I'm not a football fan myself, but since I own one of these pens, I've picked up a few bits and pieces of related ephemera over the years. Recently I acquired a Missouri pin, complete with ribbons and attached stamped metal football. The football arrived rather squashed, probably because the pin had not been packed very well, and in straightening it out, I noticed something.

You may have to click on the detail above, but the football is clearly stamped, "JAPAN". The attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place just a bit over three weeks prior; this was probably one of the last such trinkets, at least for a good long time.

A flashy taper

Pearl tapers on Victorian dip pens are common; abalone, much less so. And alternating pearl and abalone? This is the first example I can recall seeing.

While alternating pearl and abalone slabs were commonly applied to magic pencils and to fountain pens, for some reason it just wasn't done for tapers. Perhaps the work was just too tricky to shape the ends without unacceptable rates of chipping or breakage. In any event, I know I'll be handling this one carefully.

Salz as a celluloid pioneer

The question of who started making celluloid fountain pens, and when, is somewhat reminiscent of discussions of who discovered America. Sheaffer is the equivalent of Columbus here: others had done it before, but without any lasting effect.

Everyone knows that Leboeuf started using celluloid several years before Sheaffer, but other companies were using it by the second decade of the 20th century -- though as a substitute for black hard rubber, rather than for its potential for color.

Years ago I noticed that some of the earliest colorful celluloid pens were Salz Brothers ringtops, often marked "GERMANY" on their caps. I didn't have any way of dating them precisely, though, nor did I have access to any advertisements or catalogs that would help. But tonight I found this, in The American Stationer of March 11, 1922, p. 20:

By the later 1920s, the question wouldn't have needed to be asked; it is telling, though, that in 1922 such a pen would have required some effort to find, and that the one manufacturer that this major trade journal could identify was Salz.

Held and B.B. Stylo

Most pen collectors have never heard of John Held and the Held Fountain Pen Manufacturing Company. Held's pens are not often seen, and they are best known for their distinctive "swing-filler" -- a short metal lever that does not pull away from the barrel, but pivots sideways instead. Despite years of effort, pen historians still have not been able to find any record of a patent or patent application for this lever, which also appears in identical form on pens made by B.B. Stylo and Williamson. The example below is a B.B. Stylo; the lever assembly is an elegantly simple design consisting of a piece of rod stock bent to shape, with the lever end stamped into a rectangular section. It is threaded through the pivot hole in the side of the barrel, and its end is snapped into place into a matching pivot hole on the other side. The lever is lightly sprung so that its end snaps into a shallow recess, preventing accidental movement once the pen has been filled.

Held was talented, multifaceted, and tirelessly enterprising. Much biographical information has been unearthed by Pete Sacopulos, who published a short article on Held in the summer 2010 issue of The Pennant (online access requires PCA membership), but one big question has been why Held pens all seem to bear a New York imprint. Held himself lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, operating a shop there that sold and repaired fountain pens and offered engraving services and stationery. None of the biographical sources I have found give any indication of any New York connections, and census records from 1900 to 1930 consistently place him in Salt Lake City, though it should be noted that only the 1920 census lists his profession as a manufacturer of fountain pens (the 1910 census has him as an engraver and stationer, which certainly does not preclude involvement in other related ventures).

A very special overlay

Even though they were manufactured in large quantities, filigree overlays required a great deal of hand work. Still, it is notable how minor the variations are from example to example -- and how rarely one finds a truly custom-made specimen. This pen is a Heath Tribune, a known model with a gold filled overlay identical to that supplied to Parker for its #16 pens. The cap overlay on this particular pen, however, was specially made to incorporate a monogram into the filigree pattern. Coincidentally, my friend Luiz recently acquired a very similar Parker 16, also with a monogram worked into the cap filigree pattern.

Two unusual Held pens

Held pens are scarce and their background story is not yet clear. I will be posting some new research results shortly, but for now let's take a look at a couple of rather unusual Held designs.

The first is rather roughly made, with a cap and barrel of aluminum decorated with zigzag incisions. The filling mechanism is the characteristic Held "swing-filler", where the lever pivots sideways rather than pulling away from the barrel. The lever is the only place marked "Held", and the marking is crude indeed.

The feed is a conventional wide-finned design, with the addition of a couple of vent holes drilled through. The nib is a contemporary Mabie Todd #2. Overall, the whole thing looks experimental -- a mockup thrown together using conveniently available parts.

The second pen is much more refined, and is fully marked. It was advertised as the Bird Bill Pen; the earliest advertisements I've found appear in 1915. I will discuss the ads and production dates in the upcoming Held post, and will concentrate on the pen itself here.

Capped, it appears conventional enough, though the sharp-eyed will notice the Held swing-filler lever.

Uncapped, one is suddenly confronted with what looks like a Parker 51 but 25 years too early: a hard rubber pen sold in the same year that Waterman introduced its first lever-fillers, equipped with a radically streamlined hooded nib.

The Held's hood might better be described as an integral overfeed. The feed channels are clearly visible with the nib removed. There is no underfeed, only a plug that holds the nib in place.

The nib itself is entirely conventional, though modified with an additional vent hole that immediately recalls the added holes in the other Held's feed. Others had been experimenting with similar vent holes on larger pens around this time, and Wirt had adopted a standard configuration comprising a ventless nib and a vented underfeed. Held's multiplication of vents goes still further.

Even though this was a production pen, it came with a warranted nib. Perhaps Held felt there was no sense in paying for imprinted nibs for a pen design in which the imprint would be covered.