The pencil itself was conclusively traced back to the Hoge Manufacturing Company by the patent date imprinted on the cap, as well as the cap’s distinctive look which was protected by a separate Hoge design patent. But the use of the name "Modern" had me a little confused and left me wondering whether Hoge might have made pencils for A.A. Waterman & Co., which traded under the name "Modern Pen Company" (emphatically so, after the courts ordered A.A. Waterman to add "not connected with the L.E. Waterman Company" after its name).
The time this would have been made – right around 1920 – was a fascinating time in A.A. Waterman’s history. The company was reorganized as the Chicago Safety Pen Company in 1921, and the companion pencils the new company offered were marketed as the EVRDA (that’s a play on "everyday"):
The name is different, the outward appearance is different (no Hoge design-patented cap here), and thanks to that skeleton view in the catalog, we can compare the guts of an EVRDA to a Modern:
Notice that instead of a coiled wire for the screw drive, the EVRDA has a drive tube which has a spiral cut into it – the little stuff like that is the difference between infringement and innovation. These are two different pencils. Does that rule out the possibility that Hoge also made a different pencil for A.A. Waterman? No, I don’t have any idea who made the EVRDA – in fact, I don’t have any reason to think that the Chicago Safety Pen Company didn’t make their own pencils yet.
But I DO know now that Hoge’s "Modern" had nothing to do with A.A. Waterman.
To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.
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