Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Zoss List News

UPDATE 6/22/2017:  The new Zoss List is now up and running, thanks to a dedicated crew of volunteers - current subscribers have been automatically added (you can unsubscribe if you'd like).

I'm getting the digest version (I've received 9 so far), and they originate from zosslist-bounces@zosspens.com; on behalf of; zosslist-request@zosspens.com

I'm told we're having trouble convincing the good folks at Google that we aren't spammers, so if you aren't getting messages, here's what you can do:

Send Zosslist mailing list submissions to
              zosslist@zosspens.com

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
              zosslist-request@zosspens.com

You can reach the person managing the list at

              zosslist-owner@zosspens.com

-----

Original post:

Many of us are learning with great sadness that Tom Zoss, who has run the Zoss List for longer than I've been collecting, has decided not to continue running the list.

I was even more sad to learn that the PCA, which originally planned to take over and start running the list when Tom stepped down, decided not to continue the list.  According to Ron Zorn, the board's decision was due to the large number of online forums and facebook groups that are available, and the comparativcly light traffic seen on the old listserv Zoss List.

The List, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a list you can subscribe to that will periodically send you emails with postings from other members of the group.  Some call it antiquated ... I call it comforting, and I've got a number of friends who get the Zoss emails who don't mess with facebook or the internet in general.   It's still, in my book (yet another antiquated form of communication), a valid and useful means for us to stay connected.

There's a group of us who don't want the Zoss list to stop, and we're going to try to do something about it.  I don't know yet what form this will take, whether we will continue the old list with Tom's blessing, or whether we'll start a new one.  So far there's 7 or 8 of us standing up to divide the labor, and I'm sure there's room for more.

For now, on this last day the list is active, I sent a message to it directing Zossers who don't want to lose touch here, as a place where you can find the latest news and updates concerning the List.  I'll post news here as I know it ...


I Finally Get To Write About These

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

I’ve had these pictures taken since January, 2015:


What’s had me just itching to tell you more about them was what’s on the top of the bottom one in that first picture:


That Indian Motorcycle logo is the real deal, from the late teens or early twenties.  As an original piece of motorcycle history, it cost me more than I care to admit – but there was no hesitation when the opportunity arose, since Indian bikes are a passion of mine and I’ve got a pair in the garage.  This first one is actually a 2001 Kawasaki Drifter, which I’ve modified so heavily that when I took it into a dealership for brake work, they told me at first that they didn’t work on vintage Indians:


My other Indian is a 2013 Chieftain, the first one sold in Columbus, Ohio.  I heard that the new dealership in town was receiving a shipment and took off time from work to go over on the day they were scheduled to arrive, to buy the first one straight off the truck:


If you’ve been to any cold weather pen shows east of the Mississippi, you’ve probably seen me walking around in a leather riding jacket with “Indian” emblazoned across the shoulders – not because I’m trying to look like a tough guy, but because it’s the warmest jacket I own, perfect for those bracing evening cigar-smoking gatherings.

Yeah.  A pencil with an Indian logo is going to be mine.   The other two pencils along these lines have the word “Bamby” on top.


The most likely explanation I have for the word “Bamby” is that this too is an advertising piece, for Bamby bread:



What’s held me back from telling you about these pencils is the part I wasn’t able to explain.  On the side of each is a manufacturer’s imprint:


“WHCo.”  All my efforts to learn what this meant failed, and so these pictures slipped into the dead letter office awaiting the day when I would be illuminated.

That day came this week, and from an unlikely source: an eBay seller going by Qweeds Collectibles, who had for sale this later plastic pencil, marked “W&H Co.” on the clip:



Often I’m chuckling rather than marveling at the descriptions online sellers use to describe the pencils I’m finding online.  In this case, however, while the pencil itself doesn’t provide any intrinsic clues to indicate what “W&H Co.” means, this seller had the knowledge to fill in the gap.  He (or she) titled the listing “Whitehead & Hoag Mechanical Pencil,” describing the company as a Newark, New Jersey firm which was “the king of the advertising novelty business in the tri-state region early in the 20th Century.”

While all my searching for this brand by initials was turning up nothing of value, once I had the full name in hand, it didn’t take much poking around to verify the accuracy of Qweed’s attribution.  Whitehead & Hoag was founded by Benjamin S. Whitehead and Chester R. Hoag in 1892, and is best remembered for making political and advertising buttons, pins and medals to order.  The company remained in business until 1959.

I wondered whether “W&H Co.” was the same outfit as “WHCo.,” but I’m satisfied that it is.  To verify that the company was engaged in something writing instrument related, I checked American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945 to see if any pen or pencil patents were assigned to Whitehead & Hoag –  and I found one:


I remember thinking to myself as I was writing the book, “Huh.  Another Conklin,” but since there was obviously no relation between the Toledo pen and pencil manufacturer and Edward D. Conklin, who invented and patented an accommodation clip with a built-in button for advertising, the rest of that thought had long since escaped me (as did the likelihood that W and H might stand for Whitehead & Hoag).

Yeah, I know.  Read your own damned books, Jon.

Conklin’s patent was applied for patent number 1,183,436 on November 6, 1915 and it was issued on May 16, 1916 – assigned to The Whitehead & Hoag Company of Newark, New Jersey.  That’s perfect for establishing that Whitehead & Hoag was involved in the writing instruments when my metal pencils were made, and it isn’t surprising that pencils wouldn’t sport both a button on an accommodation clip and an advertisement inset into the top.

Of course, now I’m going to have to find an Indian Motorcycle accommodation clip to go with these!

Monday, May 29, 2017

Another DeWitt-LaFrance Connection

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

Joe Nemecek jokes with me that by the time I'm done researching pencils, I will have concluded that DeWitt-LaFrance and the Rex Manufacturing Company made everything.

I did take one small step in that direction earlier this month.

Late on Sunday at the Chicago Show this year, an acquaintance of mine brought around a case of things he had for sale – mostly pens, but one was accompanied by a pencil and all I could say was “I’d like to have that.”


Those clips practically jump out at me whenever I see one, as long as I’ve been a devotee of DeWitt-LaFrance, the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm whose founder, David LaFrance, was the inventor of the Sheaffer Sharp Point pencil before he joined forces with William DeWitt and went on to manufacture the Superite and a host of other brands before the company was sold to Carter’s Ink Company in 1925.  That’s why the Carter’s line continued that distinctive clip:


A nice, clean DeWitt-LaFrance set is always something I’ll snap up when they are reasonable . . . but when I took a closer look at this, “reasonable” quickly became relative to the context:


The Eisenstadt Manufacturing Company was a jewelry firm in St. Louis, most famous for the company’s hard rubber pens with a “backwards” lever – the end of the lever faced the point of the pen rather than the end of the barrel.  Not so with this set: the pen is a dead ringer for a Superite, right down to the nib:



Yep.  That’s S for Superite.  

I have only found one other Eisenstadt-marked pencil.  I posted about it here more than five years ago, when this blog was only a few weeks old.  That example was a member of the Rex Manufacturing Company family of pencils:



After I posted about that first article on fountainpennetwork.com, one commenter added “Some late Eisenstadts no longer sported this clip (using a Dewitt-LaFrance clip instead). Most of the pens seem to have been manufactured in the mid 1920s. The pencils may perhaps provide additional clues as to chronology.”

Indeed they do.  My DeWitt-LaFrance made Eisenstadt pencil is marked patented on both on the clip and the barrel, which indicates that the pencils were made after November, 1922 (when the latter of the two patents, for the pencil itself, was issued) and before the company was sold to Carter’s Ink Company in 1925.  My Rex-made example has all four of the Rex patent dates on it, which means it was made in 1926 or later.

So, Eisenstadt pens and pencils with DeWitt-LaFrance clips were made before the hard rubber pens with sweeping clips and backwards levers (the lever itself being patented in 1924).

About a year ago, Silviu Pincu wrote and posted the most detailed history I’ve seen of the Eisenstadt Manufacturing Company (his article can be found at https://issuu.com/silviupincu/docs/eisenstadt), and the story the pencils tell squares perfectly with the evidence Silviu published: he found no evidence of any advertising for Eisenstadt pens before 1924, and when the advertisements do appear, they are for the black hard rubber pens (with a suggestion that Sheaffer might have had something to do with the manufacture of the pens).

Sunday, May 28, 2017

An Unbelievable Stroke of Luck

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

This isn’t really a third installment in the Woodwards & Hale/Woodward & Brothers story, but it is kind of a neat footnote that grew out of it.

There’s been a few times over the years when I’ve wished, before I published an article on an obscure brand, that I had searched the online auctions to see if there were other examples of the brand out there that I might want to add to my collection.  While there aren’t thousands of people reading this blog every day, there are enough out there who become intrigued by one of my articles and snap up all the other currently available examples.  On more than one occasion, readers have turned up examples even nicer than the one I’d written about, and they write me excitedly to show me what they found.

So, as the first installment on Woodwards & Hale article was set to publish, I ran a search for “Woodward pencil” at one of the auction sites, and I got a hit: this trio of Victorian writing instruments scraps was available for a song.


The pencil at the top is marked “Woodwards”:



I really liked the distinctive finial at the top end:


But there’s just one little problem.  Actually, it’s not a little problem ... for most people, it’s a deal-killer:


It’s missing the nozzle.  Victorian pencils typically have a nozzle which unscrews for easier cleaning, and they frequently go missing.  Unfortunately, for pencils made before standardized mass production made parts readily interchangeable, a missing nozzle is usually a one-way ticket into the parts bin, since they come in a seemingly infinite variety of sizes and threadings.  It’s nearly impossible to find a suitable replacement.  I’ve joked on occasion that if you have two of these pencils, they take three different nozzles.

Still, since I didn’t know whether these were a common sight or if I’d never see another, I decided to bite on the lot.  Who knows, I thought – maybe I’ll get lucky.

Before I put away my new Woodward & Brothers and consigned the other two items to my junk box, I took a closer look at them to be sure nothing was worth saving.  That short pencil, with a spike on the other end, is not a masochist’s pencil (although a masochist might enjoy stabbing himself or herself while doing the Sunday crossword).  It’s one of the reversible ends of an Eagle No. 569 compass/divider:


Not bad, I thought.  I’m an omnivore for all things Eagle, and maybe I’ll find an interesting variant of an Eagle Compass someday, one that’s missing a leg.  Into the Eagle compass drawer went that one.

That third piece, though, didn’t look to be much good for anything.  It must have belonged to a different sort of omnivore – one who chewed on whatever was in hand as the lunch hour approached:


Fortunately, the piece wasn’t marked, so I didn’t shed too many tears about the sorry state of this example.  These are kind of neat – dozens of early makers turned things like this out.  The barrel telescopes out to make it a bit longer, and the end contains a reversible pencil:


Hey, and it still has the tip attached – maybe that will come in handy sometime, I thought.

Wait a tick . . . 


That tip fits the Woodwards pencil . . . perfectly:



Joe Nemecek and I talked about this after I was excited to let him know I’d hit the Victorian pencil tip lottery.  He wonders if this is really a match, with that little notch between the nozzle and the pencil.

Joe might be right . . . but finding a tip of the correct size, material and threading is a one in a .... well, maybe not one in a million, but one in a hundred chance – if you can find a hundred to try.  Finding a tip that works in the same lot of random stuff in an online auction?   OK, maybe now we’re pushing one in a million.

Besides, with that tip in place, it looks damned nice now next to my Woodwards & Hale.


Friday, May 26, 2017

"Woodward's Patent"

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

(Note: this is the second installment in a series of articles, the first of which begins at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-brothers-woodward.html). 

Once I had pieced together the history of Woodwards & Hale, later Woodward & Brothers in hand, something nagged at me a little bit.  Here’s David Nishimura’s picture of the examples in his collection:


After the first installment of this article ran, David added this comment:

Some further notes on the Woodwards in the photo, from top to bottom:
1. WOODWARDS & HALE imprint, gold brocade "FORGET ME NOT" barrel, GF crown, pale yellow faceted stone
2. WOODWARDS PATENT imprint, center section turns to extend nozzle, pale violet faceted stone
3. WOODWARDS & HALE imprint, silver brocade "FORGET ME NOT" barrel, dark purple faceted stone
4. WOODWARDS imprint, perpetual calendar, simple silver seal end
5. WOODWARDS & HALE imprint, perpetual calendar missing top ring, silver waffle seal end
6. WOODWARDS & HALE imprint, perpetual calendar, onion finial
7. WOODWARDS & HALE imprint, perpetual calendar, simple silver seal end

David’s description as to that second one from the top is particularly illuminating, because it makes sense of Thomas Woodward’s patent number 1,625 issued on June 10, 1840:


David doesn’t have an example of Woodward’s second patent, number 1,823 issued on October 14, 1840 – but that was more or less just a tab to keep parts from unscrewing themselves and from the looks of things, it might not have worked very well, anyway.  Still, one would be nice to find!

Now we get to the part that nags at me.  Both of Woodward’s patents were issued in 1840, after the dissolution of Woodwards & Hale in 1839 . . . but Woodwards & Hale was making pencils as early as 1833 (and, if the composition date of the ad is correct, as early as June, 1832):


So whose pencil was Woodwards & Hale making in the early 1830s?

The convention of identifying products as patented in those early days was different than in later decades, when an actual patent date or number would be stamped on an item.  Before the 1850s, an innovation would be marked, as is the case with David’s example, with “Woodward’s Patent.”  We’ve seen that with other earlier pieces as well, such as those marked “Lownd’s Patent” and “Addison’s Patent.”

If you were licensing someone else’s patent, however, you wouldn’t particularly want their name stamped on your product.  For example, if Woodward & Brothers were making pencils using Thomas Addison’s design, stamping “Addison’s Patent” on the side would only advertise for a competitior!

But Addison’s patent wasn’t issued until 1838; six years earlier, Woodwards & Hale was making pencils like the other ones shown in David’s picture, as well as my example:


Whose design was this?  The list of likely suspects is a very short one.  In American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910 (shameless plug), I include a section in which all known patents are organized by date, and only 27 patents for any type of writing instrument were issued in the United States prior to 1840: of those, only 8 were for pencils:

Joseph Saxton’s patent of April 11, 1829;
William Jackson’s patent of July 27, 1829;
John Hague’s patent of August 16, 1833;
James Bogardus’ patent of September 17, 1833;
Elwood Meeds’ patent of June 26, 1835;
Jacob Lownds’ patent number 32 of September 22, 1836;
Thomas Addison’s patent number 736 of May 10, 1838;
John Hague’s patent number 1,291 of August 16, 1839; and
George Simon’s patent number 1,364 of October 12, 1839 (assigned to Stockton).

Of these eight, we can rule out the last four - I’ve written about the Lownds patent and this isn’t it (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/10/about-time.html), and the same goes for Hague’s patent of 1839 (Joe Nemecek’s example was featured in http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/01/sleeping-at-switch.html).  The Addison patent is for a screw drive advance, not a slider, so that isn’t right either, and Joe Nemecek has an example of the Simon (Stockton) patent, which was a little different and was issued too late in the game to represent the pencil Woodwards & Hale made nearly a decade earlier.

The last five patents are tougher to compare, since the patent office fire of December 15, 1836 destroyed all record of four of them.  The only one that survived was the Bogardus patent, and even though it is specifically titled “Pencil Slide & Case,” it shows a mechanism advanced by a worm drive, not a simple slider:


That leaves Saxton, Jackson, Hague and Meeds.  Three of the four of these – all but Hague – were issued in Philadelphia.  In the early Nineteenth Century, would a Philadelphia patented pencil be manufactured in New York?  Maybe, but I think it unlikely, since the industry was much more localized at the time.

So let’s take a closer look at Hague’s 1833 patent.  I’ve never seen an example, and the only evidence I’ve found that they were ever made was a “hard times” token bearing a date of 1837:


On the reverse are the words "S. Maycock & Co. / 35 City Hall Place N.Y. / Everpointed Pencil Case Manufacturers Saml. Maycock John Hague."  This is to my knowledge the only evidence of a Hague pencil possibly being made pursuant to Hague’s earlier 1833 patent – maybe they were unmarked sliders (which would defy convention, since you’d expect them to be marked “Hague’s Patent”); maybe Maycock was making something different or unpatented, with Hague riding along as a partner.  However, what these tokens suggest is that while Hague was an inventor, he was not a man with the manufacturing capability to turn out the product: for production, he was dependent upon others.

Samuel Maycock shows up in Longworth’s 1836-37 New York City directory, as a “pencilm.” at the address shown on the advertising tokens: 35 City Hall Place:


So where was Maycock in 1832 and 1833, when Woodwards & Hale were making pencils such as those David and I have found?


He isn’t listed.  His first appearance in Longworth’s is in the 1834-1835 directory.

And where was John Hague in 1832-1833?  He was a general silversmith, located at 177 Greenwich:


The Longworth’s directory for 1833-1834 is interesting.  John Hague remains listed as a silversmith, but he’s moved to 662 Water Street:


Meanwhile, there’s a listing for a “Thomas & Hague,” pencil case makers, at that same address:


If it was Hague’s pencil, why wasn’t it “Hague & Thomas?”  Perhaps for the same reason suggested by Hague and Maycock – that Hague was dependent on partners to see his pencil into production?

Hague’s association with Augustus Thomas was brief.  Notice of the dissolution of their association appeared in the New York Evening Post on May 24, 1834:


The 1834-1835 directory continues to list John Hague as a silversmith at 662 Water Street, but Augustus Thomas had moved: he’s listed as a “silverpencil mak.”  at an unspecified location on Cherry Street, with his home address listed as “Attorney”:


It isn’t until the 1835 directory that we find John Hague identifying himself as being a pencil maker, at the 35 City Hall Park address shared with Samuel Maycock:


In the 1838-1839 directory, S. Maycock & Co. remains listed as a pencil manufacturer, but the firm’s location had moved to 221 Pearl Street:


Hague, however, remained at 35 City Hall Park:


By 1842, Hague had relocated to 12 Dutch:


It was at this location that history records another event suggesting that John Hague’s business sense was not as refined as one would expect after more than a decade in the business.  On January 15, 1844, the New York Evening Post reported that two men conspired to persuade Hague to accept a promissory note for pencils Hague sold in the amount of $150.00, from a signer who turned out to be a “man of straw.”


The two men were later convicted, with one receiving a lighter jail term due to his advanced age.

It is perhaps unfair to make assumptions about a person based on a fragmentary record of events transpiring more than a century and a half earlier.  However, the picture of John Hague that emerges from this little evidence suggests that Hague was a general silversmith without either the manufacturing capability or the business sense to make pencils on his own; twice he was involved in short-lived partnerships to manufacture pencils, and in neither of them was he the headliner, even though it was he who patented a pencil design.  Even after more than a decade in the trade, he was duped by a simple confidence scam.

It’s possible that simple slider mechanisms such as my example and most of David’s were never patented by anyone in the United States, but were merely American copies of Mordan and Riddle’s 1822 patent in England.   However, if Woodwards & Hale get their start making pencils which were patented here, John Hague’s 1833 patent is the strongest possibility.  Hague was likely to be persuaded to license his design; Hague apparently lacked the ability in 1832 to manufacture his pencils in quantity; and Woodwards & Hale would have been unlikely to stamp Hague’s name on their pencils - particularly after Hague became involved with Thomas & Hague, S. Maycock & Co. and then identified himself as an independent pencil maker.

It’s conjecture, but a lot of the conjecture I throw out there eventually pans out.  Whether evidence which surfaces later confirms or refutes my theory, that the simple slider pencil was patented in the U.S. by John Hague in 1833, it’s a win either way since the truth always seems to work its way to the surface.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

The Brothers Woodward

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

At the Chicago Pen Show this year, a friend asked an odd question of a pencil collector: would I be interested in a large collection of Victorian dip pens?   I told him I didn’t know enough about them to formulate an intelligent offer, but he said he was selling the bunch for a friend and he asked if I would just look through them while he browsed around the show. 

What the heck, I thought.  I was in a room full of people that could offer me a bit of guidance, and maybe I’ll learn something.

I did.

One of the brains I picked was that of David Nishimura – who lent me his advice and also some comfort.  When my friend swung by again, I made the offer David suggested, negotiations were swift and the next time David came by, I offered him the pick of the litter in case there was something in the bunch he couldn’t live without.

You can usually spot David at shows by the turquoise piece of headgear he wears, with built-in magnifiers, and you know when he’s serious because he swings it into place and you’re looking at the top of his head for a while.  Down the lens swiveled as he started pulling things out of bags one by one, meticulously examining every detail.  At one point he handed one of the few pencils in the group to me.  “You’ll want to keep this,” he said without looking up:


I’d noticed this one in the lot, but I didn’t think much of a “Woodwards & Hale” since I still try to limit myself to American pencils.


“It’s British, isn’t it?”  I asked.

“No,” the top of David’s head said without missing a beat as he continued to browse through the next items in that bag.  “It’s American.  And it’s early.”

It is and it is, of course.  In fact, now that I’ve researched it, I’ve found that it’s probably the earliest piece in my collection.  I’d never seen one, but David obviously has: he sent me a picture of his other examples by the maker to share with you.  Some of these are marked “Woodwards & Hale,” like mine, and others marked simply “Woodward’s Patent”:


What little history there is concerning Woodwards & Hale might have been lost were it not for the fact that one of the Woodwards, Thomas Jr., had a son who became moderately famous.  John Woodward earned his reputation during the Civil War as a Colonel at Gettysburg, later rising to the rank of General and becoming Inspector General for the State of New York.  In 1897, Elijah R. Kennedy wrote John B. Woodward: A Biographical Memoir -- “for private distribution,” suggesting that the work was more of a vanity project commissioned by the family than the result of Woodward’s rock star status.  While the work is largely a compilation of John Woodward’s letters, it does contain, on pages 5 and 6, passing mention of the Inspector General’s family history.

According to this account, Thomas Woodward, Sr., John’s grandfather, was an established metalworker in England who become increasingly dissatisfied with life (and particularly taxation) in England.  After he emigrated to the United States, he wrote home to the mother country: “Worried, my old neighbors, as you are, by tax-gatherers of all descriptions, from the County Collector, who rides in his coach and four, down to the petty Window Peeper, the little miserable spy who is contstantly on the lookout for you, as if you were thieves; surrounded as you are by this vermin, big and little, you will with difficulty form an idea of the state of America in this respect.  It is a state of such blessings, when compared with the state of things in England, that I despair of being able to make you fully understand what it is.”

Thomas Sr. sent his son Thomas Jr. (John’s father) to the United States in 1818 to see whether life in the former colonies would be more appealing, and in 1819 the entire Woodward family, including all three of his sons, Thomas Jr., Charles and George, arrived in New York.  According to Kennedy’s account, Thomas Jr. became a silversmith “directly after they were settled here,” and formed a partnership with his brothers and “a Mr. Hale” soon afterwards.  

Although the dates provided by Kennedy are not specific, a letter to The London Guardian published on December 6, 1823 refers to “George and Thomas Woodward (two worthy Englishmen currently residing in New York)” who the writer encountered on October 27, 1819 – corroborating the Woodwards’ arrival in the former colonies sometime during that year.

Samson Mordan did not receive his patent for the first mechanical pencil until 1822 in England, so if Woodwards & Hale had anything to do with writing instruments early in their partnership, they would have crafted silver holders for cedar pencils.   The earliest reference I have found to the partnership making mechanical pencils was this advertisement, which appeared in The Long-Island Star on January 2, 1833; in the lower right hand corner, note that the advertisement appears to have been composed on June 6, 1832:


Woodwards & Hale was dissolved by agreement in January, 1839, and published notices of the dissolution, and the continuation of the business by Thomas, Charles and George as Woodward & Brothers at the same location, 146 Jay Street, appeared in the New York Evening Post:


The account contained in Kennedy’s book says that the dissolution was the result of Hale’s retirement, which appears to be corroborated by a notice in The Long-Island Star on June 8, 1840, directing creditors of a deceased William H. Hale to present their claims to his Executor, Peter G. Taylor:


After Hale’s retirement, Thomas Woodward applied for and was granted two of the earliest patents for mechanical pencils, number 1,625, issued on June 10, 1840:


and number 1,823 issued on October 14, for a “Security Ever-Pointed Pencil Case” which included a doohickey supposedly making the parts less likely to become unscrewed from the pencil and lost:


The firm also diversified its operations.  According to Kennedy, its most profitable products in addition to Ever-pointed pencils were a “Diamond Pointed Gold Pen” (that’s nearly eighty years before the Diamond Point we know today) as well as a “Shielded Safety Pin.”  I did find several advertisements running in 1848 for the firm’s gold pens:


Brooklyn city directories are not as readily available as those for the city of New York, but both the 1843-1844 and 1848-1849 directories list Woodward & Brothers at the 146 Jay Street address:



Kennedy says that the Woodwards were in business “for nearly forty years,” but the evidence I’ve found doesn’t support that.  In 1852, Thomas Woodward was elected to the board of directors for the Brooklyn Institute; while the 1853-1854 Brooklyn City Directory still lists Woodward and Brothers and Thomas as a pencilcase manufacturer, there’s no mention of Charles, and George is listed as a “machinist.”


On March 27, 1854, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle contained an auction notice for the property at 144 and 146 Jay Street, “well known as the gold pen and pencil manufactory of Woodward Brothers”:


By 1855, Trow’s New York City Directory included the hinterlands of Brooklyn.  John Cann and David Dunn took out a prominent advertisement in the directory that year for their new silversmith shop located at 144/146 Jay Street – but writing instruments were not among their wares:


George and Thomas appear in the 1855 directory, but no longer in the business of making pencils: they are listed as importers under the name of Woodward & Brother (singular) located at 10 Ferry:


Although I never found a death notice for Charles, I believe he passed away sometime in the early 1850s: on March 12, 1867, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the death of Maria Woodward in Brooklyn, who was described as “widow of Charles Woodward, late of Birmingham, England,” and there’s a Mary A. Woodward listed as a “widow” in the 1855 directory.  George died on June 6, 1875 at the age of 84; notice of his passing was published in the Daily Eagle on June 8.

As for Thomas, who the evidence indicates was the Woodward in Woodward & Brothers, the Daily Eagle reported on January 15, 1873 that he had passed away on January 14 at the age of eighty.  A couple weeks later, on February 3, the Brooklyn Institute published a tribute to their former board member and friend:


Note:  there's more to the story.  The next installment is published at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/05/woodwards-patent.html)