C. Pat?

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This might seem like an unlikely one to have made the cut as I was deciding which out off Ed Fingerman’s Victorian collecdtion I could afford to buy:

I’ve got scads of pencils like this - nearly all are marked Mabie Todd, together with John Mabies October 3, 1854 patent date, a reference to patent number 11,762 (regardless of whether it is also equpped with the sliding dip pen nib:

This one, though, bears no reference to Mabie’s ubiquitous patent.  Instead, it says something else:

“C. Pat. 51" This one has me scratching my head.  True, a few of these are marked with Nelson Goodyear’s hard rubber patent of May 6, 1851 – but that would be “G. Pat.,” wouldn’t it?  And try has I might to get a G out of that imprint, it just isn’t there – it’s clearly a C.  There were just four patents issued in category 401 that year, according to American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910, none of them taken out by or assigned to anyone by the name of C.

Could it stand for “Canadian?”  Well, I’m pretty sure the 51 is a date, and the Dominion of Canada wasn’t formed until 1867 (and I checked - Canadian patent number 1 was issued in 1868). 

I have a theory.  I’m pretty sure the “Pat. 51" refers to a patent issued in 1851 – that brings me back to Nelson Goodyear’s patent for hard rubber.   Except it wasn’t called “hard rubber” in 1851

Goodyear referred to it as “India-Rubber” in the title, but in the first paragraph he calls it “Caoutchouc or India-Rubber”:

In fact, when Goodyear’s nephew Austin G. Day took out a patent for a slightly different formulation in 1858 (see “That Third Interesting Holland” at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/that-third-interesting-holland.html), that’s exactly what Day called it:

I think this imprint is shorthand for Nelson Goodyear’s 1851 patent for Caoutchouc.