Return of the Red-Legged Devil

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This was the last thing I bought at the DC show last August.  After John Hall and I had packed everything up, we were making our last swing through the room to say goodbye to all of our friends when I passed by Rich Lott’s table.  I had been there several times over the course of that long weekend, and I’d bought several things from him . . . but I hadn’t noticed this one before:

I might have seen it, but disregarded it thinking it was broken.  Even after four days of active showhunting, though, I was still easily distracted by shiny objects . . . and I trailed off mid-sentence from saying a farewell to pick this one up and fiddle with it.

And I noticed something strange.  No, it wasn’t broken, and yes, it operates different from anything I’m used to seeing:

The entire outer barrel is a sleeve which advances the pencil.

All I could tell at the time – because I’d packed up my loupe, too – was that this thing was more than a little bit weird.   It wasn’t until I got home, got settled in and found my magnifier that I was able to see what was stamped on the inner barrel:

Patent Applied For, and a hallmark that I’ve come to recognize as a stylized “WAL,” for William A. Ludden, the “Red-Legged Devil” of Civil War fame (the original article on William, and his dad, can be found at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-red-legged-devil-or-is-it-devils.html).

Ludden has several patents to his credit listed in American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910.   All have spiral drives which advance the mechanisms by magic – this one is simply a straight slider, operated by moving the outer shell down rather than moving the innards.

It could be that someone else was the inventor of this design, and Ludden either acquired or licensed rights . . . but I don’t think so.

Not if the inspectors at the patent office were awake, because this had been done before:

John Hague’s 1839 patent (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/01/sleeping-at-switch.html) did the same thing.