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As we left things yesterday, your hapless researcher was tearing his hair out trying to find Edward Todd’s design patent for the firm’s line of ruler pencils by reading his own book, American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910; yet no design patents with Todd’s name on it were issued around January, 1897. I was positive I put it in there.
I didn’t, and as it turns out, that was with good reason.
Fast forward to spring of last year, when I received a message from Aaron Svabik, the fellow behind Pentiques.com. I’ve bought pencils over the years from my fellow former Ohioan, and he had a few laying about needing a good home to show me. This was one of them:
Not that I’d mind having an extra Edward Todd ruler pencil on hand, but I’m a collector by design and a dealer only because I have duplicates, so I asked him what made this one different. He showed me what was on top:
That’s a company logo for Otis elevators, and I’ve had an affinity for those ever since I first wrote about that great orange Dur-O-Lite with a perpetual calendar, topped off with that same logo (I first showed off John Coleman’s example in 2014, and then I couldn’t help but brag a little when I found my own example at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/11/three-more-interesting-dur-o-lites.html).
This wasn’t the only pencil Aaron was offering, and the price for the whole bunch was reasonable enough, so Otis the Second found his way to the museum. And when it arrived, I noticed something odd:
This one says “Pat. No. 68281,” not “Pat. January 19, 1897. Since at the time I wasn’t posting articles here, I didn’t think too much of it and filed Sir Otis away alongside his next of kin.
But wait a tick . . . after I tore my hair out a bit trying to find the January 19, 1897 patent for yesterdays article, I finally found the Watts/Smith utility patent – and it was number 575,671, not 68,281. Either a digit is missing or . . .
That’s the design patent I was trying to remember!
Edward Todd, Jr. did get a design patent for the ruler pencil, just as I remembered. But he didn’t apply for it until March 5, 1925, and it wasn’t issued until September 22, 1925.
I did remember it right - Edward Todd (albeit Junior) did secure a design patent for his ruler pencil, and I did include it in my patent book. The reason it wasn’t in American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910 was because I put it where it belonged, in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945.
But why would Todd apply for a design patent for something that had been patented more than 25 years earlier? There’s one easy answer: Todd’s pencils were popular, and now that the utility patent had expired, he was facing competition:
On November 25, 1925, James J. Murphy of New York, New York applied for utility patent 1,607,097, for something which appears to be a pencil identical to Todd’s venerable ruler pencil. It wasn’t assigned to Edward Todd & Co., and I’ve no idea what possessed the patent office to grant this application on November 16, 1926, given the 1897 Watts/Smith patent and Todd’s design patent. Nor have I ever seen this number imprinted on any ruler pencil by any manufacturer – my bet is that both Todd’s design patent and this one were swiftly determined to be invalid, since both the outward appearance and the internal design had long been in the public domain.
Take, for example, Exhibit A:
This ruler pencil has Edward Todd’s distinctive upturned ball clip, but note that it has a pointy nose shown in both the Todd design patent and Murphy’s 1925 drawings.
Note also that rather than the graceful, Victorian-styled numbers, this one has spartan, sans serif numbering on the side. There’s no Edward Todd imprint on this one and no patent number, but there is an imprint, on the innermost section right next to the nose:
Cartier. Edward Todd, Hicks, and LT & Sons all made writing instruments for prominent jewelers such as Tiffany and Cartier. Larry Liebman, who has a family connection to the Tamis family, has seen the remaining Edward Todd equipment, which was inherited by Tamis after Edward Todd folded in 1932, and the Tamis archive includes advertisements for ruler pencils made for Cartier.
However, there’s no known association between Edward Todd and these:
These have a long, straight clip similar to what you might find on a Hutcheon:
But the imprints are for a firm known more for kitchy novelty pencils, not high-quality writing instruments:
I’ve written about the Pen-N-Pencil Co. of New York here in 2012, in connection with the company’s “Marvel” line of lower-quality pencils with lucite magnifiers as well as in connection with another lower tier pencil with a smoker’s toolkit stowed away inside the barrel:
The floodgates were open. After World War II, the ruler pencil was further appropriated for production in post-War Germany:
The top example is our sterling Pen-N-Pencil, but the other three are German productions. One of these is marked Bavaia and “Rofeco,” and that’s the most prevalent variation. Maybe as a fig leaf to discourage copycats, it bears an imprint including “Des. No. 68281,” a reference to Todd’s 1925 design patent.
One is marked only “Germany / US Zone,” a reference to allied occupied Germany, before it was formally referred to as West Germany:
And the third, marked “Pilgrim Novelty Company New York,” is also made in Germany:
And . . . horror of horrors . . . it includes a scale in the metric system!
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