One of the Best Names for a Pencil

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Joe Nemecek and I rarely call dibs on each other when something comes along online, but last fall I took that rare step.  I was sure Joe wouldn’t be to concerned, since he already had one one of these, but alas . . . he had already bid.  After he had won it, he had three – so when we got together at the Ohio Show, we struck a deal for him to share the wealth a little bit.  But before his trio was split up, we took some nice photographs of the three of them together:

These hard rubber pencils were made by the Inkograph Company, best known as a prolific manufacturer of stylographic pens.  The pencils, however, were called the “Leadograph”:

The Inkograph Company was the brainchild of inventor Joseph Wallace, whose earliest patent was for a stylographic pen, originally applied for on June 18, 1910.  The application was renewed on December 18, 1913 and patent 1,085,714 was issued February 3, 1914.

Jim Mamoulides has done a nice writeup on Inkograph over at PenHero.com (the article link is https://www.penhero.com/PenGallery/Inkograph/InkographInkDCator.htm), and he notes some confusion as to when the company was founded – the company’s own literature provides varying dates between 1914 and 1918.  The company’s trademark history indicates the earlier of them: Wallace’s trademark registration for “Inkograph” was applied for on April 7, 1914 and in it, he claimed to have been using the mark in commerce since March 16, 1914:

The American Stationer reported on the Inkograph line of stylographic pens in its May 26, 1917 issue, providing further proof that 1918 can’t be right.

The article doesn’t say that the company is new, and only refers to the pen’s “new” patented features, when Wallace’s patent was already three years old – must have been a slow week in stationer’s news.   Suffice to say it appears Wallace went into business under the name Inkograph Company in 1914, although it might have taken him some time to get production ramped up. 

By 1921, though, Inkograph production was in full swing and, with other pen manufacturers largely abandoning production of stylographic pens, the company enjoyed very little competition.  The 1921 recession might have prompted Wallace to explore the expansion of his product lines, and he filed a patent application for what would become the Leadograph on December 1, 1921.  The patent was issued on January 30 1923 as number 1,443,399:

Wallace, as President of Inkograph Co., Inc., filed a trademark registration for the “Leadograph” name on February 2, 1922, claiming to have first used the name in commerce on December 22, 1921:

This brief announcement of the pencil’s introduction was published in Walden’s Stationer and Printer in January, 1922:

In February 1922, Wallace went all in, placing a full-page advertisement in System: The Magazine of Business.  System was the same magazine in which Charles Keeran had introduced his Eversharp in 1913:

Note that the gold bands exhibited in two of the examples Joe found.  This feature doesn’t show up in the advertisements, which show only models A, B and C priced from 35 cents to a dollar.

These Leadographs apparently didn’t change much during the first few years of production.  An advertisement in the April, 1924 issue of Popular Mechanics shows essentially the same pencil:

Since the original Leadograph was a hard rubber production, its styling soon became passe as brightly colored celluloids began to dominate the market in the mid-1920s.  To my knowledge, the original Leadograph design was never adapted to celluloid, and the original design was dropped in favor of a more conventional nose-drive pencil to accompany Inkograph’s stylographs.  Larger flattop pencils were earlier, followed by more tapered pencils that closely resembled Parker Parkettes.  These are the Leadographs shown in The Catalogue, on page 95:

Apparently, the Inkograph Company decided to abandon pencils in the late 1930s to focus on their stylographic pens.  This advertisement in The Boston Globe shows discontinued Leadograph pencils being blown out at the bargain price of two for a quarter in 1938:

But, you'll note that Wallace's trademark registration for the "Leadograph" name and logo reproduced above was renewed on June 20, 1942, although I can't find any indication that the company continued to produce pencils after 1938.  Who knows - maybe Wallace thought after the War he might want to jump back into the game.

Or maybe he just thought it was a really cool name worth protecting.