The Embryotic Volume Three

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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The Patent and Trademark books I’ve written are like pillars in Shrodinger’s library: they are both my greatest successes and my greatest failures at the same time.  

On the success side, all three cover their respective areas so well that I believe they will be the definitive resources on their subjects long after I’m gone.  Their failures have been financial, and have been even more spectacular.  

My goal was never to get rich on those three books – they were tools I needed for my own research, they didn’t exist, and I thought others would be able to use them, too.  Mission accomplished, although on a much smaller scale than I hoped.  These days, my goal is to outlive my inventory . . . and I think that’s a longshot.  

In the years since these three books have come out, several who have them and use them have asked if I will do a third volume in the patent book series.  My answer, and I apologize if there has been a touch of annoyance in my voice, has been that I’ve lost enough money as an author.

That answer isn’t strictly accurate.  I started work on a third patent volume right after Volume 2 came out, and before I abandoned the idea in 2015 I made quite a bit of progress in that direction.  The database I built was in its early development, so it includes only patents issued in category 401 – the main writing instruments category – but it includes 1,957 of them issued between 1946 and 1980.  

As was the case with the other patent volumes, I built the database for my own use.  I didn’t feel as compelled to share the tool I made for myself in book form, since I generally collect pre-War writing instruments.  I’ve only rarely needed this tool as much as I have needed the other ones, so I didn’t see the same urgency to make it available.  If felt tip markers ever become a hot collectible, maybe I’d rethink that.

I’ve only rarely needed this half-finished tool, but this was one of those times.

I nearly consigned this pencil to the junk box when it came in amongst a lot of . . . well, mostly junk.  I don’t even remember what caused me to buy the bunch in which it arrived:

It feels light and cheap, like a Bic ballpoint.  Yet those colored panels around the upper barrel had me wondering whether it might be a multicolor pencil:

A bit of twisting the top back and forth revealed it is, and it works like more expensive metal multicolor pencils from Germany.  Twisting one way retracts whatever color is in use until it reaches the top, then with a click that dot on the knob advances to the next color.  Twisting in the opposite direction advances the selected color, along with the matching colored panel:

The nose wiggles off to reveal the different colored rods which can be advanced, and the mechanism is more compact and elegant solution than the more expensive-feeling variations on the theme:

There was a name on the clip – the only clue I had to find out what this thing might be and who might be behind it.  “Sparkes ‘66'”, it reads:

A bit of poking around revealed how far ahead of its time this pencil was.  It was introduced in 1951, as shown in this advertisement from the New York Daily Times on December 2, 1951:

The big break in the story was a short news piece in the Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman on October 25, 1951, which identified gun designer Walton Musser, “who is now working on a top secret government project,” as the inventor of a new six-color pencil called the “Sparkes ‘66'”:

I have my doubts about the “top secret government project” stuff being published in the paper: if it's true, as the Cold War was picking up steam the last thing anybody would do is advertise that involvement in the paper.  

With this clue in hand, I dusted off my phantom Volume 3 to see if the dormant project could verify the rest of the story.  It contains three patents, all issued to Musser and all applied for on October 10, 1950.  The first was issued October 5, 1954 as number 2,690,736:

Number 2,703,070 followed on March 1, 1955:

And finally, number 2,704,532 – covering the collet assembly inside – was issued on March 22, 1955.

C. Walter Musser’s description as merely a “gun designer” doesn’t do his contributions justice.  During World War II, while working as an engineer at the Frankford Armory in Pennsylvania, he co-invented “recoilless” guns along with ballistic expert Dr. William J. Kroeger.  The platform, along the lines of a bazooka, included a one-man 57mm gun and a 75mm gun – the latter of these was the caliber used in French artillery cannons during World War I, but Musser’s gun was a portable cannon that could be operated by two men, firing a 14-pound shell with “deadly accuracy” at ranges up to 4,000 yards.

The gun was a gamechanger during World War II.  It was demonstrated before reporters on July 20, 1945, and a photograph including onlookers appeared on page 3 of the Camden, New Jersey Courier-Post.  None were identified as Musser, but a few civilians were on hand:

In 1957, Musser invented and patented the harmonic gearing while he was an adviser at the United Shoe Machinery.   The gearing, commonly used in robotics and a myriad of other applications to this day, proved to be his most significant innovation out of more than 250 patents to his credit.  He died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on June 8, 1998.