This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.
If you don't want the book but you enjoy the article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.
Last October, I had retreated to my cabin for the evening to cozy up with a portable heater, a glass of Scotch, and my laptop. I’ve fixed it up into the perfect writer’s retreat, a place where free of distractions I can be alone with my thoughts and dive deep into subjects that require intense research and thought.
That particular evening, though, I wasn’t feeling it . . . and within twenty minutes or so there I was, idly thumbing through online auction listings. I saw something kind of interesting being offered by eBay seller “adamsjewelryspecialists”:
The faces struck me as unusual, and the listing title described it as made of “carved tigers eye,” but the pictures looked like it might be wood rather than stone. The auction pictures included a better shot of the extender, marked with a patent date of December 19, 1876:
I pulled out American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910, and I didn’t report any patents issued on that date in the book – that told me this was another one of those patents you’ll never find without an artifact like this in hand, because it was probably for some manufacturing technique not listed specifically for writing instruments in category 401.
I threw in a healthy bid, since I’m always a sucker for an example with a patent date not represented in my collection. With an hour or so to spare before the auction closed, I started tracking down the patent the old-fashioned way: since the description for all the patents issued on that date was “Title is not available,” going through each patent issued on December 19, 1876, one by one was my only option.
There were 237 patents issued on December 19, 1876; I found one, then started working my way backwards until I reached the patent issued on December 12 – nothing. Then I started working my way forwards, until I found it. Cool! The patent was for a method of boring and carving stone for use on a pencil barrel – the auction’s description of “Tigers Eye” was perfectly accurate, and this piece, with its intricate carving, is an exquisite little miniature sculpture!
I went back to the listing to up my already healthy bid – only to find that the auction had closed and I had lost. It wouldn’t have mattered: there was no possibility I would have won this time since it went for several hundred dollars more than I was willing to pay. Figural pencils sell for significantly more than the usual fare, and apparently the carved faces made this pencil “figuralish” enough to fall into that category. I was relieved that I didn’t need to beat myself up for getting so caught up in research that I lost track of time.
The seller gave me permission to use these pictures, so I tucked the images away into my fodder folder for future articles . . . and I forgot about them.
Six months later I was on my way to the Krinke auction, where I was going to be bidding on things for myself and a few other guys, including Joe Nemecek. There wasn’t much in the Krinke auction as far as Victorian pencils were concerned – just a few lots of unmarked slider pencils and parts. Only one piece was on Joe’s wish list, and I knew he would want it:
It only looked to be a little unusual, with an oversized hexagonal barrel and alternating vertical and horizontal ribs on its facets. The extender had me mildly intrigued, but not enough to arm wrestle Joe for it – besides, as long as he won it, I’d had time to bring it home and take some decent pictures of it before delivering it to him. Had I remembered what happened six months earlier, though . . .
“Edward Todd & Co. / ??? Dec. 19 1876.” I want to believe those letters before the date are “PAT.,” but it looks more like remnants of what could be “CAN.” Regardless, I think it’s a reference to that same patent; maybe by coincidence a Canadian patent was issued on that same date, or maybe Edward Todd just didn’t want to send one up north without a little fig leaf of intellectual property protection.
It’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t make the connection until I sat down to write this article. What’s even more embarrassing is that I forgot to document the patent when I found it last October.
Sigh . . . back to the patent database I went . . . started in the middle of the December 19, 1876 patents . . . worked my way down to number 185,382, the first one issued on that date . . . then working my way back up. Along the way, I found two patents for manufacturing man-made stone (numbers 185,456 and 185,554); possibly maybe, I thought, but neither patent mentions applications to writing instruments and without any patent drawings, neither gave me the eureka moment I remembered having the last time I did this search.
Finally, I found it. Patent number 185,562 was issued to Joseph Monaghan, who had applied for it on June 16, 1876.
Monaghan’s patent is certainly the one referred to on both of these pencils: first, its application is specific to “pencil-cases,” and second, Monaghan was the immediate predecessor to the partnership he formed with Edward Todd on September 1, 1870. At the time this patent was issued, Monaghan and Todd were the two principals in Edward Todd & Co. (see “From Bagley To Todd,” a three-part series beginning in Volume 5, page 174; Todd’s partnership notice with Monaghan appears on page 179).
Even though the title of Monaghan’s patent is “Improvements to Pencil-Cases,” the patent was not cross-referenced in Category 401, even though it should have been. Neither is it filed alongside Ephraim Johnson’s “Pearl Patent” of December 5, 1871, in category 138, subcategory 140. Whoever filed this patent didn’t know where to put it, in the same category 138 (“Pipes and tubular conduits”), but in subcategory 178: “Miscellaneous.”
Every assistant who has ever worked for me knows there should never be a “miscellaneous” file for anything – if there isn’t an appropriate place to file something new, create one so we can find it later. Otherwise, you’ll have a huge file folder of all this random stuff and you won’t be able to find anything.
That’s what has happened to subcategory 178: there’s 767 patents filed there, with no common theme other than someone was too lazy to find an appropriate place to put them. Even professional patent researchers must have torn out their hair many times knowing that their research is incomplete as long as an unchecked “miscellaneous” folder exists, with hundreds of patents to sift through, one by one . . . or in my case, twice.
NOTE: when I pulled the index of all the patents in subcategory 178 to see how many patents were filed there, the Monaghan patent was (by chance) the first one listed. After checking a few dozen others, the subject matter I found was truly random – no other writing instrument patents were found, and I gave up the search.
No comments:
Post a Comment