Maybe a Threebit

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This one has been a long time coming:

The imprint at the top reads “Tubit,” with a pencil in that same shape:

One of the first articles here at the blog established that the Tubit was a brand name used by the Swanberg Manufacturing Company (Volume 1, page 37).  At the time, all I had found was the trademark image and number, but now that the mark has been included in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, the full certificate is available:

Julius Swanberg was operating at 1516 Foster Avenue, Chicago - right in the same neighborhood as Autopoint - when the trademark application was signed on July 1, 1921.  He had started using the mark just two days earlier, on June 29, 1921, fresh off his gig as inventor of the Shur-Rite pencil for the Fabart Instruments Company.  Note that the pencil illustrated in the Tubit mark has a straight top: these pencils come in ringtops and full length models, with straight tops and bell-shaped crowns:

Even though I knew about the bell top models ten years ago, it’s taken me that long to scrounge up a Tubit that matches the trademark drawings!  The bell tops, I believe, were introduced later.  Swanberg applied for a design patent for that version on June 11, 1923, which was granted May 27, 1924 as Design Patent 64,772:

Based on the trademark filing, I believe the Tubit was the brand name first introduced, while Swanberg-marked pencils came out later and were sold alongside Tubits at the same time.  Swanbergs also come in straight top and bell top models.

The straight top models come both with exposed erasers as well as with plain tops.  Note that the one shown with the exposed eraser has knurling matching Swanberg’s design patent, while the one with a plain top is different:

The imprints are different, too:

With the bell top models, I need to circle back around to something I said earlier, when I was comparing my bell-top Tubit to the Swanberg (Volume 1, page 37):

I noted how similar the pencils were, but took this picture to illustrate the difference between the slanted-line knurling around the crown of the Tubit and the crosshatched knurling on the Swanberg.   With the benefit of hindsight, now that I’ve acquired a few others and several more have passed through my hands, I know the crosshatched top on the Swanberg from that early article was a real oddity; all the others I have seen have tops identical to the Tubit:

My new Tubit with the straight top differs from its Swanberg counterpart in two respects: it is slightly smaller, and it lacks any knurling on the barrel at all:

Swanberg hard rubber pencils appeared to evolve the same as their aluminum pencil lines; I’m suspecting the earlier models had straight tops with accommodation clips stamped “Swanberg,” while the later ones adopted the same crown top with the imprint on the cap and a plain clip, the Van Valkenberg “Holyoke B” (see Volume 6, page 37):

A few weeks ago another Swanberg surfaced in an online auction that I’ve been hunting ever since I saw the one my father had - it was pictured in A Century of Autopoint on page 78, at the bottom in this image:

This new one is in flat green plastic, a color I haven’t seen on a Swanberg before:

Ordinarily, I’d assume that the long metal nose is earlier; most other manufacturers started with that since they were easier to make with a straight tube of rubber or plastic, and the tapered nose required more complicated machining.  

However, the mechanism extends from the nose in exactly like the earlier metal Tubits and Swanbergs.  Similarly, at the top end the long nose Swanbergs have an added ring above the band bearing the Swanberg imprint:

Was this a carryover from the earlier knurled crowns which was dropped later, or an extra bit of spice added later on?   There isn’t much information available concerning the company’s product lines, and as I mentioned in an earlier article, the closest thing we have to a Swanberg catalog is a 1927 advertisement which describes the company’s available models at the time, but doesn’t include any pictures (see Volume 5, page 215).  For now, all I can do is document the different variations as they surface, and hope that some day documents will surface to explain how these lines evolved.