Worth Something

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Nathaniel S. Worth was in a tight spot after Marx Finstone died on December 22, 1927.  He was working for the Eclipse Pen and Pencil Company.  He had an agreement with Finstone to trade his stock in the New Diamond Point Pen Company for Eclipse stock – but he couldn’t perform his end of the deal because his shares were in the possession of one of New Diamond Point’s other shareholders, Charles Flaum.  He made the unwise decision to confront Marx’ widow, Lillian, about his stock, and Lillian simply fired him.  Exactly when that happened isn’t documented in the Court records, but it was shortly after Finstone’s death and certainly well before affidavits were filed in Worth’s 1929 appeal.  

Nathaniel’s son, James Worth, was also employed at Eclipse, but James was not in the same pickle.  He had possession of his shares and had turned them over to Marx, receiving his Eclipse shares in exchange.  Whether he was also fired by Lillian isn’t documented; in his 1944 testimony during the Diamond Point litigation, he stated that he had been working at the Norwalk Tire & Rubber Company in Connecticut for eleven years, leaving a gap between 1927 and 1933 during which we know nothing about his activities.

Precisely during this gap, between 1928 or 1929 and James’ appearance in Connecticut in 1933, a pen company called “The Worth Featherweight Pen Company” emerged in New York.  This new company quickly ran afoul of Walter Sheaffer in numerous respects, leading to a court case against the company in which Sheaffer alleged violation of Sheaffer’s design patents for the Balance as well as unfair trade practices in adopting the brand name “Safer,” which in combination with the Balance-like shape of its products sound too similar to “Sheaffer” to be coincidental.

Daniel Kirchheimer provides us with a wonderful account of Sheaffer’s litigation with the Worth Featherweight Pen Company in his 2012 article, “Featherweight v. Heavyweight” (the article, last revised in 2017, is still online here, and it also appeared in the winter 2017 issue of The Pennant).   

I had previously thought the name “Worth” might have been used by the company to associate its products with “value,” since the only name associated with the company according to Daniel’s article was Worth Featherweight’s president, Walter E. Bauer.  However, now that we know there were two men named Worth who were in the pen business, one of whom had been summarily fired from Eclipse in 1928 or 1929, I couldn’t help but wonder – is it possible that Nathaniel S. Worth, perhaps with his son James, started a “Worth Featherweight Pen Company” after alienating both Eclipse and New Diamond Point?

Every lead I followed to find some connection between Nathaniel or James Worth with the Worth Featherweight Pen Company was a dead end; in desperation, I went back to pour through Daniel’s article, looking for any detail I could find connecting Nathaniel S. Worth with the Worth Featherweight Pen Company . . . 

And I found it.  

The clincher, plain as day, was right there in Daniel’s article all along – it wasn’t really relevant to the story Daniel was telling, and it was contained in one of the pictures he included in the article, not the text.  

In his article, Daniel tells how Worth Featherweight’s legal team requested several delays during Sheaffer’s case against the company.  It was later revealed those delays were requested for an ulterior purpose, so that Walter Bauer would have time to send out letters to other pen companies requesting their assistance and support.  This letter, signed by Bauer and dated May 15, 1930, was introduced as evidence by Sheaffer to prevent any more delays.

I began to scour the letter looking for any connections with Nathaniel Worth . . . and there it was.  Right in the first line: “You have undoubtedly heard from Mr. Charles Greenwald, our attorney.”

The only way you’d make the connection was if you had just read a few hundred pages of trial testimony in the 1929 Nathaniel Worth litigation.  Since I had just had done so, I remembered that I had just seen that name:

Charles Greenwald was the same attorney who was representing Nathaniel S. Worth in the Marx Finstone/New Diamond Point litigation in 1929.

One could argue that it’s a coincidence that there were two guys named Worth, and a pen company called the “Worth Featherweight Pen Company.”  Slimmer still is the possibility that all were in New York City, and that Nathaniel Worth had been recently relieved of his duties at another pen company shortly before this one emerges.

But could it still be a coincidence now that we know the same New York lawyer was representing both Nathaniel Worth and the Worth Featherweight Pen Company, in two complex cases, both of which would likely consume nearly all of his time?  No, I believe this eliminates all reasonable doubt.  

Nathaniel S. Worth was the man behind the Worth Featherweight Pen Company.  Perhaps he quickly sold out to Walter A. Bauer, or maybe Worth just brought him in to serve as President, preferring himself the more behind-the-scenes roles of board member, secretary, and/or treasurer.

I’ve written about Worth twice, both in articles published in 2017.  The first article concerned a flattop pencil with Worth’s trademarked W and feather on the clip - I theorized that Conklin supplied at least this model to the Worth Featherweight Pen Company (see Volume 5, page 1):

And then there was that second article, about a metal Worth pencil that surfaced just after the first article was published (Volume 5, page 121).  Since the article was written, I’ve found a second, cleaner example:

“I don't have enough information to say this was produced (not made) by the same Worth,” I said . . . “but I do think this one resembles pencils marked Morrison and Eclipse.”

Damn . . . I love it when things come together so nicely.  Four years ago, this was just a random observation, and I didn’t even share a picture to show why Eclipse came to mind:

Given that Nathaniel Worth didn’t come into Max Finstone’s orbit until 1926 adds another wrinkle, because metal pencils were on the whole suffering from a precipitous drop in popularity in the United States in favor of bright colored celluloids by that time.  

I’m not suggesting Eclipse or Worth made either one of these, because throwing Morrison into the mix suggests that all three pencils were supplied by someone else – pencil design and manufacturing is a specialized art, and most pen manufacturers acquired pencils from other manufacturers rather than creating and building their own.  Some went on to develop their own products later, some did not. 

That all these companies were supplied by a jobber is supported by something imprinted on the back of the barrel of that second example of the Worth I found – “Pat. Oct. 10, 22":

The patent date is listed in American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910.  It refers to patent number 1,431,510, issued to David Zakim and assigned to the Sterling Metal Novelty Company of New York:

Perhaps Nathaniel Worth and/or his son James were in the pen business before they joined the New Diamond Point Pen Company, and they happened to source pencils from the Sterling Metal Novelty Company, which also supplied Eclipse and Morrison. Perhaps Marx Finstone commemorated the Worths’ entry into the firm with pencils marked with his new business partners’ name, before Finstone died and things went south with them.

There’s one other point Daniel Kirchheimer made in his article that causes me to circle around to something else I’ve written about here before: a combination pen and pencil with Gordon’s “fanged” clip, but marked “Safer” on the clip (Volume 6, page 63).  

The comments I made with regard to these were so offhand that I didn’t even create an index tab for “Safer” at the blog.  In an earlier article about the Gordon (Volume 3, page 265), I commented on this Safer-marked Gordon clip – “‘Safer,’ huh?” I said.  

I was thinking – but didn’t say – that I thought the word “Safer” was a suggestion that the combo was safer to carry in one’s pocket without losing it, but not much comfort for all those Gordon owners out there with ripped shirt pockets.  Of course, as long as these combos are, you’d need a really deep pocket to carry one of these around.

Daniel’s article suggests that “Safer” had a more sinister meaning - a deliberate attempt by the Worth Featherweight Pen Company to sell pens with a name that sounded a lot like “Sheaffer.”  Daniel found where Sheaffer’s legal team introduced in evidence a box so marked, accompanied by a guarantee certificate from the “Safer Service Pen Company” of New York:

According to Daniel, all of this came to a head in the Sheaffer/Worth scuffle in the spring of 1930, and William Gordon applied for his patent for this second (and most common) version of his “fanged” clip on April 3, 1930 – right in the middle of Daniel’s story.

I still can’t say for certain that William Gordon wasn’t just trying to reassure his customers that their shirt pockets would remain intact with fanged clips marked “Safer.”  However, given the timeline and everything else I know now, I’m leaning towards the belief that Nathaniel Worth and Walter Bauer sourced specially marked clips marked Safer from William Gordon – before they were quickly stopped by Sheaffer from offering them to the public.