Jennifer Heath was on hand at the Chicago Pen Show this year, liquidating more of her father Tom Heath’s collection. She had quite a crowd, attracted by the sound of hands plowing through plastic bins of stuff – items were marked with a colored dot to denote the price.
One of the cheaper items was an example of the Colorgraph pencil, and I couldn’t resist at that price even though I had one in black and pearl. The Colorgraph was a duplex pencil – turning the cap one way advanced a black lead, and turning it the other way retracted that lead and advanced a red one (or whatever other colors you wanted).
Right after I got home, another example popped up in an online auction – the opening bid it was too cheap to resist, and my opening bid carried the day. Weeks later, as I was going through things, I had forgotten which one was which.
Was I stupid bidding on things I thought I already have? No . . . what would have been stupid would be assuming that I already knew what I have because, so often, I do not. Here’s the two new examples shown next to the first one I acquired so many years ago:
Nice - the longer noses on these new additions are a little older, I believe. But that still leaves two duplicates without a purpose, right? Not so - here’s the entire spread of Colorgraphs in my custody:
At some point, if I can ever figure out how to take these things apart, I’m going to transplant the clip from one of these onto that example at the top.
I haven’t thought about the Colorgraph for a long time, and the long nose/short nose difference made me dive back in to see if I could date these more precisely. I couldn’t find that bit of information, but I did find other things to tell you about.
Lots of things.
The bulk of what I had learned about the Colorgraph before now was published in “A Colorful Mystery Is Solved” (March 15, 2013: Volume 2, page 95). I had at the time just stumbled across some of Frank Furedy’s design and utility patents for the Colorgraph in George Kovalenko’s patent book, just before I started working on my own two-volume set. George’s book yielded four patents: the first, number 1,638,026, was applied for by Frank Furedy on July 22, 1924, when he lived in Brooklyn, New York. It was issued on August 9, 1927:
Both of Furedy’s other utility patents that Kovalenko listed, 1,664,071 and 1,664,166, were issued on March 27, 1928. The latter was applied for on July 22, 1924, the same date Furedy applied for his first pencil patent and references an even earlier application by Furedy, serial number 694,990, which was applied for on February 25, 1924:
Finally, Furedy (who by then was living in Penn-Wynne, Pennsylvania) applied for a design patent for what is obviously the Colorgraph on September 17, 1930. The design patent was issued on December 16, 1930 as number 82,821.
A lot has happened since 2013: as mentioned earlier, I wrote a couple patent books of my own, and in the process of writing American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945, I found three more patents with Furedy’s name on them. The first, number 1,536,430, was serial number 694,990 referred to earlier, applied for on February 25, 1924 and issued May 5, 1925. This was his earliest patent, with drawings made before Furedy had the great idea to put a slant on the caps.
Another pencil patent that turned up when I wrote the book was number 1,679,566, applied for on and issued August 7, 1928. What makes this one interesting is that Furedy had two collaborators: Charles Schroth and William Favini, both from Bloomfield, New Jersey. This patent was assigned to Bushwick National Bank, and it is the only appearance Schroth or Favini made in my book. As I tunneled in to learn more about them, I found nothing newsworthy to report.
The Colorgraph was first advertised in newspapers in early 1928, but advertisements were nondescript. This one appeared in the Grand Rapids Press on January 3, 1928:
Frank Furedy was plagued with financial problems; a foreclosure notice against Frank Furedy Holding Company, Inc. was published on January 18, 1928 in the Montclair (New Jersey) Times: Furedy’s mortgage on his New Jersey property was delinquent, and the notice cites other of Furedy’s creditors who had secured judgments liens against his real estate:
Furedy, however, didn’t miss a beat: on July 27, 1928, the Wilmington Morning News reported that a new Delaware corporation called the Furedy Holding Company, Inc. had been formed to hold, obtain and develop patents. Frank was keeping a low profile: the named incorporators were Frederick Jaspersen, George McQuilkin, Jr., and Elizabeth C. Wright, all of Philadelphia:
The Colorgraph pencil, however, was not a product of either of Furedy’s holding companies – at least, not according to the imprints found on the pencils’ barrels. Earlier examples are marked only on the clips, but the later ones sport an elaborate script imprint attributing the pencils to the “U.S. Colorgraph Corp.”
Furedy had formed U.S. Colorgraph Corporation in 1928, right when the first advertisements for his pencils were first offered on the market, but he quickly ran afoul of securities regulations. On April 17, 1930, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that he was arrested for selling $20,000 in shares for the corporation without a license. He was held on $1000 bail pending trial:
Furedy’s legal troubles might have caused him to circle the wagons in his business dealings. On September 6, 1930, Furedy filed a trademark application for the Colorgraph mark; in his application he claimed to have first used the mark on November 15, 1925, around the time the initial trade announcements for the pencil appeared, but three years before advertisements for the pencil were published in newspapers.. Trademark registration was granted on July 19, 1932 as number 296,000, and it was assigned to George M. Hessdoerfer of Philadelphia:
Newspapers report nothing about Hessdoerfer, other than his 1940 obituary, so he may simply have been a straw man for Furedy, given Furedy’s legal troubles. There is one other detail about him, which I missed when I wrote my patent books. Frank Furedy filed an application to patent improvements to the Colorgraph pencil on October 22, 1930:
Patent number 1,918,464 was issued on July 18, 1933, and it is reported in my book – but I did not catch that a one-half interest in the patent was assigned to George Hessdoerfer. Mea culpa. If it is difficult to sort out all of Furedy’s business associations today, it may be due to the fact that Furedy was covering his tracks while he was under indictment nearly a century ago.
I found no reports concerning the outcome of Furedy’s case; if he was convicted, it does not look like he spent any significant amount of time in prison. I found no evidence that the Colorgraph remained in production after 1930, but Furedy wasn't quite finished in the writing instrument industry . . .
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