In 2014, I wrote an article titled “The Doomed Craftsman” (November 13, 2014: Volume 3, page 97), concerning the only example I had found of the Craftsman:
The Craftsman was introduced in the stationers’ press in July 1922, and according to those announcements, what set these pencils apart was the material used to fashion their barrels - Redmanol.
That is what led me to describe the pencil as “doomed.” I knew that around that time the Redmanol Corporation lost a patent infringement case brought by Leo Baekeland and his Bakelite Corporation. I had assumed that any product made of Redmanol would have gone extinct once that material was no longer available.
Realite pencils, introduced in the fall of 1922, were also made of Redmanol; I assumed that Realite only avoided a similar fate by substituting Bakelite for Redmanol, from which Realite and Autopoint pencils (after the two companies merged) would be made for decades to come. I reasoned that the makers of the Craftsman were unable to negotiate a similar arrangement and therefore went the way of the dodo.
I was close. Actually, I wasn’t really all that close, but at the time, this was a reasonable interpretation of what facts I knew. As I researched and wrote A Century of Autopoint, however, I learned a few more key facts that proved I was dead wrong.
Chapter Four in the book, “The Plastic War,” unveils the details of the Redmanol story. Adolph Karpen, a furniture manufacturer by trade, was interested in the development of a more durable substitute for furniture varnish. Dr. Lawrence V. Redman developed a phenol-based substance he marketed as Redmanol, and he and Karpen established and owned the Redmanol Corporation.
Here’s the rub: yes, Leo Baekeland would sue Redmanol Corporation for patent infringement, and Baekeland would ultimately win. However, the judge’s decision against Redmanol was rendered in July 1921 – a full year before the Craftsman pencils with Redmanol barrels were introduced.
Contrary to what I believed back in 2014, Redmanol’s defeat in court was not a death knell. Redmanol was not the first competitor Baekeland had sued: the first was Condensite Corporation, which used a similar substance to make phonograph records for Thomas Edison. Condensite also lost, but after its defeat the company negotiated a license with Baekeland and continued in operation. Leo wanted royalties, not conquest.
By the beginning of the 1920s, Condensite’s fortunes looked bleak. Edison would only permit the production of records which suited his personal tastes in music – and Edison disapproved of that newfangled jazz that was taking the industry by storm, causing rapid losses in market share. While the patent litigation against Redmanol was pending, Adolph Karpen quietly bought up options to purchase Condensite’s shares from the company’s anxious shareholders.
As soon as the ink was dry on the judgment entry holding Redmanol liable for patent infringement, Karpen sprung his trap: he exercised his stock options and acquired a controlling interest in Condensite, so that what Karpen could not do through Redmanol he could continue to do as a Condensite licensee. Leo Baekeland was forced to the negotiating table, and in May 1922, the Bakelite Corporation was founded as a holding company which wholly owned the Redmanol Corporation and the Condensite Company. The three companies were formally merged in 1924.
The Craftsman pencil was introduced in July 1922, at a time when the Redmanol Corporation was operating with the full blessing of Leo Baekeland as a subsidiary of the Bakelite Corporation. The Craftsman pencil was in no way “doomed” by virtue of the material used in its construction.
The Craftsman makes an appearance in A Century of Autopoint on page 45, but at the time the book was published I still was unsure how the pencil fit into this bigger picture. It would have been helpful to take apart my example of the Craftsman to see what was going on inside, but my only example had deteriorated so much that I feared any attempt to disassemble it might destroy it.
The Craftsman looks Keeranesque, but I had ruled out Charles Keeran as a suspect since he had signed an exclusive contract with Realite on July 15, 1921 and the Craftsman did not debut until a year later. Therefore, all I could say in A Century of Autopoint was that the Craftsman “bore more than a passing resemblance to Autopoint’s ‘50-cent’ number [invented by Keeran], but as of this writing no connection between the two is known.”
Again, I was close. Sooooo close . . .
No, there is still no surviving direct evidence which connects Charles Keeran to the Craftsman Products Corporation. The 1922 Illinois Secretary of State’s Corporations lists the president as “H.K. Neinn” of Wilmette, Illinois, and the treasurer was P.W. Rice of Chicago. Both of these leads were dead ends. All trade announcements and the Illinois Secretary of State indicate the company was located at 668 Washington Boulevard, Chicago - another dead end, since that address has been wiped from the face of the Earth and is now in the middle of I-94.
Now, the evidence I sought has finally come to light, tying together all the loose ends that have bugged me about the Craftsman as neatly as I could have ever hoped.
At the Chicago Show in 2023, Susan Wirth’s longtime companion John Martinson was liquidating much of what remained of Susan’s hoard. One of several boxes I purchased from John included was another example of the Craftsman. This one is in much better condition and has a slightly different top end:
Unlike my other example, this one disassembled easily, and what lies inside answers many questions. Here it is with the insides removed, shown along an early Autopoint “50-cent number”:
The Craftsman is an Autopoint 50-cent number wrapped in a Redmanol barrel. Now, laying out all the clues I’ve found in chronological order, we have a very different picture of what happened:
1. Charles Keeran was ejected from the board of directors at Autopoint in April, 1921 (A Century of Autopoint, page 29).
2. Keeran signed his exclusive contract with Realite through Michael M. Kaufmann, Frank C. Deli and John Lynn on July 15, 1921 (the contract was reproduced on page 34).
3. On July 13, 1922 Keeran and “Kaufman” filed a patent infringement suit against Autopoint, according to a report published in The United States Patent Office Official Gazette on April 24, 1923.
“Kaufman” is almost certainly a mispelling of Michael M. Kaufmann, one of the original principals of Realite. The patents sued over were number 1,372,354, issued to Keeran on March 22, 1921 (just weeks before his ouster) and 1,400,362, issued to Keeran and Kaufmann on an application filed in 1919 (the mechanism inside the original Autopoints, including the 50-cent number).
Patent 1,400,362 was issued on December 13, 1921, after Keeran had been ousted from Autopoint and had joined Realite. I did not report the patent infringement suit in A Century of Autopoint, because I did not know how it fit into the story.
4. The Craftsman is introduced in the stationers’ press in August, 1922 – one month after Kaufmann and Keeran filed suit, according to the notice in the Official Gazette.
Now it all makes sense. Keeran had invented the 50-cent number for Autopoint, and there was a dispute over who owned the rights to manufacture the pencil. A new company, the Craftsman Products Corporation, was established to make the disputed pencil . . . certainly not on behalf of Autopoint, but as a direct challenge to Autopoint’s claims.
Of course the Craftsman Products Corporation had no identifiable connection to Realite or Charles Keeran – had the maneuver failed, it would be Craftsman and not Realite or Charles Keeran that would take the fall.
Realite’s rapidly expanding business led it to seek out better manufacturing facilities by 1922, and there was no easier way than to take over Autopoint’s plant. Realite increased its capital dramatically in November, 1922, shortly after the Craftsman’s warning shot over Autopoint’s bow.
In April, 1923 the stationers’ press announced that Autopoint and Realite had merged; the surviving company was renamed the Autopoint Products Company, and its first president was Charles Keeran (A Century of Autopoint, page 50).
With the full story laid out, the Craftsman was indeed “doomed,” but not for the reasons I thought back in 2014. The Craftsman was doomed by its rapid success as a sacrificial pawn, forcing Autopoint into a merger. In 1923 and 1924, the Autopoint Products Company offered both rebadged Realite pencils and the original Keeran Autopoints (including 50-cent numbers), but there is no evidence that the Craftsman remained in production. With the introduction of the new Autopoint Model 1925, Keeran’s 50-cent number was discontinued.
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