The Pencil and the Tramp

 By January 2022, all of us in our cadre of enthusiasts were sick of worrying about the bug, and we were eager to get back on track with our pen shows. My good friend R. George Adams asked if I was going to make the Baltimore show in March, and he sent me pictures of a strange duck he’d found.

“Stylofede” is imprinted in script on the barrel; although I’d expect to find a trademark for the logo, I didn’t find one in the course of writing American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953:

Fortunately, the word “Stylofede” does turn up in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945. Design patent number 93,133 was applied for by Jesse J. Robbins of Hollywood, California on July 14, 1933. It was issued on August 21, 1934 and assigned to Stylofede Corporation.

This is obviously R. George’s pencil, although the narrowed upper section suggests some serious plastic shrinkage has taken place. R. George indicated that the pencil was all welded together and didn’t appear to work.  “Regardless . . . I have to have it,” I commented, and my first order of business when I arrived in Baltimore was to track R. George down and complete the transaction.

Jesse J. Robbins is mentioned three times in American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2, and the second occurrence provided an intriguing clue as to what might be going on with R. George’s pencil. Patent number 2,010,466, applied for on December 28, 1932 and issued on August 6, 1935, was for an interesting disappearing clip:

Unfortunately, the drawings bear no resemblance to the little stub that protruded from the side of the Stylofede pencil:

But wait a tick . . . it pulls out . . . 

And snaps into place!

But wait . . . there’s more. Much, much, more.

Remember how R. George and I discussed how the mechanism appeared to be locked up? It isn’t – it just doesn’t work anything like what you might expect. Pressing the tip down on a hard surface causes the point to retract in a bit:

Releasing it causes it to spring forward, propelling out a bit of lead in the process. This is a tip-actuated mechanism, which appears consistent with Robbins’ third patent listed in American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2:

I described patent number 2,056,143 in the book as a “gear drive” mechanism, because of the complicated cog located inside the barrel, but a closer examination reveals that the cog is engaged by pressing in the tip. 

It seems like a tidy ending . . . a design patent for what is obviously our pencil, a utility patent for a disappearing clip, and another utility patent for a tip-actuated mechanism. All three are embodied, sort of, in this example of a Stylofede. 

Sort of. It’s not the right clip and I don’t think it’s the right mechanism, either. Mr. Mustard may be our culprit, but he’s holding a rubber chicken in the dungeon. The game continues . . .

Another aspect of the Stylofede did not fit the evidence: it is fashioned from injection-molded plastic, a material that was not available in the mid-1930s, when these patents were issued. 

Remember that scope of my second patent book covers patents through 1945. While I started on a Volume 3 picking up in 1946, I never finished the project (see “The Embryotic Volume 3" on May 24, 2021: Volume 7, page 139). On a hunch, I checked my post-1945 list of patents, and Jesse J. Robbins appears twice. One is another patent for a disappearing clip . . . 

Not just any disappearing clip. Our clip exactly:

Patent number 2,507,816 wasn’t applied for by Robbins until September 22, 1945, and it was another five years before it would issue on May 16, 1950.   Robbins also took out another utility patent for his tip-actuated mechanism: on November 13, 1945, he applied for patent number 2,469,411, which was issued on May 10, 1949. 

Now it all makes sense: R. George’s Stylofede pencil was not made during Jesse Robbins’ first foray into pencil design in the 1930s, but during a second burst of activity after the end of the Second World War.

At least, it almost makes sense. These patents were assigned to Stylofede Corporation over a period of eighteen years, yet the only advertisement or trade announcement I could find was this one, published in Scientific American in March, 1934.

How can Robbins and his Stylofede Corporation have been around for that long without so much as a blip on this pencil fanatic’s radar until now? Robbins may have become distracted from pencil manufacturing shortly after the initial excitement. I found a letter dated October 9, 1935 from Albert Lasker, an advertising pioneer in New York, to Will H. Hays, who was at that time chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America – the organization that created the motion picture ratings system. The letter describes how Robbins failed to keep an appointment to discuss the Stylofede pencil, but Lasker’s office promised to “keep after” Robbins.

How did a pencil manufacturer get mixed up with a prominent member of the motion picture industry, and what exactly were they discussing? That I don’t know, but that detail ties in well with (putting on my best Paul Harvey voice) . . . the rest of the story.

While I found little concerning the Stylofede Corporation, I found a mountain of information concerning who Jesse J. Robbins was, and that’s where the “tramp” part of this article comes in.

In the interests of full disclosure, it is possible but improbable that there were two people named Jesse J. Robbins, both living in Hollywood, California during the early part of the last century. However, Robbins’ identification of “Hollywood” as his residence in his patent applications is telling: West Hollywood was not formally incorporated until 1984, prior to which Hollywood was simply an unincorporated neighborhood in Los Angeles County, which sprang up around the fledgling movie industry in the 1910s. The entire county’s population was 577,000 or so in 1920, and while that number grew to 1.2 million by the end of the 1920s, most of that growth was fueled by an influx of migrants from Mexico.

And it is in Hollywood that a Jesse J. Robbins exploded onto the scene as the General Producing Manager of the new Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, formed in 1907. Essanay set up shop in 1915 on the former Majestic Studio lot for the sole purpose of making short films starring none other than Charlie Chapin.

Chaplin had entered the film business in 1914 after achieving widespread fame as a vaudeville performer. His first contract was with Keystone Studios, for whom he made 36 short films in 1914. Chaplin’s early films turned him into an international star, and Essanay offered Chaplin a $10,000 signing bonus plus a weekly salary, which he accepted in December, 1914.

Chaplin wrote and directed 14 films during 1915 at Essanay, including The Tramp, which forever cemented his association with that role (although he had also played the part in some of his earlier Keystone films). According to an article published in The Moving Picture World on July 10, 1915, Jesse J. Robbins was “Chaplin’s right hand man.”

The association wouldn’t last as Chaplin’s popularity mushroomed, and in 1916 Chaplin was lured to join the Mutual Film Corporation, which offered him a staggering $10,000.00 per week. Essanay’s fortunes had been built solely on the success of Chaplin’s films, and after Chaplin’s departure Essanay did its best to milk whatever it could from Chaplin’s work during 1915. The last “true” Chaplin film made for Essanay was A Burlesque on Carmen, released as a typical two-reel film on December 18, 1915 . . . but Essanay wasn’t done with the film.

On April 22, 1916, after Chaplin’s departure, Essanay re-released the film as Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on Carmen, padding the original film with outtakes and additional footage drawn from other films – including scenes that Chaplin himself had rejected – to make a four-reel production that was at best disjointed and as one critic wryly noted, only “watered down the cream” of the original film.

Chaplin, who had exercised strict creative control over his films at Essanay, was infuriated at the new production and sued Essanay among others, claiming that the film violated his contract rights and watered down his carefully manicured “Chaplin Brand.” In the end, Chaplin lost - the Court ruled that his contract provided that he was paid by the week to work for Essanay, and Essanay was free to do as it pleased with the resulting footage.

Emboldened by the ruling, Essanay went on to cobble together two more films using outtakes and recycled footage. The last, Triple Trouble, combined scenes from Police and an abandoned Chaplin Film, Life, and was released in August 1918. After Triple Trouble, Essanay ceased operations.

As for Jesse J. Robbins, who also went by “Jess Robbins,” an article posted at IMDb.com states he was born April 30, 1886 in Dayton, Ohio and died on March 11, 1973 in Los Angeles, California. He lived long enough to dabble in the pencil business, although I’ve not found a definitive connection between his two separate lives.

I am convinced that Jesse J. Robbins the film company manager and Jesse J. Robbins the pencil inventor were one and the same person. After all, more times than I can count I’ve answered the question, “is this Jonathan Veley the lawyer, or is this the pencil guy?”