In addition to writing books and articles, between 2014 and 2016 I served a three-year stint as editor of the Pennant, journal of the Pen Collectors of America. When my initial three-year contract expired, I was offered an extension but I declined to continue. Somebody else should take a turn, I said, and that was true – it’s never good to have any one person driving the boat for too long, and I didn’t want The Pennant to become my personal yacht. The greater issue, however, was that nobody was helping me drive that boat and I couldn’t do it all myself.
These days my friend Jim Mamoulides is the editor, and he has succeeded where I failed: he has been able to enlist volunteers to assist with fact-checking and editing.
Of course, one of those fact checkers is me. Every time I think I’m out . . .
Before the DC Show last month, Jim asked me to help proofread an article some colleagues of mine had submitted concerning the Dictator Fountain Pen Company - I think I was tapped to help with this one because I had been discussing my only example of the Dictator pencil with one of the authors since last February:
Truth be told, I had never thoroughly examined this pencil before. I’ve had it for at least twenty years, and I don’t remember where it came from. It resided through my early years of chasing pencils in pretty colors in a shoebox along with my other “boring” metal pencils that I had accumulated, where it was all but forgotten until 2011, when I included it in The Catalogue. That was the first time most of the obscure pencils in that box received any attention at all, and I didn’t have much to say about the Dictator.
I reported its value as “unique,” not because I thought it was worth tons of money but because I had never seen another one – I had no comparable sales to which I could refer. To this day, it remains the only example that I have seen.
Jim Mamoulides asked me to bring my Dictator pencil to the DC Show so that he borrow it and take some high-resolution photographs for the planned article. We made the exchange, and I received my pencil back around the same time Jim emailed me the draft article for review.
After an initial read, those of us proofreading the article noted some loose ends in the article that need to be addressed before it is ready for publication. I am looking forward to seeing the revisions when they are ready - the story of the Dictator Fountain Pen Company is both lurid and fascinating.
Full stop for a quick note, not a spoiler alert but just to clarify something: there is no evidence that “Dictator” was a reference to any authoritarian leader. Given our current climate, that’s worth mentioning.
While the authors work on tightening up their article, I hope this article helps to tie up one of those loose ends. The authors were understandably hamstrung in drawing any conclusions about Dictator pencils, because all they had to go on was Jim’s pictures of my pencil’s exterior. Jim had not asked if he could try to tear my pencil apart while it was on loan to see what’s inside – while I trust Jim completely, I’m not sure what I would have said had he asked. It’s the only example any of us know exists . . .
What the heck, I thought. Jim’s high-resolution shots of the outside of my pencil are preserved for posterity, so the time is nigh to really see what is going on inside my Dictator-marked pencil, no matter the risk. Should an attempt to dissasemble it fail and the pencil be destroyed, at least I would be the one who destroyed it, and besides . . . we all need to know whether my pencil is the same as those offered by the Dictator Fountain Pen Company, rather than an unrelated pencil someone marked “Dictator” just because it was a cool name.
I told Jim I would do a thorough analysis of the pencil here without stealing the authors’ thunder - to riff on that famous line from the Godfather, I would leave the thunder but take the cannoli.
A small amount of background information is in order before this exercise begins. Richard Binder’s Pen Glossopedia contains an entry for the Dictator Fountain Pen Company, and I don’t think I’m stealing any thunder by reporting the current state of our collective research. Binder reports the company was formed in in 1920 by J. Hendricks, W. Burress, and E. A. Paulton. Dictator pens, like Frank Furedy’s Ink Pak pens discussed here the other day (see here), used concentrated ink cartridges and filled with water, so that in theory the pens would write for several weeks or months without refilling.
The inventor of the pen was Arthur Winter, who had obtained his original patent in Great Britain (British Patent No 178,406), and Winter obtained other patents for improvements on this design in the United States. Binder reports that Winter dissolved and reorganized Dicator in 1921 and that there is no evidence that the company continued to operate after 1923. Binder also reports the existence of the Dictator pencil, with a magazine of 18 spare leads that was advertised to write for a year without refilling.
Dictator pencils – the pen’s “little brother” – are discussed and illustrated on page two of a two-page spread published in System: The Magazine of Business in September, 1921. The authors plan to use the full advertisement in their article, but I don’t believe it takes any thunder away from them to reproduce the second page here, since a ten-second Google search is all it takes to brings it up as the first search result.
Advertising artwork is notoriously inaccurate – particularly when a pen manufacturer is sourcing pencils from a third-party manufacturer rather than making their pencils in-house. In this case, the cap and clip shown in the illustrations do not match the example in my hands, which drove my concern that my Dictator may not be what is described.
Sometimes these advertisements will show an x-ray vision cutaway of what’s going on inside, and that would have been very helpful – this, however, was not one of those times. The text of the ad is vague but intriguing: a pencil that holds 18 spare leads isn’t unusual, but at the bottom of the page, this one says that “[o]ne lead automatically takes the place of other when it is used” and therefore it “will write 1,200,000 words without recharging.”
“Recharging” – does that mean you don’t have to put more spare leads in the magazine, or does it mean that each of those leads in the magazine somehow find their way into position automatically, without touching them at all? One of the authors provided me the documentation proving it was the latter: Donald Ladd of Elmira Heights, New York filed a Canadian patent application for this pencil on March 20, 1922, and Ladd’s drawings and specifications were published in the Canadian Illustrated Official Journal (Patents) on June 28, 1922, along with the notation that his invention was assigned to the Dictator Fountain Pen Company. Canada’s rudimentary patent database indicates that Ladd received patent number 225,369 on October 31, 1922.
Ladd’s name does not appear in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1910-1945, and I found no other evidence that Ladd ever obtained a patent for a pencil or anything else in the United States. The imprint on my pencil indicates only that a patent is pending, without specifying where it was pending . . . if Ladd ever filed a patent application for this pencil in the United States, I doubt that it was granted.
I’ll leave that Canadian Official Journal image for the authors to share with you if they so choose, but here’s a cannoli to add: Ladd also filed his application in New Zealand, where it was published in the New Zealand Patent Office Journal on May 18, 1922. The New Zealand drawings are better than the Canadian ones, showing more clearly what is going on inside Ladd’s Dictator pencil:
Twisting the cap advances or retracts a pushrod through an open space in the lower barrel, which contains spare leads. Once a lead is used up, the cap is turned the opposite direction, the pushrod retracts and, as shown at left, that little crook in the rod moves the end of the rod to the side. In theory, that allows enough space for the next lead to drop neatly down to the point, where the pushrod can advance it into position . . . at least, in theory.
While this is a pretty neat idea, in practice a design like this would never have worked well if at all. First, since the lead magazine is completely concealed from view, there is no way to see if the remains of the previous lead are out of the way, if the rod has been retracted far enough, or that the next lead is sufficiently in position. If there are any crumbs of lead or other debris preventing that next lead from seating perfectly square, the pushrod will strike a glancing blow to the end of the lead, breaking it rather than pushing it forward.
Complicating matters further are the long-term issues that typically arise with any of these old pencils. Colored leads swell in humid conditions, so any Dictator left out in the summer filled with colored leads will inevitably become fouled. Even if only black leads are used, dust and debris builds up over time and there’s no access to clean the chamber out.
As I prepared to disassemble my pencil, I noticed something that I need to correct in my Dictator entry in The Catalogue. I wrote that the barrel has a seam created by “folding” the metal together in the front, but that isn’t right: the barrel is in fact a solid tube with a groove pressed into one side. That creates a thinner wall where the metal is pushed in, and in the case of my pencil the barrel has partially split open at that weakened part of the barrel.
That split now caused me some anxiety as I started taking it apart, but fortunately it was easier than I thought it might be. A bayonet-style groove engages with that little indentation above the clip, and that is all that the pencil needs to hold the insides . . . well, inside:
Now we can see how that groove is a functional part of the mechanism: that groove lines up with a slotted metal bushing at the end of the mechanism, holding it in place so that as the cap is turned, the pushrod moves up and down:
Note that the pushrod in my example lacks the bend shown in the New Zealand drawings, and likely with good reason. It was another good theory, moving the rod to the side so the next lead can fall into place, but that feature likely never worked – especially in a brand-new Dictator pencil packed to capacity with 18 spare leads, or if the user didn’t face the point straight down as the rod was retracted.
This exercise has been a success all around. I can now say with absolute certainty that my Dictator-marked pencil is a slight variation of the design patented by Donald Ladd, assigned to the Dictator Fountain Pen Company and offered as the “little brother” to Dictator Fountain Pens between 1921 or so and 1923. I know that Ladd’s innovative design failed because it was poorly thought out. If they ever worked at all, they would have been prone to the barrels splitting, and ordinary use over time would inevitably foul them beyond repair.
I leave our Pennant authors this platter of cannoli as they continue their work on a great article about the history of the Dictator Fountain Pen Company. At least now they know everything that can be drawn from the only known surviving example of a Dictator pencil, to the extent they want to use the information it provides.
Besides, who knows? When I say I have the “only known surviving example,” all that means is I haven’t seen another one. The peanut gallery may be able to supplement what I’ve offered here with other examples, and that may add even more to the pool of knowledge that will be available to them.
That’s how these articles work - once you throw some information out there, it seems like even more information comes back that benefits us all.
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