The Wahl Company got into the writing instrument industry backwards. While Parker, Sheaffer, and Waterman were fountain pen companies which later added pencils to mtch their pens, Wahl started out making pencils first in 1915, when it was known as the Wahl Adding Machine Company and started making pencils under contract for Charles Keeran’s Eversharp Pencil Company. Later, after Wahl acquired a controlling interest in Keeran’s company, Wahl went into the pen business with the purchase of the Boston Fountain Pen Company in 1917.
Wahl’s origins in the industry as a pencil manufacturer would influence the company in the decades to come, and that is what makes its products particularly fascinating to pencil collectors: there are many Eversharp pencils that do not have a matching fountain pen.
Except, of course, when it comes to those pesky Eversharp Skylines with sterling caps and other Skylines with clips marked “Wahl,” as shown in yesterday’s article. Those are a rare frustration for pencil collectors, because matching Skyline pencils are not known to exist.
It is reasonable to conclude, given Wahl’s history, that no Skyline pencils were made with Wahl-marked clips: beginning in 1917, it was “The Wahl Pen and Eversharp Pencil,” and it wouldn’t be until much later that Wahl would mark a fountain pen model as an “Eversharp.” For that reason, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there probably never was a Skyline pencil marked “Wahl” on the clip. Prove me wrong, as they say.
Hope springs eternal, though, that one day a Skyline pencil with a sterling silver overlay will be found: it is one of those things that “should” exist, because there is no reason it should not exist and everything we know about Wahl suggests that it would exist.
When Pat Mohan went home from the Raleigh Pen Show to check the cap imprints on his Wahl-marked Skyline fountain pens for me, I’ll admit that I held out faint hope that Pat would return to the show with that knowing smile on his face I’ve seen so many times and a conversation starting with “I’ll bet you haven’t seen one of these” as he handed me a Wahl-marked Skyliine pencil.
Pat did return to the show with that exact expression on his face, and our conversation began exactly that way. No, he didn’t have a sterling Skyline pencil on him, but he had this:
There’s lots to unpack with this pencil, starting with the derby and clip assembly. This has what Eversharp called a “Streamliner” top end - instead of a buttressed clip, Streamliners lack the upper mounting.
The Eversharp Streamliner was a lower-priced version of the Skyline, designated Model 198 in the demi size and Model 199 as a full-length pencil, all as discussed on page 341 in Eversharp. Until Pat’s example surfaced, every Streamliner I have seen has sported a plain barrel, with no overlay or trim bands.
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Now let’s pile on that stainless overlay. The Eversharp Skyline in stainless is the third most rare variation in the series – behind sterling silver and that mythical platinum version. I’d rate the solid gold Skylines as fourth most rare, at least when they were made, but their numbers continue to dwindle with the skyrocketing price of gold. The temptation to scrap 14k examples poses an unprecedented threat to their survival, particularly when it comes to badly dented or worn examples.
Within that subset of third-place stainless Skylines, Pat’s Streamliner has other unique characteristics. Note that the overlay is significantly shorter than “usual”:
The two examples in the center are the most commonly encountered Skyline Stainless variants, featuring either gold filled or the slightly less common stainless clip assembly. The example at bottom came from the late Fred Krinke’s auction – see “I’m Gonna Drive (500 Miles)” (April 3, 2021: Volume 7, page 4).
Whenever something comes along that isn’t supposed to exist, I always have to take into account the possibility that someone may have “made” it by combining parts that aren’t supposed to go together. I’ve considered and rejected that possibility.
First, transplanting derby and clip assemblies from one Skyline pencil to another is a huge pain in the neck. Repair instructions at the time directed repairmen to crush the entire derby assembly with a pair of pliers, pull it out, and press fit an entire new derby and clip assembly. The decades have not been kind to Skyline plastics, which have become so brittle that this procedure – labor intensive and risky even when these were new – is nearly (but not entirely) impossible now. I successfully performed the operation in “Radical Surgery on a Skyline” (February 21, 2013: Volume 2, page 58), but it took quite a bit of time. The experiment was only worthwhile because I was grafting a 14k solid gold overlay and derby onto a barrel from an ordinary Presentation example.
Also, the upper portion of the barrels of these overlay Skylines are milled down a bit so that the overlay is flush with the diameter of the lower barrel. If Pat’s weird Streamliner Stainless began life with a plain barrel, someone would have had to turning the top portion of the barrel on a lathe so that the stainless sleeve slides over it. Did I mention how brittle these Skyline plastics have become over the last eight decades?
Let’s assume that a hobbyist with above-average machining skills was willing to spend the time to precisely mill down the upper portion of an ordinary Skyline barrel, remove the derby, slip a shorter tube of stainless steel of the exact diameter into position, and install a Streamliner derby and clip assembly.
That didn’t happen.
No Skyline I have ever seen has a “Made in USA” stamp on the barrel, and Pat’s example has that stamp just below the end of the overlay. Without question, Pat’s variation is factory.
Now I need to circle back around to that full length metal barrel from Fred Krinke’s auction. I took this picture of it before the auction started in case I didn’t win it:
This shot didn’t come out the way I hoped it would – “Skyline Noir,” I called it when the image ran in Volume 7. It didn’t convey all the detail that I had hoped, but it did convey the mysterious and dramatic nature of the beast.
I have assumed that Fred’s Skyline was a prototype with a full length, stainless steel barrel. That’s how I reported it here at the blog and also in Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry. On page 317 in Eversharp, I noted “[t]he 1940 price sheet lists the Presentation Stainless as Model 178W, but a full-length stainless model is unlisted. It might have been Model 178S.”
Or . . .
Recall from yesterday’s article that this same 1940 price sheet does list a Skyline with a platinum cap and barrel – the ultimate unicorn in the Skyline series, with no surviving fountain pens (Model 78P) “and – gulp – a platinum pencil (Model 178P).”
Can platinum be mistaken for stainless steel? Yes it can, and it often is . . . but I’m not about to subject Fred’s pencil to scratch testing or other intrusive means that will damage it in any way, so I researched how else to distinguish the two metals. One way is the color of the metal: platinum is a deeper gray than stainless, which is brighter and has more of a modern feel. Have another look at this closeup of the tips:
I’d already noted the absence of the typical band around the nose found on other Skylines, and that almost matte, darker finish.
Platinum is also heavier than stainless steel: I had thought that Fred’s pencil was heavier just because the metal overlay is full length, but now that I’m wondering whether it might be platinum, I can feel more heft than I would expect. Of course, that’s not a reliable indicator, without a full length stainless barrel to weigh for comparison.
As I explored non-invasive ways to test for platinum, the primary lesson I learned was that there are a lot of seriously weird and stupid people on the Internet. “Read the hallmark and see if it says platinum,” said one intellectual giant. There was one suggestion I thought was helpful, although I don’t know whether it is true: one source claims that hydrogen pyroxide will fizz dramatically when a few drops are applied to platinum, but not to stainless steel.
Janet looked at me a bit sideways when I came into the master bath, raided the first aid supplies, and put a few drops on the barrel of Fred’s pencil. Some context likely would have been helpful before I did that.
No fizz, for whatever that is worth, but that same source that had me doing weird things with a pencil in my bathroom also said it isn’t a particularly reliable test, depending on the purity of the platinum.
I’m torn between which is better: being able to introduce to you the first documented example of a Skyline Model 78P in platinum (and having to correct something I wrote in Eversharp), or having a wholly undocumented full stainless example.
I suppose until I have a more definitive diagnosis, I have both.
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