There I was yesterday, minding my own business and telling you about a few Victorian pencils I brought home with me from the Chicago Show in May. Five pencils there were, and after I told you about the first four, I had to poke around a bit so that I could tell you about that last one.
This one did come home from Chicago with me, but I had been talking with David Nishimura about it since he first showed it to me at the Philadelphia Show in January. I was smitten with it at first sight, but I didn’t feel like spending the money at the Philly show (I had thought I might actually break even in Philly this year . . . before I heard about that Tiffany Met Life pencil in “Two Kings”). David brought it along again to Baltimore in March . . . at that point, I was digging myself out of a deep hole after buying Terry Johnson’s pencil collection.
In Chicago, however, I was vulnerable. My grand deal with Zeppelin Commander Bader left a bit of cash in my pocket, ripe for the picking. I got picked.
The metalwork is exquisite, and from the first time I saw it, I thought it resembled those John Foley “Madelaine” pencils I wrote about just a few weeks ago (see “That Other, Bigger Shoe Drops” on September 25, 2025). There’s no maker’s mark on the pencil, but it does have a patent date I didn’t recall seeing before: December 8, 188 . . . something . . .
I thought, as I started writing up that fifth Chicago purchase, that I would simply look up a new, obscure patent, show off a few images, and call it a day. I was wrong. There’s a lot more to this story, and you are going to be convinced that I did this on purpose.
Twice.
Finding the patent was not difficult, thanks to American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910. American patents were only issued on Tuesdays, so in the chronological section of the book all I had to do was find a patent for a dropper pencil, issued on a December 8, sometime in the 1880s . . .
Stephen M. Brougham of Brooklyn, New York was awarded patent number 331,941 on December 8, 1885 for his “drop movement for pocket utensils,” and the patent was assigned to the Standard Pencil Company of New York. Back I went to American Writing Instrument Patents, where I found another entry under Brougham’s name: Patent 194,216 issued on August 14, 1877, for a combination pen and pencil:
Brougham’s earlier patent was not assigned to anyone, and it is intriguing that it was ever issued at all. His design is for a split slider: a slotted outer ring advances a dip pen, and a second slider slips through that ring to advance a pencil. Perhaps it was issued in error, since this patent so closely resembles a much earlier patent issued to Henry Withers in 1836. The oversight may have resulted from the Patent Office fire that year, which wiped out any record of nearly all of the patents issued up to that point. After the fire, the Patent Office began numbering issued patents, something that had not previously been done; Withers’ patent was not numbered initially, but after the fire it was retroactively assigned an “X-patent” number of X9527, with the X denoting it predated the fire.
Note: David Nishimura broke the news about Withers’ Patent at his blog in 2017. His article is published here.
I next turned my attention to this “Standard Pencil Company,” and that’s where things became really interesting. Incorporation of the company in New York was announced in the Brooklyn Daily Times on December 1, 1888: the “trustees” of the company were Brougham, joined by Edward Flackman and Edwin Terry:
By 1890, Standard had apparently diversified into fountain pen manufacturing; the company advertised for “rubber turners on fountain pens” in the New York World on June 17, 1890. The Company received a short writeup in History and Commerce of New York (1891), in which Brougham is not mentioned but Edwin Terry is identified as Treasurer of the company. Albert Terry, presumably a relative of Edwin’s, was the company’s president; when Albert wasn’t messing around making pencils, he was busy running a successful brick manufacturing business in Brooklyn.
The day to day operations of the company, according to this report, were attended to by “worthy superintendent” Gideon Isley of Jersey City, New Jersey, a Civil War veteran who had previously served as Jersey City’s Fire Commissioner. Isley died July 30, 1893 at the age of 52; his death was reported in the New York Herald on August 1, 1893:
The Isley lead proved to be a good one: a Henry Isley, also from Jersey City, co-invented another dropper or gravity pencil with none other than William S. Hicks. Patent number 280,313 was issued on June 26, 1883:
Two men with the last name Isley, both from Jersey City, both patenting dropper pencil designs within two years of each other? That would be a whopper of a coincidence if one believed in such things, and I don’t. I have written about a Hicks gravity pencil here, but the one I wrote about was patented nearly twenty years later, in 1905 – see “That’s Heavy, Man” (December 20, 2016: Volume 4, page 294).
I then turned back to my search results for the Standard Pencil Company, and I hit paydirt. This is the first part you’ll think I did on purpose.
I found a reference in the United States Patent Office Official Gazette for a patent application filed March 3, 1887 by James B. Smith of New York, which was assigned to the Standard Pencil Company:
Smith’s application was for a “glove or shoe buttoner,” and the patent was issued on August 9, 1887 as number 368,024:
Since Smith’s patent was for a button hook, it wasn’t filed in any of the categories in which writing instrument patents are located. That’s why I couldn’t find it in the course of researching my John Foley “Madelaine” pencils.
Boom. Now we know to what the “Pat. App. For” imprints on John Foley’s Madelaine pencils refers.
Now for the other thing I said you might think I did on purpose . . .
I had some difficulty researching the later history of the Standard Pencil Company, because there was more than one business going by that name. On February 5, 1903, Geyer’s Stationer reported that a Standard Pencil Company registered as a foreign corporation in Newark, New Jersey. I’m not sure whether this was the same company, because none of the same names are affiliated with this Standard: shares were held by Harry H. Picking, Charles A. Greene and C. Frederick Smith.
Further confusing matters, the School Journal’s report of this filing on March 7, 1903 states that this Standard Pencil Company had been “incorporated” in New Jersey, not just registered as a foreign corporation to do business in the state. Maybe this was sloppy reporting, and maybe the owners of the original Standard Pencil Company organized another company by the same name in New Jersey.
Then there was another, totally unrelated Standard Pencil Company that arose from the cornfields of Hutchinson, Kansas in 1911. The Kansan Standard Pencil Company’s business was selling wood pencils painted with advertising, and on October 30, 1911 the Hutchinson News reported that after only a few months in business, this new company had placed an order for 1,300,000 wood pencils, “the largest shipment of wood pencils ever to be shipped to any point in the west.” The shipment was sent in two filled boxcars, and the order was so large that it was filled by two New York manufacturers – the American Lead Pencil Company and the Eagle Pencil Company.
Just a couple weeks later, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported on November 10, 1911 that a Standard Pencil Company had been organized in New York, and Nathan Bloom was named a director.
On December 20, 1917, the New York Herald reported that an explosion at the New York Cordage Company had destroyed a four-story building at 42 South Street; the upper floors, according to this account, were occupied by the Standard Pencil Company.
This one, I believe, was our Standard Pencil Company – it had been located at 3 and 5 Coenties Slip in 1891, according to The History and Commerce of New York, which was only a block away from 42 South Street – at least, if it wasn’t the same company it would be another wildly improbable coincidence. If it was, the explosion likely was the end of the company Stephen Brougham had founded.
The Kansas wood pencil company by the same name, however, adds more to our story. When it was founded, the company sourced complete wood pencils from manufacturers, which Standard painted with advertising. By 1914, this Standard Pencil Company had moved to St. Louis and was manufacturing its own pencils. In 1920, The Retail Grocers’ Advocate published a short writeup about Standard’s impressive new factory. “Standard Pencil Company products are marketed under the names of birds, lark, wren etc.,” the report notes.
Standard Pencil took the avian theme to a new level, securing a trademark for the phrase “It’s a Bird” with artwork. M.B. Wallace, Jr., as secretary of the company, signed the declaration on the registration certificate, applied for on October 18, 1920. He claimed the mark had been in use since September 28, 1920.
By then, the affairs of the Standard Pencil Company were being directed largely by its vice president, Asa B. Wallace. According to the Centennial History of Missouri, published in 1921, Wallace was “a young man of enterprising business ability who is making his way steadily upward and has already secured a position which many a man twice his years might well envy.”
Wallace’s youthfulness might also have made him impulsive, and under his direction the Standard Pencil Company unwisely adopted another sort of bird for use on the wood pencil company’s letterhead . . . an eagle. Standard’s former supplier, the Eagle Pencil Company, was not amused.
On February 25, 1921, Modern Stationer and Book-Seller reported that The Eagle Pencil Company, holder of dozens of trademarks with the representation of an eagle, had swiftly and decisively won an injunction against the “Standard Pencil Company of New York.” The decision was a complete rout for Wallace’s company: Standard was permanently restrained from using an eagle in its products or advertising, and the Eagle Pencil Company persuaded Judge Delahanty to go even farther. The judge also ruled that the Standard Pencil Company could no longer use of the word “standard” in connection with its products – even though neither Eagle nor anybody else had secured registration of a trademark for the word.
Ironically, the Standard Pencil Company had also advertised in that very issue of Modern Stationer and Book-Seller. “It’s a Bird” takes on a new context in light of the infringement case, because the timing of the trademark filing – five months before the injunction was issued – suggests that Standard was already being threatened by Eagle when the mark was adopted. “No it isn’t an Eagle, it’s just a bird,” the mark doth seem to protest too much.
The Standard Pencil Company would change its name in obedience to Judge Delahanty’s decision, to – you guessed it – the Wallace Pencil Company.
That’s the second thing you probably think I did on purpose. This blog is about mechanical pencils, not wood pencils, and I can count on one hand the number of articles that have included them. One of them was just a few days ago, when I mentioned my only pencil-related find after scouring the biggest antique malls in the south:
A Charles Lindbergh pencil box made by . . . the Wallace Pencil Company.
Maybe I do believe in coincidences after all.
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