As a trawled through my photo archive looking for simple subjects that would be quick and easy to write up, I remembered that I found this example of a Russell in an online auction:
The Russell is a fat, conventional nose drive pencil with only one complication: an adjustable eraser that protrudes through a cap on the top. Unscrewing and removing the cap releases it for repositioning.
As with the other examples I’ve found, it is stamped “Russell / Pat. Pend.” on the barrel.
This example joins the other two that I wrote about in “A Rainy Day Project” (September 10, 2017: Volume 5, page 114). In that article, I expressed doubt that a patent was ever issued for such a simple addition to an otherwise ordinary pencil.
However, I promised on some rainy day to dust off the notes I had compiled in preparation for one day completing a third volume of writing instrument patents – a project that I’ve indefinitely shelved due to a lack of demand, but my working spreadsheet occasionally proves useful in tracking down post-1945 patents.
The problem, though, was that I had no idea when a patent for the Russell would have been issued, or even if it was ever issued at all. “Duly dusted,” I noted in the print version of Volume 5: the only search results that were turning up for “Russell Adjustable Eraser” were leading me back to my own article.
This new addition, however, added a couple details that I hoped would be useful in putting this one to bed. It provides an address and phone number for the Russell Pencil Company in Gardena, California:
My previous newspaper searches for “Russell Pencil” were only narrowing things down to those pages that have the words Russell and Pencil on them . . . not particularly helpful . . . but adding “Gardena” to the mix yielded a hit: The Daily Breeze in Torrance, California published the only advertisement I’ve found for the Russell Pencil Company on October 21, 1948.
Now I had a place – probably somewhere in California, since the only advertising was in a small, local paper. I also had narrowed down the time during which some patent was pending – around 1948. Those two details, used in conjunction with my patent volume 3 notes, were just enough to help me find this:
Hiram Earl Temple, of Los Angeles, California, applied for patent number 2,478,437 on September 17, 1945, and it was issued on August 9, 1949. There’s some differences between what Temple shows and the Russell as it went into production – Temple’s design actually called for an eraser with a hole bored through it, so that the super long eraser protruding through one end could surround a super long lead inserted from the other end. Since all of the examples I’ve found of the Russell have a conventional screw drive mechanism, that feature isn’t included. At best, Temple’s application – pending at the right time and in the right place – was only good enough to warrant a “Pat. Pend.” stamp on the Russell’s barrel.
I did find one other item that looks like it has Temple’s fingerprints on it. It doesn’t have a pencil, but it has a pair of two-inch erasers inserted in opposing ends.
“TEC” reads the imprint mid-barrel. Somewhere I think I have a TEC leadholder set, and from what I remember they were used to mark film with different colors. A quick search led me to an Etsy listing by seller “roughroughdraft,” including a box identifying the Venmo TEC photo retouching set as being made by the V & E Manufacturing Company in Pasadena, California.
Hiram Temple died on October 18, 1990, and his obituary was published in the Ventura County Star on October 20; he was a mechanical engineer primarily remembered for his baking equipment inventions who was born January 12, 1901.
Whether there was any connection between Hiram Temple and the V & E Manufacturing Company, I don’t know. I still don’t know who “Russell” was, either. I need a few more rainy days . . .
