Eversharp stole the idea for its repeating pencil from someone else.
This story starts innocently enough, with the article I wrote in early December titled "The Ferengi's Acfad." After the article was published, I went back to Michael Little (the Ferengi in the article) and told him how excited I was to discover that his ACFAD was actually a pre-Moore pencil, from the days when Moore was known as The American Fountain Pen Co. I didn't ask him to sell it to me - I just asked that if he ever did decide to sell it, to consider selling it to me.
Well, Michael did ask me how much I'd pay for it, and after I made an offer, we had a deal. There was only one problem:
he'd lost it.
He emailed me frantically after I'd sent him the check and said it just had to be somewhere in his apartment, that he was on the hunt for it and not to worry. Fortunately, I know Michael well enough to know that he would find it - in fact, while he was looking, he might find some other cool things while he's looking for it. From his description, his apartment sounds like Warehouse 13.
Sure enough, a few days later he emailed me to let me know he'd found it, along with about six other pencils he thought I'd like. One of them, he said, was a "Gilfred." Quite correctly, he pointed out that I did not list the Gilfred in The Catalogue. He didn't send me a picture of it, but a little later in the day he sent me a link to a court case decided in January, 1942, captioned Gilfred Corporation v. Eversharp, Inc. (ok, the lawyer in me can't stop there -- the citation is 43 F. Supp. 645).
I was amazed as I read the case. This "Gilfred Corporation" claimed that Eversharp's design for its version of the repeating pencil infringed on Gilfred's patent. Eversharp didn't defend by saying it came up with the idea first, and Eversharp didn't claim to have rights under its own patent. Eversharp's entire defense was that Gilfred's patent claims weren't valid because someone else had thought of it before Gilfred, in 1896.
Who won? I'll give you one guess. Ever hear of a Gilfred Skyline?
(Now as an aside, stop here for a minute and ponder the irony of this. Just three years after this case was decided, Eversharp was on exactly the opposite side of this argument, when the Reynolds Pen Company introduced the ballpoint pen and Eversharp sued Reynolds for infringing on Eversharp's rights -- Reynolds, just as Eversharp had done in 1942, argued that the ballpoint pen had been patented in the 1880s and the rights to it had long since expired. But I digress.)
To get back to our story, a couple days later I decided to dig a little deeper and look into the two patents that were mentioned in the case. The "Clement Patent" from 1896 was number 566,444, issued August 25, 1896 to John Clement of Birmingham, England.
But it was the Gilfred patent that raised my eyebrows. OK, it didn't raise them, it had them sailing off my forehead like in an old Warner Brother's cartoon, with a steam whistle blowing in the background. The Gilfred patent was number 1,592,502 and was originally issued to Abraham Pollak. The assignee was . . . Samuel Kanner. Wow! That's the patent for the Presto repeating pencil I wrote about just a few weeks ago. Remember this?
NOTE: This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.
To order, here's the link: Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company
