MacKinnon v. Cross?

 Am. Stat., Mar 11, 1880, p.5.

[This is the “short” preamble.  Look for part 2, the “long version”, next.]

[Posted on L&P on Oct 26, 2005.]
        MacKinnon v. Cross?  No, there was never such a court case.  It’s just a metaphor that I’m going to build on in this thread.  Justin Rank asked a good question on Pentrace on Jan 28, 2005.  If the Cross pen company is supposed to be over a hundred years old, “where are all [their] vintage pens?”.  David Williams posted a chronology of Cross achievements from this webpage, which started with the following entries.

1879 Stylographic pen
1879 Propel-repel mechanical pencil
1881 Propel-repel mechanical pencil with clutch
1912 Propel-repel expel mechanical pencil                                                                             1930 Slim mechanical pencil with black bands design
1930 Fountain pen with black bands design

​And Doug Flax posted a defence of Alonzo T. Cross, calling him “this venerable, but often-maligned maker”.  Well, as it turns out, Cross is justifiably “often maligned”, so let me tell you why I think so.
        The problem is that the chronology in the website mentioned above doesn’t answer the question that was asked.  Well, it does, and it doesn’t.  It answers it in an oblique way, because it doesn’t mention fountain pens until the 1930s.  The question was where all those vintage Cross pens have gotten to.  Well, maybe there weren’t that many in the first place, at least not many that were successfully marketed.
        All of Cross’s early fountain pen patents were failures.  In a time when Waterman was simplifying the fountain pen to 5 or 6 parts, Cross was patenting overly complex and unworkable pens.  The more parts you have, the more crevices there are for ink to creep into and dry up in, and to clog up the pen.  Those early patents were probably never put into production.  The only surviving examples of their pens are the Peerless fountain pens, the ones that mimic the style and simplicity of the Waterman’s pens.  One of their ad lines in the period 1889-1899 was, “Simplicity [Is] Its Chief Feature”.  But Cross was merely the agent for this pen, which was probably produced for them by another company after the early period of failures.  Where are all those examples of the pen that was advertised with the slogan, “The Cross ‘Perfected’ Fountain Pen Is A Natural Fountain Pen”?  I think that was the original question. Cross didn’t come anywhere near the claim in Wirt’s slogan, “More sold than all other makes combined”.
​        Take a look at the chronology again.  The first entry is for the Cross stylo, which was merely a rip-off of MacKinnon’s stylograph.  It starts off with a “borrowing” of MacKinnon’s idea, and then continues for 51 years with not a single mention of a fountain pen.  All it gives from 1879 to 1930 are references to mechanical pencils.  That’s 51 years of not very many fountain pen ideas, except for what they could beg, borrow, or steal from others.
​        On Jan 29, 2005, Rob Astyk wrote, “Well, okay.  Let’s malign Cross.  Barbara Lambert unequivocally states that Cross saved examples of its products, but chucked records in the 1960’s and 1980’s when offices were moved.  Thus, a lot of her history of the company’s products is either deduction or pure conjecture.  The slogan ‘since 1846’ is actually a very arbitrary date according to Lambert.  It is the year that Alonzo Townsend Cross was born.  His father, Richard, was in the jewelry business in America as early as 1839 and both Crosses, pere et fils, ‘gave 1848, 1849 and 1850 as founding dates’ according to Lambert.
        “In defense of Barbara Lambert’s book, I must note that the lady was writing as an express commission from the owners. Her book never bites the hand that feeds her.  She also appears to be completely unaware of the Day Rubber Archive.  Thus, when she passes quickly over the Cross v. MacKinnon law suit, the involvement of various Boston stationers and the Cross Pen Company of Boston it’s because she’s not done her homework fully and because she’d been paid not to.
        ​“I rather think that the Peerless pens come out of the Day factory via Boston.  In the old Boston City Directories the advertisements for Greenough, Hopkins and Cushing and their predecessors show a Maltese cross on which is superimposed a lion with a pen in its mouth.  The earliest ads show a Cross Stylograph in the lion’s mouth.  About 1890, the stylographic becomes a Peerless and remains until it is supplanted by a Moore’s safety about 1900.  I know that’s slim evidence, but without those records that the Boss family dumped twenty and forty years ago, it’s kind of difficult to know for certain.  What we can know is that the factory in Providence, Rhode Island was a rather small place that did not turn hard rubber or produce nibs of any kind....Actually, Cross Peerless fountain pens [from the 1880s-90s] are not found very often, but they are out there”.
​        Later on, Rob also said, “I forgot to mention [something that] explains the problem with Cross pens.  From about 1916 to approximately 1935, Cross made nothing but pencils and jewelry items.  Even the pens introduced in the 1930s were contract pieces made by LeBeouf.  Therefore, at the time when the fountain pen was in full flower, Cross was out of the market.  The fountain pens left the Cross line after only a few years and were not available for the great surge in pen buying that attended America’s entry into World War II.  No wonder they are hard to come by.  While the pens are hard to find and distinctive, their very limited production and availability makes any pens made after 1900 very scarce indeed”.
        Then on Oct 19, 2005 in another exchange on Pentrace Rob wrote, “Actually the first A. T. Cross fountain pens were stylographics going back to the late 1870’s.  Alonzo Cross won a patent fight with Duncan MacKinnon, and became the premier maker of stylographic pens in the 1880s”.  And Stephen Overbury responded, “Actually, Cross stole the idea from a Canadian, Duncan MacKinnon.  MacKinnon was a pharmacist from Stratford, Ontario who responded to a contest in Scientific American calling for new inventions on how to control ink flow.  He came up with the stylographic pen concept and won the contest and began manufacturing the pens in New York....Afterwards, Cross copied the idea.  The first MacKinnon pen dates earlier than the Cross model.  The almost identical pen was made by Cross sometime later”.
        Stephen is right, but so is Rob.  The Duncan MacKinnon stylo came first, and well before Alonzo T. Cross’s.  But I think Rob was saying that Cross’s first nibbed fountain pens were failures, and that his stylographics were his first successful pens.  After that, Cross went on to sell the Peerless pen, which was made for Cross from another’s design.
​        Now, concerning the word “stylographic”, Duncan MacKinnon was not the person who coined the term.  MacKinnon didn’t use the word in his Canadian patent in 1875, his UK patent in 1875, and his US patent in 1876.  In the Canadian patent, number 4,809 issued on June 5, 1875, he used the phrase “Combined Pen and Ink-Holder”, and he still used the word “fountain pen” in his 1876 US patent, number 174,965.  But in articles written about the pen in Scientific American magazine at the time, the name “ink pencil” is used.
        The first use of the word “stylographic” originates in the early 1800s in the UK, as the name for an apparatus for making duplicate copies of written or drawn works.  But the word as applied to a writing instrument was actually coined around 1878 by Charles Woodbury Robinson in the British advertising for the Cross stylograph.  James P. Maginnis, in his definitive Cantor Lectures on the early UK patents for steel, reservoir, stylographic, and fountain pens writes that Robinson, an American who imported and introduced the early American stylographs to the UK, “claims...to have been the first to suggest the word ‘stylographic’ as applied to these pens”, and that A. T. Cross “was the first maker to adopt the name”.  In spite of that, MacKinnon scooped Cross and was the first to use the word “stylographic” in a US patent.  The word makes it first appearance in the US Patents in the July 15, 1879 patent numbered RE 8,802, a re-issue of MacKinnon’s 1876 US patent, and then again in his July 29, 1879 US patent number 217,888.
        So let me get back to that metaphor I started with.  Both Rob and Stephen are right when they say that Cross stole the idea and won the patent fight in the real court case “Cross v. MacKinnon”.  But the irony of it is that MacKinnon won out in the end.  MacKinnon’s original patents of 1875 and 1876 called for a weighted needle valve.  Cross changed MacKinnon’s weighted needle valve to a spring-loaded one.  The only thing Cross added to the design of the MacKinnon stylo was one spring.  That’s it.  His so-called “patentable” idea consisted of a SPRING!  As Mark Twain wrote in his letter to Helen Keller on Mar 17, 1903, “He added his little mite—that is all he did”.  Now, if Cross had owned the patent for the MacKinnon stylo, then the spring patent could be viewed as an evolution of and an improvement upon their own idea, but they didn’t own the stylo patent.  The Cross patent should never have been allowed by the USPTO in the first place.
        At first it seemed the spring-loaded valve functioned better than the weighted valve, so MacKinnon briefly adopted this innovation in his stylos.  That spring was the reason for the patent suit.  As it turned out, the spring was constantly submerged in the highly acidic ink of the day, and it very quickly corroded, even though it was made of silver or gold alloys.  It quickly lost it springy tension, and didn’t function very well, after all.  By 1880-81 MacKinnon reverted to the weighted needle valve, not only as a result of the patent suit, but also because it functioned better.  That’s why MacKinnon bothered to have his original patent reissued in 1879 without any substantial changes.  Just look at all the drafting pens of our time, the direct descendants of the stylographic pens.  Not one of them makes use of the spring idea.  Every single modern drafting pen, to the last one, makes use of the weighted needle idea.  MacKinnon’s original idea was vindicated.  So now who has the last laugh?

[Posted on Oct 28, 2005.]
        Rob Astyk asked backchannel what prompted this lengthy dissertation on MacKinnon and Cross.  When I post something on a pen board that does not have an archive, I always try to bring it over to an archived message board to give it a lasting home.  If I’m going to expend the effort to research and write something lengthy, I’m not going to treat it as a piece of ephemera, and just let it disappear after a few days on the board.  Well, there were two interesting threads concerning MacKinnon and Cross this year on Pentrace, one in January and another in October.  So I took the opportunity to amalgamate my two responses on those occasions and Rob’s long response to my posts, and to expand upon them and turn them into the above post.  That way they will always be retrievable online by some unknown collector or researcher in some far off place, such as Japan.  In fact, that’s how I met Ron Dutcher many years ago.

[Posted on Mar 4, 2012.]
​        Perhaps the first post in this thread is a little bit long-winded because most of what is said there can be distilled to what is said in a letter I found in American Stationer.  Replying to a note in an earlier issue that was critical of their stylo, MacKinnon & Co. sent a letter to the editor that was published on July 2, 1879, p.14.  It basically said two things.  They complained that Cross was “selling our pen without our license”, and that Cross was “making [their own stylo] soft-pointed”, in other words, they were giving all stylos a bad name by making the Cross stylo without an iridium point.  That was what it all came down to, those two complaints.
        But then I kept reading, and you wouldn’t believe what else I found.  If you thought the first post here was long-winded, “Well, just watch me”, as Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously said.  But instead of suspending civil liberties, as Trudeau did, let’s give them free reign.  And don’t complain too much because “I might regret my liberality” and take it all back.  But here goes anyway.  First, let’s go back a few steps.  I’m going to post the complete texts of the note and the letter I cited above, but I’m also going to post a whole lot more under a new topic about the stylographic war of 1880, coming soon, to a blog near you.

George Kovalenko.

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Lewis Carroll’s Stylograph

 

[Posted on L&P on June 7, 2013.]
        Ron Dutcher has stated on several occasions that he is working on a book on Mark Twain’s Pens.  The various chapters will deal with the pencils, steel pens, quills, a stylograph, various fountain pens, and a typewriter that Twain owned and used.  Well, here’s a reference to one of Lewis Carroll’s pens that I ran across lately, one that’s sort of in the same vein as Twain’s pens, for Carroll, too, was a lover of “toys and gadgets”, and “peculiar Victorian devices”.
        The book from which those quotes are taken is Jenny Woolf’s, The Mystery Of Lewis Carroll.  She recently discovered Carroll’s detailed bank account and financial records in the archive of a large modern financial institution that absorbed Carroll’s old bank.  The bank records kept in those days were much more detailed than they are now, and recorded all the names of the people with whom and the businesses with which he dealt and what exactly was purchased.  She deduced most of this from his bank books, but other items were also mentioned in his letters and his diaries.  On page 129 of her book she writes that his “capacious cupboards...were full of treasures” such as a mechanical bear that spoke, a flying bat driven by elastic bands, musical boxes, a mechanical barrel organ called an “orguinette” that played piano rolls, which he loaded backwards and played in reverse, a hand-propelled “Velociman” tricycle for adult invalids, and one of the earliest typewriters.  He also invented “novelties” himself, such as a “contraption for writing in bed at night in the dark”.  But best of all, on page 282 she writes that he was “an eager purchaser” of such peculiar Victorian devices as “the Stylographic pen”.  She doesn’t state which brand of stylograph it was, but MacKinnon, Livermore, and Cross stylos were all sold in London at the time under that name.  He probably also used wooden pencils, and pen and pencil cases, and quills, and steel pens in penholders, and maybe even some early fountain pens, but someone else is going to have to read all his letters and diaries and financial records to glean that neglected, and overlooked, and temporarily misplaced and discarded information.

George Kovalenko.

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‘Sumguy’ and ‘Banana Pen’

, and “frankenpen” and “stylophile”.

      Here is a story about the word “sumgai”, pronounced “some guy”, from the fountain pen of Bill Riepl.  This article was archived in the early 2000’s by Len Provisor in the Pentrace “Older Stuff”, but it was originally published much earlier on Stylophiles Online, which isn’t online anymore.
      Len wrote this introduction, “The name Sumgai has by now become synonymous with the dread nemesis of all collectors, the cause of “the one that got away”.  Of course, the real dark secret of Sumgai is that we all get a chance to be Sumgai ourselves sooner or later.  As a wise fellow once said, We have met the enemy, and he is us”.  In the story, Bill Riepl finds some pens, and beats the sumgai to the pens, and thereby becomes the sumgai himself.  “As I drove away”, he wrote, “I thought I saw an awful form materialize and slink into the store.  It seemed that there was a horrible cry, but I couldn’t be certain because I had the radio turned up”, but actually, in that case Bill was transformed into the dreaded Sumgai.  By the way, I prefer the spelling “sumguy”, and the feminine of “sumguy” is obviously “sumgal”.
      And now, here’s the story of the Riepled Banana Pen that I placed on the Zoss List in August 2003.  Back around 1997, Bill Riepl related a story on Zoss about having gone to a picnic and having left a case full of fountain pens in a hot car on a sunny summer day.  When he got back to the car he found that he had toasted that case of pens in the window of the car, and the pens had melted into curved banana shapes.  These became known as “riepled banana pens”, and to do this to a pen was to “riepl the pen”.
      I think the word “frankenpen” originated on Zoss as well about the same time, but I can’t prove it anymore because the Zoss archive going back before 1998 is dead, and isn’t online anymore.  You have to understand that, at the time, the Zoss archive went back to only September 2005, and the early years of Zoss messages were not included.  At one time, the messages back to about May or June 1998 were on eScribe.com.  Due to some problems when the Zoss archive was transferred over to eScribe in the spring of 1998, the earlier messages going back to 1995-6 were all lost, a real shame.  Did anyone out there save any of the messages privately?  Now the messages between 1998 and 2005 are not in the archive either.  [And now, the Zoss Archive since Feb 16, 2012 is dead, and the search function for the period from 2005 to 2012 doesn’t work.]  In any case, I found a few messages in the eScribe archive before it went down.  In the “2nd Annual Zoss Awards For 1998” presented by Deb Alicen on Jan 1, 1999 she states, “I shall award New Wordmaker of the Year to Bill Riepl, for sacrificing a case full of pens above and beyond the call of duty in order to enrich our vocabularies with the word “riepled”, which, as we all now know, means pens roasted too long in warm, gentle sunlight, inside a car”.  Therefore, the word must pre-date the time when the eScribe archive was established.  What do you bet that in the “1st Annual Zoss Awards For 1997” the New Word was either “sumgai”, or “frankenpen”?
      The earliest use of “riepled” I found on Google is for a message on alt.collecting.pens-pencils that goes back to Dec 28, 1998.  Now, acp-p goes back to the middle of the 1990s, but its earlier Usenet archive, the one before it was associated with Google, was lost when it was not transferred over to Google, another real shame.  Bruce Harrison’s “The Ink Spot” and the AOL.com pen boards are no longer online and have no archives.  Shame! twice again.  The first use of the word “riepled” that I found in the Zoss Archives was in a message by Alexandra “Xan” Nyfors on Aug 8, 1998, but that’s not the first use.  Xan used the word in her message as if it were already a well-established and accepted term, so it wasn’t the first use ever, but it was close to the time of the first use.
      At the end of August 2003 there was a series of messages on Zoss about the terms “frankenpen” and “riepled banana pen”.  Anna Lawson remembered using “riepled banana pen” early in 1997.  She wrote, “I vaguely remember some delight among some people about its use early on, so it might have been fairly new about that time.  I can’t document it, though”.  Xan Nyfors wrote that it must have originated early in 1997 when she was working for Equator Technologies.  She remembers that the car was parked at a company picnic, and that “frankenpen” wasn’t a new term at the time.  In fact, “frankenpen” came up during the advent of the term “riepled” because “Some wag suggested that Bill could turn a riepled banana pen into a frankenpen”.  But the earliest recorded use of “frankenpen” I have found so far is in a message on Zoss by Xan from June 24, 1998, where she wrote, “The more I work with vintage fountain pens, the less sure I am of my ability to spot anything but the most egregious Frankenpen”.
      Here’s a tantalizing tidbit.  If you do a Wikipedia search for “frankenpen”, you don’t find anything, but a drop-down menu offers you the alternate word “Frankenpenis”, which redirects you to the entry for John Wayne & Lorena Bobbitt.  It says that they were “an American couple whose abusive relationship gained worldwide notoriety for an incident in 1993 when she severed his penis with a knife.  It was subsequently surgically reattached”.  And a little later, “In 1996, he appeared in an adult film, Frankenpenis”, not to be confused with Frankenweenie.  This was in 1996, and perhaps the word was up in the air, erect, so to speak, and had a certain fertility and potency and fruitfulness in its influence, or effluence, on the coming and the coining of the term “frankenpen” in 1997.  But then, perhaps frankenpen is the word that came first.  Again, just don’t forget to put a space after that red word.
      Does anyone out there have any earlier uses of any of these terms in a print source?  And how about the word “stylophile”?  When was it first used?  One of the earliest uses I have been able to find is in Pen World, Vol. 1, No. 4, the Summer 1988 issue, page 14.  It was used by Art Maier to describe himself as a “Teacher, calligrapher, researcher, writer, stylophile”.  The word simply jumps off the page.  But that’s just my sixpence.

 

                             —From Mark Twain’s Letters.

George Kovalenko.

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‘Frankenpens’ and ‘Squeezacs’

, and pensmiths and the Lourdman.

        Altering the “Big Red” ballpoint into a fountain pen was a major sport amongst pen collectors in the 1980s and 1990s, and it continues on to this day.  I’ve seen practically every kind of nib-and-section stuck into these “Big Red” ball pens.  The Sheaffer “NoNonsense”, “Old Timer”, and “Connaisseur” sections fit with only a slight alteration of the threads.  I have also seen Parker 51 shrouds and filling units adapted to fit, and I have an example made by one of the guys at the Parker factory in Janesville, perhaps Mike Conway, or Lynn Sorgatz, with a 75 nib in a reworked “Big Red” section with a feed with a cartridge-filling nipple from a Parker 75.  But the easiest retrofit is the Sheaffer “NoNonsense” or “Connaisseur” nib-section unit, depending upon whether you want a steel, gold-plated, or 14K nib.  And once you get the “NoNonsense” section to fit, the existing nib can also be pulled and switched out with any 14K nib that fits.  I have one with a small Waterman’s Emblem nib, but #2 to #5 nibs might also fit.  I even have one that I franken-penned with a conical Montblanc splat on the barrel end, just as a joke, so that it’s hidden inside the pocket when carried, and hidden under the cap when posted.  When capped and out of the pocket, it makes a good, showy, self-promoting pointer for someone with a big ego.
        The Cross “Solo” and “Radiance” nib-section units also fit perfectly with no sanding required, but I prefer the shape and look of the Sheaffer “Connaisseur” nib, especially the Type II in this Dennis Bowden picture from Jan 15, 2007.  The Sheaffer Connaisseur nib has more of a vintage nib shape, and the Cross Solo clearly doesn’t, as this comparison shows.  In terms of looks, the Sheaffer “Connaisseur” nib wins by a country mile.  One of my Sheaffer “NoNonsense” sections now has a Waterman’s #2 nib, but it could also hold anything up to a #5 nib, small “100 Year Pen” nibs, or any other suitable nib.  Let’s see, you could put a Sheaffer “NoNonsense” nib-section in a Cross “Solo”, the “Solo” nib-section in a Parker “Big Red”, and the Parker “Big Red” section in a Sheaffer “NoNonsense”.  My goodness, that’s quite an incestuous roundelay of frankenpens.
        I don’t like the look of a nib with wide shoulders and curved sides.  The nibs in some modern Cross, Pilot-Namiki, Sailor, and Montblanc pens have this shape.  The shoulders stick out like stubby, little bird’s wings spread wide.  It’s what I call a flügl feder, or wing nib, although I know I am misusing the term as used for Montblanc nibs, and I am giving new meaning to the term.
        I do not claim this discovery for myself.  I just helped to perfect it once I found out about the possibility.  And I don’t know who was the first one to do the retrofit with a “NoNonsense”, but the first time I saw it was in the 1980s here in my city, Saskatoon, and the guy who dreamed it up was Glenn Craig.  He’s a fellow-collector who used to live here, but he moved out to the west coast and islands of B.C., the Saskatchewan graveyard, where all Prairie people go to die when they retire.  Glenn had the bad habit of tightening his pen caps very tightly, and doing some heavy-handed repairs on pens that required a delicate touch, so I gave him the nickname “Lourdman”, a punning, Anglicized version of the French words “lourde main”.  We were pretty well isolated from the pen-collecting world out here in the 1970s and 80s, and Glenn had lots of time on his hands to play with the cheap parts pens that we found out here.  Glenn wrote on Pentrace recently, on June 19, 2014 specifically, “Living in the boonies makes a person do with whatever is at hand.  I appreciate mint condition authentic pens, but if all you got is bits and bobs then make what you can out of them”.  He had a good penmechanic’s and pensmith’s eye, and he noticed that the two parts were almost the same size and very nearly compatible.  But the Sheaffer-retrofit idea was probably in the air and was discovered separately by a few different people at about the same time.  It’s like discovering that the gold-plated Osmiroid nib units are compatible and interchangeable with Esterbrook nib units.  I found that out on my own, but so did a few other people, I’ll bet.
        The threads on the Sheaffer sections and the “Big Red” barrels have the same pitch, but the diameter of the section threads is just a tiny bit larger than the internal barrel thread diameter.  All you have to do is sand and file the threads down on both pieces until they match, only about 0.3 to 0.5mm.  Use a bastard file, not a crosscut file, on the section threads, and round files and sandpaper rolled around the file, or a dowel to do the barrel threads.  It’s easier to keep the pieces symmetrical if you use a lathe, but it’s not necessary.  It’s not rocket science.  And don’t go too far, or you will have no threads left to hold the two pieces together. If you reduce both sets of threads by half, that should be sufficient, but constantly keep checking the fit until you get it just right.  Every time you test the fit, the section will go on a little farther, a little bit at a time, until it finally fits.  The section still fits in the “Connaisseur” body.  I got a black one as part of a trade for repairs, so I sacrificed it because I would rather have a Big Orange-Red pen with a “Connaisseur” nib.  I will only do it for others if they specifically request it and understand the consequences.  I put a nib-section unit with a gold-plated “NoNonsense” nib into the “Connaisseur”, so it isn’t a total write off.  Pun intended.  In any case, one can use a “NoNonsense” nib-section unit and switch out the steel nib for a vintage gold nib.
        This is what I also do with my “Big Red”.  I remove the gold ring on the cap to make it shorter, and curve the lip to look like a bandless Parker Duofold.  It’s not rounded over, but rather curved parabolically form a short distance from the cap lip.  The one above is an early pen with the single-lead thread inside the cap, and the black barrel tip, but I also use the later one with the bandless cap with triple-lead threads and solid orange barrel, but then I usually cut the cap down to shorten it.  It just looks better with a shorter cap when the cap is posted.  The later ones also come with steel clips, so you have a choice of silver-colored or gold-colored clips.  Then I install a “Connaisseur” section with a gold nib, but with the rings removed.  The plastic is very soft, and the threads usually wear out in a few years, so I just retire it, move the section over into a new one, and make another one.  Although I specialize in collecting RHR pens and pencils and penholders and inkwells, etc., one of my small sub-collections consists of an example of every known variation of the Parker “Big Red” felt tip and ballpoint models, but only in red plastic.  Maya Furlong, another Canadian pensmith in B.C. who makes her own frankenpens with Cross “Solo” and “Radiance” nib-section units, said that she was surprised that I collect new pens, but any pen is pen history.  Old pens, new pens…who cares about the distinction.  It’s all pen history.
        By the way, when you’re watching the film The Paper Chase, look for the scene at the end where John Houseman’s character is altering the marks on exam papers.  He is using an original “Big Red” felt-tip pen, and it just glows on screen.  Here is Len Provisor’s picture of his “Big Red” in Mandarin yellow that I made for him, and a clear red Sheaffer “NoNonsense” retrofitted by Vivek Narayanan into a matchstick filler.  You can just see the matchstick hole in the barrel.  Good luck with your attempts.  If you are successful, then way to go!  You will be well on your way to becoming a pensmith.
        Another thing that Glenn “the Lourdman” Craig may have originated was the squeezac, a mechanism that converted a cartridge pen into a bulb filler.  Over on the Zoss List in February 2005, they were talking about it and coined some new terms for it.  They called it the “Craig Conversion”, a term coined by Paul Lloyd, and named after its originator.  It concerns Glenn Craig’s and Keith Hallgren’s method of converting a cartridge pen into a sac-filler.  Then Glenn coined a new term for it, the “Squeezac Filler”.  This conversion method turns ink-stingy pens, such as the Parker Centennial Duofold, into super-wet writers.  Keith said that he never thought that it was anything but “a practical way to turn a cartridge filler into a bottle feeder”, and could not remember whether the idea was his own, or whether he picked it up along the way somewhere else, but it was “still pretty cool, and an excellent solution for those who hate buying cartridges”.  Add to that the improved performance of the pen that one gets, and the modification is a winner.  Although they both got some credit for the idea, Keith thought it had been around for a while.  It may have originated in the method of refilling cartridge pens by pressing the soft-plastic cartridges directly, that is, until the sides of the cartridges cracked.  The squeezac filler makes an excellent substitute for cartridges, improves the performance of any cartridge pen, and is really easy to make with simple tools.
        Using a silicone ink sac is a good idea because then there is a means to see how much ink is in the filler, and the finished length of the new filler cannot exceed the length of the original cartridge.  An intact cartridge can be used as a guide.  A small amount of rubber cement can be used to secure the cartridge to the pen, although this isn’t required, but use caution so as to prevent any adhesives from getting into the cartridge nipple.  John Chapman suggested cutting down the cartridge more and using a longer sac.  With a longer sac you get “a more complete squeeze of the sack and a more complete filling with a single squeeze”.  Less cart and more sac is the right idea.  Here are two pictures of a squeezac, Shawn Newton’s, and Keith Hallgren’s.
        Glenn may not have invented this method, either, but he certainly popularized it.  He was one of the pioneers who championed this method, and he deserves the eponym, that is, to have the method named after him, the eponymous “Craig conversion”!  It definitely qualifies him as a journeyman pensmith.  I think Keith Hallgren, another pensmith in neighboring Alberta, also helped to pioneer the method.  Maybe it’s a frugal Canadian kind of thing, in other words, a cheapskate kind of thing.  It also might help to be a preacher.  What was that Lourdman Repair Tip #1 again, the first one I learned from Glenn?  “Never throw anything away”, the Lourdman said.  Never throw away any broken pens, or pen parts, or spent cartridges, because someday you’ll want to try out some sort of pen repair, or conversion, and you’ll never know what you’ll need.  You, too, may be a pensmith, someday.  All pen collectors should be their own pensmiths.

 

                                                                                                      Franken magnifying glass

George Kovalenko.

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P.S.  This is a picture of Dagwood Lourdman setting fire to his fountain pen.  I got the picture from Ron Dutcher, and I added the fire.

P.P.S.  Also take a look at this other version of a “Big Red” frankenpen with a gel refill in this post.  It can take a Pilot G2, or Juice refill.
 

Einstein’s Fountain Pen

[Posted on L&P on June 19, 2006.]
        Have you ever seen a picture of Einstein’s fountain pen?  This has been brought up before many times on the various pen message boards.  Someone or other will periodically post the picture of Einstein with what looks like a late Pelikan 100N, either in his hand, or in his breast pocket.  But there is another pen, an earlier one mentioned in the Leiden University website, although the link to the pen is dead.  Paul Ehrenfest invited Einstein to become special professor at Leiden University, and they became close intellectual friends.  As a token of their friendship, Einstein gave Ehrenfest the fountain pen that he had used to write down his research on general relativity between 1912 and 1921.  The pen is now preserved in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden.  Here’s the correct link to the museum webpage with a picture of the pen.  The museum’s website is in Dutch, but you can see a picture of the pen there, and it looks like a Waterman’s #20-series pen, an eyedropper pen with a long, tapered cap, perhaps a Waterman’s #22 or #24 pen.  Einstein also kept the distinctive Waterman’s blue box in which the pen came, which is why we can now tell the brand name of the pen from the tiny picture.  And what looks like an unusual cap band is actually a slip-on, sliding, accommodation clip.  There is also a news item about the pen from Mar 6, 2009, again in Dutch, in this Youtube video.  You can see the pen at the 1:39 mark.
        If you use Google Translator to render the text of the museum website into English, you get some funny results.  When I originally found the site and used the translator on it on June 19 2006, it took the line, “Maar Einstein wilde Max Planck niet voor het hoofd stoten en bleef in Berlijn”, and turned it into, “But Einstein not wanted Max Planck for the head bump and remained in Berlin”, and if you do the translation now it becomes, “But Einstein did Max Planck do not offend and remained in Berlin”.  It sounds like Max Planck was prone to metaphorically head butting his intellectual opponents, but I think that the gist of it is that, “Einstein did not want to bump heads with Max Planck and remained in Berlin”.  But now that statement gets smoothed out a bit too much by Google translator, imputing to Einstein an uncertain deference that is not there in the original Dutch by implying that “Einstein did not want to offend Max Planck and remained in Berlin”.  He just didn’t want to bump heads with the conventional Max Planck and was avoiding confrontation, not deferring to him.
       Most people know that Einstein was working as a patent office clerk while he made his earliest discoveries concerning light and gravity and relativity. But did you know that, later on, he actually held a few US patents, some along with Leo Szilard as co-inventor?  Take a look at US patents 1,781,541 and 2,058,562.  Now, it would be the icing on the cake if any of those patents were for writing instruments, or if they were at least writing-instrument related, but that would be too much to hope for.  These two are for a refrigeration system and a camera, respectively.  Between 1929 and 1961, Szilard also received fourteen US patents for nuclear processes, some of them with Enrico Fermi as co-inventor.  That’s like a character in a movie saying, “Hello, my name is Lenin, and this is Stalin, and this is Trotsky”.
        However, most of this early 20th century technology and science was invented and designed and written up and drawn up with fountain pens, just as most of Newton’s work on gravity was written up with an italic quill.  It gives their mathematical equations and handwriting a beautiful ductus, that uninterrupted flow of calligraphy that makes it look all of a piece.  That’s what writing a lot will do for your handwriting.  Improving your handwriting is like trying to get directions to Carnegie Hall.  If you ask how to get to Carnegie Hall, any New Yorker will tell you all it takes is “Practice, practice, practice”.

George Kovalenko.

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Addendum, Nov 25, 2015, on the 100th anniversary of the general theory of relativity.
      The PBS program Nova just aired a docudrama titled “Inside Einstein’s Mind” on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the general theory of relativity.  There are many shots of the actor in the role of Einstein writing with a fountain pen, but as usual, they got the fountain pen all wrong.  And it was so easy to get it right.  All they had to do was to visit the Leiden University and the Boerhaave Museum websites, in the links above.  But they didn’t do their research.  And what modern pen did they use instead?  Who cares.  It’s wrong.
      PBS also repeated the Nova episode “Einstein’s Big Idea”, originally aired on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the special theory of relativity of 1905.  And what writing instrument did they use there?  A wooden pencil, equally wrong.  He used a pen.

 

And here’s a Waterman’s #0622, with the barrel covered with Mother Of Pearl slabs with nice opal fire.

Addendum, Feb 22, 2020.
Here’s an interesting thread on Reddit about Einstein’s pen, and his field equations, + - + +.

 

Some Obscure Waterman’s Designs

, two-part thimble caps & finger guards.
 

        I can’t believe that Waterman’s actually came up with this pen, let alone produced it.  It’s a pen with two caps, or a two-part cap, or a cap-within-a-cap, depending upon how you look at it.  The idea is to keep your fingers clean by having a secondary, internal cap that keeps the hands clean by “preventing ink from getting…into contact with the fingers”.  The above picture is from the article titled “Waterman’s Thimble Cap” in Geyer’s Stationer, July 27, 1905, p.20.  This link should work for those of you in the US, at least.  For the rest of us, it will work if we have an IP address blocker such as TunnelBear.
        There were a few precursor patents for two-part, thimble caps.  Here’s one from 1899, patent no. 631,824, but it’s not the one for the above pen.  Patent nos. 682,574 and 682,575 are a couple of other very likely candidates with very complex multi-part caps, but again, they’re not the ones.  There’s even this Waterman’s patent, 698,882 from 1902 with a cap-completely-within-a-cap, although it’s not the one, either.  But if you look closely at the cap in the above picture you’ll just barely be able to make out the patent date Oct 20, 1903 for patent no. 742,036.  It showed up in the above article, though not in any advertisements that I could find, but an example of the pen has been found and appears in the Waterman book by Max Davis & Gary Lehrer, on p.23.
        This pen must have inspired Waterman’s to come up with and market the device in these articles in the American Stationer, Sept 26, 1908, p.14, and Bookseller and Stationer, Nov 1908, p.47, yet another thimble sleeve to cover the inky section tip, and the sometimes leaky joint between the section and the barrel.  I found one about 15 years ago in red mottled hard rubber that also worked quite well on straight pens, or penholders without a grip.  It almost makes a regular Waterman’s eyedropper into a “Waterman’s Zaner-Bloser” pen.

George Kovalenko.

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Some Pen Research Leads

  , for someone else to follow up on.

 

        There’s a trove of old records in Boston.  The Dunn Archive at Harvard is one of the resources cited in the book Writing History, the history of A. T. Cross Pencil Co.  Evidently it contains some information on early nib makers and their affiliations with fountain pen manufacturers.  I don’t know whether it’s at the Widener or at the Baker Business Library.  The Baker, however, does have the record book containing the meeting minutes of the Board of Executives of the Crocker Pen Co., and even more fascinating, the scrapbooks of the Thomas Groom Stationers.  Groom was an old-time Boston stationer going back to the late 19th Century and an early Waterman’s dealer.  The company kept scrapbooks up to the 1930’s of all its advertising in all the Boston newspapers.  They cut the ads from the newspaper and pasted them into these huge scrapbooks in chronological order and annotated each ad.  It’s a treasure trove of Waterman advertising and may help with refining dates of some models and colors.
        Just the records at Harvard would be enough, but there are also the court records and the original case files for the “Waterman v. Lockwood” and “Waterman v. Johnson” suits in the Circuit Court of Massachusetts.  There are also the records at the Medford Historical Society regarding Walter Cushing, a patent and trademark depository library at the Boston Public Library, and the Bostonian Society.  And at the Massachusetts Historical Society they have the above pen that Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.
        There’s an even bigger trove in New York City in the NY Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the Columbia University, the New York University, the CCNY, and the legal records centre.  The copies of the various newspapers are at the NY Public Library, and perhaps some of them reported on Norman Thomas’s speeches about Frank D. Waterman during the 1925 mayoral campaign, speeches attacking Waterman for breaking up the Nib Makers’ Guild after he took over Aikin-Lambert.  The company incorporation papers reside in Albany in the State Commerce office, but they may not have kept all the records.  For convenience, the state keeps some records in New York City, so that information commonly needed there doesn’t require a trek up to Albany each time a court case or merger or other action requires its review.
        The best treasure trove of all, however, is the archive of the H. P. & E. Day Hard Rubber Co. from Seymour, Connecticut, housed at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Conn.  The contact people at the Dodd Center are Tom Wilsted and Laura Katz-Smith.  In particular, take a look at the ledger books.  Literally everybody east of the Allegheny Mountains and south of the Massachusetts border got their hard rubber parts from Day Rubber.  John Holland, John Foley, William S. Hicks, Mabie Todd, Aikin Lambert, Leroy S. Fairchild, Edward Todd, Paul E. Wirt, Lewis E. Waterman, Francis Cashel Brown, and Warren N. Lancaster are all in those ledgers.  The folders are also full of original contracts and notes signed by Alonzo T. Cross, Frank C. Brown, Paul E. Wirt, Frank D. Waterman, William I. Ferris, and others.  The file containing patents includes nothing but pen patents and does not contain the patents for Ripple hard rubber.  There’s a nothing at all on hard rubber, or processes for modifying vulcanized rubber.  Day had a division in Ravenna, Ohio, but those records aren’t in the UConn archive.  The Ohio plant, however, may have supplied Conklin and a bunch of the Chicago pen companies.
        The independent audits of the L. E. Waterman’s Ideal Pen Co. for 1948, 1951, and 1953 are there.  By 1951, every member of company management was over 65, and the factory supervisor was 75.  The 1948 report is absolutely scathing about Frank D. Waterman, Jr.’s management.  The report shows the company losing money since 1926.  The 1951 and 1953 reports are by a different auditing firm, and are written in much more indirect language, but draw the same conclusions, except that those reports show no losses before the end of 1929.  According to the 1951 audit, Waterman’s went from being the predominant pen maker in the world in 1920 to the lowest ranking penmaker.  The percentages of sales of the big four quality fountain penmakers were ranked as follows in 1951.  Parker 45%, Sheaffer 40%, Eversharp 9%, and Waterman 6%.  That was very bad news for Waterman’s, and it made the takeover by BIC inevitable.
        And who was behind the Signature Company that owned all the patents for Waterman’s Signagraph?  Incidentally, it did not go out of business until the 1980’s.  There’s a reference to the Signagraph in the Scientific American, in an article titled “The Inventor In The Office”, in the Oct 29, 1910 issue, pp.344-346.  So far, the only overt connection to Waterman’s is that they made the proprietary pens for the Signagraph, but they must have had other financial and managerial connections to the company, too.

George Kovalenko.

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Vintage Pen Repair Tools, Again

, my first message board series.
  

 
[Posted on L&P on May 27, June 1, 4, Sept 25, Oct 23, 2005, Sept 5, 2007, and Jan 30, 2012.]

I just noticed that “The Wayback Machine” in the Internet Archive somehow managed to preserve my first series of messages on the Lion & Pen message board in 2005.  All the titles in the list of messages in the “Pens Past” forum on Lion & Pen up to Apr 25, 2012 are preserved in Wayback, although only a few of the titles are linked to the actual messages.  Also, if the message thread is longer than 20 posts, then the links to the succeeding pages are also dead.

But fortunately, 2 out of 6 of the threads in the “Vintage Pen Repair Tools” series are archived at the following links.  What’s funny is that the message board colors vary and fluctuate according to when the messages were archived, sometimes years apart, even though they were all composed about the same time, and placed on the message board within days of one another.

Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 1
Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 2-dead link, pic 1, pic  2.
Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 3-dead link, pic 1.
Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 4 
Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 5-dead link, pic 1.
Vintage Pen Repair Tools, 6-dead link, pic 1, pic  2.
Vintage Pen Repair Shop, 7-dead link, now in another blog post.

A seventh message about “A Vintage Pen Repair Shop” that I found in my city was archived, but the URL in the archive is a dead link.  Another one that does survive in the archive is the thread with the Francis Cashel Brown biographies.  I also updated the link for Lion & Pen in the “Vintage Links” on the right-hand side of my home page.
 
George Kovalenko.

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