..the more there is to know.
When you become interested in something, it frequently happens that your new interest takes you where you hadn’t expected to go. Such has been the case this past month. Almost exactly a month ago, I wrote about a new BCHR pen I’d acquired, a Monogram pen made for, and sold exclusively by, the Rexall Drug Company. I tracked the manufacture of that pen down to Michael G. Kraker, the while waxing philosophical about the lever design and Sheaffer’s patent.
The Cliff’s Notes version is that the lever embodies U.S. Patent Nº 1,263,261, issued April 16, 1918, to Rudolph W. Lotz. Well, it turns out that on the same day Lotz also received U.S. Patent Nº 1,263,260. And that one was also put into production by Kraker, on Pencraft pens produced by — you guessed it — the Michael George Pen Company. Here’s a crispy Pencraft pen that I restored today:
The lever on this one might look a little funky. That’s because it’s not only the lever. This Lotz patent, instead of having a spring-loaded catch built into the end of the lever, has the catch assembled into the pen barrel, end to end with the lever so that a notch in the end of the lever can snap down over the end of the catch. The pressure bar in this version, like that in the Monogran design, is attached to the lever, but with an extra “tail” sticking upward from the attachment stirrup to form a spring. When the lever is closed, the spring is cocked. When you release the catch by pushing it away from the lever, the spring pops the lever up so that you can operate it. Here’s a close-up of the barrel with the lever popped up:
I don’t think this version would be as reliable in the long term because the ends of the lever and catch are bound to wear rapidly, but what Lotz and Kraker did by patenting two different versions of Lotz’s latching lever was to make it much more difficult for someone else to patent a similar design, as William Welty had done successfully with his cam-locked Wawco filler:
Welty’s patented filler is enough like Conklin’s Crescent-Filler that Conklin sued Welty. Although a court found in Welty’s favor, both parties in the suit ended up paying some pretty hefty legal bills, and Welty’s cheaper alternative surely took away some sales from Conklin. Lotz and Kraker protected themselves against this sort of thing, and that’s just plain good business. It’s also something I hadn’t known until today, and that’s just plain good fun!
