For many, many years Virginia and tobacco were synonymous. The bright leaf variety was commonly known as “Virginia Tobacco” and was considered a type superior enough to be bragged about on packaging. In the late 19th century it built and molded many Southern U.S. cities. Now this once wildly profitable crop’s cultivation has dwindled since it often kills those who use it.
Danville, VA was a beneficiary of tobacco and became a center for processing and storage. Between that and textile manufacturing the city enjoyed a nice industrial base which allowed for businesses to flourish. In the “Tobacco District” commercial structures were built through the early 20th century. These were severe but handsome warehouses, offices, and processing facilities mostly made out of formidable looking red brick.
As the 20th century came to an end the two major industries mentioned folded up leaving Danville a much poorer place. Still, the structures were left behind as a testament to the good old days. Looking at them now a few have been converted to housing or are still in commercial use but the bulk of them are empty. The fact that they mostly all still stand is a wonder and a thrill if you get a chance to wander there.
Here’s the announcement you’ve probably not really been waiting that much for: The winner of the Tip-Wic pen I’m giving away. I counted up those who wanted to be part of the contest and there were 13 entries which I numbered oldest to newest. The random number generator told me the winner was number 11 which is Lauren. Congrats on winning something of little value and possibly no real use!!! A notification email is on the way.
I really do appreciate all the people who took the time to read my blog and enter the contest. So many were from people I knew not and I can’t figure out how they found my contest. Lauren was one of those mysteries, btw. Maybe next time I’ll give away more than one thing since I do wish everyone could have won.
Greensboro and High Point, NC share the Bicentennial Greenway system. It’s not always linked together but there are a number of nice long stretches that are fun to bike on. I’ve still got a thing for taking pictures of nature in some way or another while I ride. Even I realize this is rather boring and looks like a thousand other images but that doesn’t stop me from sharing a handful of pictures here I took on a stretch of this system.
Deep in the bowels of my basement I opened a drawer and found something. After I ran screaming and it scuttled off I found something else there that I must have purchased over 10 years ago on Ebay. It’s an odd bit of writing history and technology for sure.
The pen manufacturer (Wahl-)Eversharp made some mistakes in the 40s that led to its eventual doom. Besides a homely looking line of fountain pens they also had a major fiasco with the CA, an early ballpoint. By 1957 it was all over and Parker bought what remained of the writing division and for a while used the Eversharp brand on some of its products.
One of those Parker/Eversharp products I found in that drawer and you can see it here: The Tip-Wic. What is it? Well, basically it’s a felt tip marker made to use fountain pen ink. I think the blister pack I took a picture of shows the benefits nicely.
I don’t know what prompted its creation or how long it was sold but the package is dated 4-65 and so that gives you an idea of the era. It’s a simple looking writing instrument reminiscent of a Parker 45 in shape and size. How well does it work? Well, here is where the fun starts!
You can win this pen and the extra converter and cartridge in the pack for almost no effort! OK, to be honest some effort. If I inked this pen I’d write a few lines and probably forget about it since I’m not a fan of markers. However, I am interested in learning how it works and someone might want to give that a go. So the deal is first write a comment below about anything since I’m not picky. I’ll use a random number generator to choose the person who gets this almost new item (I did remove the pen from the pack but will put it back in). The tricky part is the winner must agree to use this pen and within a month write a short summary of how they like it. I’ll post that as an update here so everyone can see the results. Just to be clear: You have to write something about how this pen works within 4 weeks and email me it. What if you don’t? Well…I’ll really be grumpy and you will not get any candy if I decide to hand some out in the future.
Let’s say this contest ends in one week on 9/26/2010 at 9:00 PM Easter Standard Time. Good luck to whoever feels the urge to try! Oh, don’t forget: It’s the tip; It’s Porosyn; It glides!
I live near a place that has a big chair. It’s really just that: A big dinning room chair or about 15 feet in height (that’s my estimate since I’m not going to waste time looking that up). Why is it there? I have no idea…it was donated and this area used to make furniture. But like a giant wooden and synthetic upholstery flame it attracts events to it. Once a month when it is warm enough there is a local car show in the vicinity and I happened to go to the last one. I never did take a picture of the big chair so you’ll have to take my word for all that.
Ringgold, VA is a crossroads without much that needs mention except a restored old depot with a caboose. Oh, and a trail.
The trail is along the route of the old Danville/Richmond railroad line and is where there tracks used to be in the distant past. Now there is nothing but butterflies, dragonflies, and old bikers making use of it. The latter was me today as I decided to pull out my two-wheeled transport and see this for myself. I took some pics along the way I hope you enjoy.
Whitefort, the place, looks to be mostly a road sign on a country road in Ireland near Thurles with no industry I can see. The length of the nave of the French cathedral of Saint Etienne of Bourges is 333 feet. Now you know the irrelevant information I discovered in a search about the pen I’m holding now: the Whitefort 333.
The Whitefort 333.
Not everyone loves a mystery and I would like to know more about this intriguing pen but that info seems lost in the sands of time. It’s an amazingly crafted piece precisely made from machined clear plastic like most mid-20th century display pens. All the parts have exacting tolerances and fit perfectly. Was this one of a few demonstrators made or one of a thousand production models? No idea. Nothing looks prototypical about it under close inspection. The only clues of identity is a clip engraved “W 333” and a nib and cap band engraved “Whitefort 333”. There are no markings on the barrel or other plastic parts.
The Whitefort 333 taken apart.
The nib itself deserves some further comment. It’s marked “14ct” and is two-tone with a band of bright silver plating on the leading edges. Seeing “ct” instead of “kt” here indicates it wasn’t made in North America so that’s at least a bit of useful detail. This is a nicely made nib which reminds me of the similar two tone ones some vintage Onotos had on them.
Can we make any useful guess on this fountain pen’s provenance after this examination? Maybe a half-baked guess is the best we can do. The gold content marking and the name leads me to believe this pen was made in English speaking Europe somewhere. It seems to be made of Lucite (also known as plexiglass) which came into use for pens right before WWII. Lastly, the visual style of the pen is similar to British products from the 1950s. This leads to a very unsteady deduction that it is an UK pen made after WWII and before the flower power decade.
Enough now about the origin of this pen and on to the most interesting facet which is the filling system. This is the most complex bulb-filling system I’ve seen in person or in books. It’s usually a simple system not taken to an extreme like this and I’ve put together a little diagram help me explain the major sections of it (click it for a larger version):
The A section of the illustration is the rubber bulb itself. Pressing and releasing the bulb creates the pressure and vacuum that fills the pen. This fits through and then wraps under a collar which screws into the barrel. The threads for the blind cap are also here.
The B section is an area that I will call the vacuum chamber for no other reason then I have to call it something. The tube that enters this chamber from below allows for the air flow but also keeps this chamber dry. You can see the tube goes quite a ways up so no fluid will be able to get past it and into here theoretically. I don’t know if there is a benefit to this other than the bulb stays ink free so leaking from it would not be possible.
The C section is the ink chamber. There is a divider in the barrel between this and the previous chamber where two tubes come together. Air is evacuated through these and then out the tube connected to the section due to pressure from the bulb. Ink will then flow back through the section tube (if dipped into the bottle) due to the vacuum created by the release of the bulb. Repeat this action until the pen is filled. The height of this section tube marks the upper limit of the ink level in the chamber which it just about to the top. The reason the upper tube in this chamber hugs the side of barrel at the far end is a mystery to me. Possibly they felt that capillary action would pull any ink that got into this tube out again?
The D section is the nib, feed, and section of the pen.
How well does this filling system work? Well, I’m not going to fill this pen despite my usual lack of reluctance to using NOS or rare-ish pens. I have no idea how many of these are left and I like looking at it empty and clear. Using water I can tell you that the upper chamber can get liquid in it if you are over enthusiastic with your filling which would not be a good thing since it has no place to exit from up there. The system’s all a bit silly really. The rest of the pen should function normally since it has a standard construction.
So now you’ve seen this bit of history too and I hope you found it interesting. There’s always something out there that can befuddle and confound it seems.
Labor day is a holiday many people have off work so it always confuses me. I’ll never solve that conundrum but I do know it’s often thought of as the end of summer so I went out to catch some of the last flora, fauna, and weird animal stuff while I still could in the pleasant sunny weather. These photos were taken at the Bicentennial and Bog Gardens in Greensboro, NC. Continue reading “Laborless Day”
I’ve got a quick follow-up on my last post about the Hicks-Sackett pen. The long “feeding stem” was missing from the pen when it arrived. Not surprising since it seemed the weakest part of the design being made of hard rubber and spindly. Somewhere in the past an owner was a bit rough refilling the pen and it snapped off. Besides acting as an ersatz feed that piece also seemed to provide a bit of locating support for the nib/feed plug. What I tried to do was construct a replacement using stone knives and bearskins which are about as advanced as my tools get. In the end I had a main shaft and a smaller hard rubber feed on top that ran down about 1/2 the length. Not perfect but workmanlike.
Mr. George H. Sackett designed a pretty poor pen. Of course that sounds harsh a 124 years after the fact, but I’ve been examining the results of his fertile imagination and have come to that conclusion. Before discussing this curiosity more let me say I can’t blame him too much since early fountain pens are odd beasts as inventors and companies in the early days tried to morph them from glorified dip pens with a built in ink supplies to dependable instruments which would not alter your finger color. It was a free-for-all at the time since it was easy for someone to take a tube, stick a nib on the end, and engineer what was between based on simple physics and bizarre notions.
The Hicks-Sackett and writng sample.
I’m not sure if back then people thought building the perfect fountain pen would have the world beating a path to their door but it seems so. Type the word “Fountain Pen” into the Google patent databases and you’ll see enough listings to bug out your eyes. We tend to think the implement we nib fanciers use is a proven mechanical device and focus on aesthetics or usability but these early patents are an indicator how long the development process took. Nozzles, tubes, valves, and other tiny internal workings are intricately drafted in the old records and illustrate the inventor’s genius or insanity. Time and time again great self-assurance shines through in the pages and pages of descriptions and diagrams that are found.
The designer of the pen in question, Mr. Sackett, had at least three patents for a fountain pen (here, here and here) which show seemingly the same construction. Why the individual patents were filed and granted (just months apart in 1886) is confusing. The last tidbit is that an advertisement for this pen listed an 1885 patent but I can’t find it. This muddle aside it does seem there was little time wasted before manufacturing started since ads can be found from 1885. I’m neither a good researcher nor a patent expert so I can offer no explanations for all this. I’ll chalk it up to something unfathomable from the distant past which is another way of me saying I didn’t bother any further with the mystery.
Who was the inventor? Thanks to a family history I did find out a few factual items. His entry read as below:
GEORGE HENRY SACKETT, 1826-, of Providence, R. I., and Brooklyn, N. Y., son of Isaac and Mary Johnson Sackett, was married at Providence, R. I., July 27, 1857, to SARAH SWEETSER SHELDON. He was, from 1855 to 1878, a member of the firm of Sackett, Davis & Co., jewelry manufacturers, of Providence, R. I., and is the inventor of the Sackett fountain pen.
As you can see Mr. Sackett’s eponymous pen was considered an important enough achievement to be listed as one of his two accomplishments.
In that biographical tidbit it’s interesting to see that he was jeweler like many people involved in the nascent fountain pen industry. His invention seemingly got him out that business and by 1890 the Sackett Fountain Pen Co was located at 169 & 171 Broadway in New York City – at the corner with Maiden Lane, which was a hub for Jewelers in the city as well as many writing instrument companies as Waterman’s and Mabie, Todd & Co. One of the companies neighboring the location was the William S. Hicks Company which sold fountain pens both under its own name and for such high end establishments as Tiffany’s and Cartier. Many of these were beautiful, expensive pens and pencils made from precious metals and are prized today.
I’ve not found when or why Sackett and Hicks got together to brand and sell the pen designed by the former. Advertisements from the beginning list the pen as the “Hicks-Sackett”. Being an older and more established firm Hicks could have offered manufacturing capabilities and a proven distribution channel which must have been appealing. The elder firm may have wished for a low cost line of pens to market and latched upon this design as the one that fit the bill. Either way the pens were made from around the patent date till at least late into the first decade of the 20th century. By the late oughts the pen was quite a dinosaur since its competitors had invaluable features as modern channeled feeds to regulate ink flow and combs to catch excess ink. Add the use of screw caps and self-filling systems in some marketed pens and – even at a low price – the Hicks-Sackett pen was a doddering holdover from an earlier era.
The following might be dry, boring, and maybe even confusing in describing how this oddball pen works and includes illustrations that may make you squint and get a headache. With that caveat lets look at the pen parts and the basic principles of how they function. The first image below is from the patent that is best represents the actual pen sold. The second scan is a detailed illustration from an advertisement that also backs up that claim.
The Sackett patent drawing.
1885 Advertisement.
Externally it’s unremarkable except for probably the first thing you’ll notice: The slip cap has a smaller diameter “crown” on the end. In my opinion this is the cleverest feature of the pen since the protrusion into a hole on the opposite end to allow posting. It’s a nice, tight fit and there’s no chance of a ring around the barrel ever forming from the friction of a cap being placed over it.
Internally what you see illustrates its origins in the late 19th century when fountain pens were in their infancy. As stated earlier the Hicks-Sackett is without the later innovations which made pens reliable and predictable in use and throughout the long period it was manufactured was frozen like this. In a nutshell it is basically a chased thin black hard rubber tube with an odd feed rod inside and flat triangular bit acting as a rudimentary feed.
The most prominent part that extends inside the barrel front to back is the “feeding stem”. This long grooved bar looks like a narrow feed on steroids but the patent text tells you the reason for it is to transmit the last bit of ink clinging to the walls of the pen to the nib via capillary action. That’s a reason but a silly one indeed. As seen in some of the Hicks-Sackett advertisements in the gallery below using the last drops of ink was brag worthy and for some reason the period around the turn of the 19th century was one where pen manufacturers fretted about this ability in their products. If you look at how pens like the Parker “Lucky Curve” touted their ink evacuation ability it seems like this was something the masses were demanding. From the hyperbole of the advertisements violent mobs must have gathered to chant “No ink left behind!” Of course this was just a marketing ploy since everyone wanted their pen to stand out in some way and this was flashier than saying “our cap stays on!” or “the pen that makes lines on paper!” The entire idea seems to have been abandoned as other things could be patented and harped upon like filling methods or interchangeable nibs. History shows people were alright with refilling their pens prior to that last drop being used since later pens phased out the gimmicks that were supposed to throttle the last of the ink out.
So the snake-like “feeding stem” which was inside the pen got a lot of thought. Unluckily nothing much else seems to have, especially the feed. Many contemporary pens had an over and under feed in the Hicks heyday and one could justify how elaborate these were since the super flexible nibs of the time needs a ink to gush down to where the rubber (read nib) met the road (nee paper). The Hicks-Sackett didn’t even bother with the underfeed that is still currently used in fountain pens and instead has a triangular sliver of hard rubber above the nib which has a standoff to make a gap which pulls ink out via capillary action. What is desperately missed is something like feed groves to allow air back up into the reservoir to fill the void ink leaves behind in a metered fashion. Everything happens on this pen through the same tiny slit behind the nib which the patent gobbled gook says will work just awesomely. In reality it allows air and ink enter an exit willy-nilly resulting in the occasional glob of ink coming out when air rushes through too fast. Aesthetically I love the way the nib looks – like a dip pen’s from underneath but that doesn’t compensate for the poor functionality.
My criticisms wouldn’t hold water with the copy writers who created the ads for the pen as profuse praise was heaped upon by them. What kind of drugs they were on as they wrote these I don’t know, but one claim is that you will not get your fingers inky when refilling it. Possibly they had soot blackened fingers (Dickensian image) so they never noticed this pen almost guarantees ink stained digits. There is no section at the front and the barrel just continues jauntily on till it comes to an abrupt end. Here the feed and nib is held in place by a plug that friction fits into the hollow of the inside void. Removing it means you have to grasp the feed and nib between your finger and thumb and you know what liquid is on them? Yes, ink.
None-the-less the ads I dug up for this pen are a fun romp through a time long past. Look at the hyperbole in them for a quick giggle. I’ve found as many as I can so you can see that the pen never altered over its marketing life. If you do see these and wish to go back in time to purchase I recommend you first look at a certain new pen by a Mr. Sheaffer he calls a “lever filler”. I also heard Mr. Waterman makes a fine product too.
What I love the most about researching this pen was finding the original patents and taking in their lovely language. On both you see Mr. Sackett tried to cover as many bases as possible by explaining alternative ways of executing his design. I have to say you can almost buy that this pen will revolutionize the field as the grandiosity of the design is teased out for you. If it only had a tiny steam engine and flapping wings you could see this as a prop in some modern steampunk fiction and called “Dr. Hermes’ Incredible Levitating Ink Fountain Marking Machine”.
The Hicks-Sackett pen is fascinating, odd, frustrating, and wonderful to explore. Some questions remain like why Hicks was associated with this pen and how it continued to be sold when as it become so inferior to its competition. But I’ll not trouble myself with that since I am not a historian but an observer. The pen that is pictured in this post has been passed to its new owner who has used it in part to create the wonderful illustration below. This proves that talent trumps technology – or something like that.
