March 30: The Pencil Patent

Hyman Lipman of Philadelphia was granted a patent for a pencil with a rubber eraser on its end on this date in 1858. Both the graphite and the eraser of Lipman’s pencil could be sharpened. Lipman also founded the first envelope company in the U.S., in 1843, and bought a patent for the postcard, created in 1861 by John P. Charlton; Lipman’s cards had a decorated border and no images, and became the first authorized cards that could be mailed, in 1870. (The U.S. Post Office would issue its own three years later.) In 1862, Lipman sold his pencil patent to Joseph Reckendorfer for a hefty $100,000, and Reckendorfer proceeded to sue the Faber pencil company for patent infringement — but in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled the patent invalid because Lipman’s invention was simply a combination of two already known entities. The modern pencil was likely invented in the late 16th century; before then, the penicillum was “a small brush . . . constructed of a hollow wood tube filled with neatly arranged animal hairs,” according to Jamie Phillips of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. March 30 is National Pencil Day. “The combination, to be patentable, must produce a different force or effect or result in the combined forces or processes from that given by their separate parts. There must be a new result produced by their union; if not so, it is only an aggregation of separate elements.”—U.S. Supreme Court, Reckendorfer v. Faber, 1875