A Chas Ingersoll ebay find

[Johnny Appleseed]

I will be posting a reasonable history of the Chas H. Ingersoll pen company and the Ingersoll Dollar pen. In a nutshell, the company was founded by Charles Ingersoll somwhere around 1924. Charles was the main "Brother" in the Robert Ingersoll and Bro. company that made the Ingersoll "Dollar Watches" - they claimed at one point to have sold 70,000,000 pocket watches. The company got into financial trouble in the early 20s and the Ingersoll's were forced to sell.

 

Charles went off to Newark and started selling "Dollar Pens" (Somewhere along the line they moved to the Newark Suburb of East Orange, NJ). The pen's utilised a rather clunky but effective twist-fill mechanism (the twist-filler nob was essentially an upholstry tack) and started out as basic all metal pens with a nickel finish over brass. Later they expanded to colored pens out of bakalite (yes, they really were out of bakalite). The nibs were 14k gold, and most of the ones I have seen were very nice. They advertised as having high-quality nibs like much more expensive pens.

 

Among their best were some oversize models where the filler knob was concealed under a blind cap. Just the other day I picked up these two - the top one an oversized model in red woodgrain, the lower one a smaller bakalite red one.

 

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a150/laridae/Ingersolls-red.jpg

 

The top pen I picked up for a total of $7.75 with shipping, thanks, I believe, to the seller mislabeling it as an "Inyersoll" pen. While Ingersolls rarely are that expensive, this is still an amazing price. The red one was about the same, but with a missing clip, replacement nib and cracked barrel threads, it is about what it is worth.

 

John

[stez]

I've an Ingersoll lever filler in 14k rolled gold.

The 14k nib says:

Ingersoll.

St. Paul

2

Do you know anything about where this pen fits in the Ingersoll history?

[Johnny Appleseed]

The Ingersoll St. Paul pens are "the other Ingersoll." They are not connected to the Charles Ingersoll Dollar Pen company, but they are related, literally.

 

Ingersoll St. Paul was the Redipoint company that put out the Redipoint mechanical pencils.The get the Ingersoll name from William Ingersoll, who was the nephew of Charles and Robert Ingersoll. William Ingersoll was VP of marketing for the Robert Ingersoll and Bros. Watch company, of which Robert was the CEO and Charles the Secretary and General Manager. In early 1922 the watch company went into receivership and was sold to the Waterbury Watch co. which then became the Ingersoll Watch company and went on to produce the famous Micky-Mouse watches.

 

William presumably left the watch company when it was sold out from under his uncles. By the end of 1922 he had taken his name and joined with Redipoint to form Ingersoll-Redipoint. I am not sure if Redipoint was selling pens at this time, but for the first couple of years, the only adverstising for Ingersoll-Redipoint was for pencils - even using the "Ingersoll Dollar Pencil" at one point (which was not much of a claim, as many mechanical pencils sold for less than a dollar). Charles Ingersoll didn't start his pen company until 1924.

 

As far as I can tell, there was no business connection between the two companies. I do not know what the relationship was, and I am not sure entirely what the time-frame of the Ingersoll-Redipoint pens was. It may be that they did not start producing pens until Charles Ingersoll was out of the business, or it may be that they were competitors at some points. There are some intreaguing similarities in the metal patterns of some of the I-R and CHI pens, and some of the Ingersoll-Redipoints did use a twist filler. However, the construction was very different - most Ingersoll-Redipoint pens were lever fillers and were usually gold-filled, sterling, or silver-filled, wheras the Charles Ingersoll pens never produced a gold-filled or silver/silver-filled metal body.

 

I also think that there was little difference between the pens and pencils produced before and after William Ingersoll joined Redipoint. William Ingersoll was, as mentioned, the VP of advertising and I strongly suspect that the main thing he brought to Redipoint was his name and advertising skill. He later went on to be a big advertising guru in the 1930s. Charles Ingersoll's company went under during the dive into the depression between 1930 and 1931 - by 1932, when he did a talk at Cornell University, he did not even mention the pen company among his accomplishments.

 

Ingersoll Redipoint has not been my main research focus, but I have learned some things about it along the way. I can't tell you what happened to I-R later in the 1930s. I believe they lasted for a while in the depression, eventually changing back to Redipoint, but I do no have validation of that.

 

Thanks for the interest - I hope this helps!

 

John

[Bo Bo Olson]

Nice Info...keep up the good work.

[Johnny Appleseed]

Here is an interesting blog post that claims Redipoint to have been a brand of Brown and Bigelow (which I have heard elsewhere, but unfortunately the Lion and Pen post on the subject is still down), and that they were producing fountain pens the whole time. No insight into the relationship between William and Charles.

 

Redipoint, Set, Go!

 

John

Edited June 22, 2010 by Johnny Appleseed

[AllWriteNow]

Hi John

 

I just received this Bakelite Ingersoll today.

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230485816964

 

Steve

 

ps sorry if I outbid you

[Johnny Appleseed]

Cool Steve. You only outbid me in spirit (I didn't bid as it was higher than I wanted - on a tight pen-buying budget right now).

 

The official name for that color is Mahogany. I think that would have been called a standard "Dollar" pen, but it might have been a Jr. Interestingly, it has an E. Orange imprint, but a standard thumbtack stem-winder, rather than the threaded stem-winder.

 

John

[Bryanz]

I have found a sterling Ingersoll Redipoint Mechanical Pencil, Can you give me any information on this item? Thanks