24, Pierced By A Pen,

[rhr]

Now, let's see, where was I?

 

This is not about the "Ideal" globe trademark. There are various trademarks for just the word, and also for the word inside an image of a globe, spread out across the equator, and with lines of longitude and latitude above and below, but I'll let you discover those on your own. What I really want to talk about here are some piercings.

 

Trademark no. 37,762, L. E. Waterman Co., "Fountain-Pens", Feb 4, 1902, used since January 1896, is for two representations of a fountain pen and a globe, one with the pen passing diagonally through the globe, and the other familiar one with the pen superimposed upon the globe with the pen stroke around the globe, as if the pen had just finished drawing the flourish, and the slogan "Makes its mark all around the World". Trademark no. 48,230, L. E. Waterman Co., "Fountain-Pens", Dec 19, 1905, used since January 1896, is just for the image of a fountain pen passing through a globe. The Boston Fountain Pen Co. received a trademark for a very similar image, an image that may also have been used by the Colonial Pen Co. Trademark no. 46,736, "Fountain-Pens", Oct 3, 1905, used since October 1903, is for an image of the old Massachusetts State House with a pen sticking through it, or maybe laying behind it, and it's also reminiscent of the Waterman's trademarks.

 

Waterman's probably trademarked their image because of copycats such as these. I don't know how they thought they could get away with it, but the Wirt Pen Co. also had an ad very similar to the Waterman's trademark. That ad also made use of an image of a pen piercing the earth, along with the ad-line, "Through the whole world you will [not] find the peer of the Paul E. Wirt Fountain Pen". Waterman's repaid in kind by ripping off the Wirt trademark featured in part 6 of this series with this image showing a writing hand blatantly imitating the Wirt trademark with the pregnant pen. It's from the "Points for Penmen" catalogue from the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. I guess Waterman's got away with it by not making the pen barrel pregnant. Here's another pen with a massive, pregnant barrel and an enormous twist-filler bladder, patent no. 659,989 from 1900. The Wirt pregnant pen might also be the inspiration for the Parker #47 pen with pregnant pearl slabs that was first advertised, along with the Swastika pens, in Parker's in-house magazine Side Talks in January 1910. Canadian trademark no. 12,894, Librarie Beauchemin Limitee, July 15, 1908, is for the name "Sir Wilfrid Laurier", and an image of Laurier in a tondo with a fountain pen passing diagonally behind him. The image of Laurier-and-pen appears in ads that are also obviously meant to copy the style of the Waterman's ads, and possibly to confuse the buyer.

 

George Kovalenko.

 

 

If you want to perform the trademark searches, simply cut and paste, or type the trademark numbers into the search window in the Trademark Document Retrieval Portlet.

Edited June 12, 2010 by rhr