The Story of the Invention of Steel Pens | Page 9

Cocker, in Nursery Street. In 1829, Levesley was making pens for sale, and that year is said to be the earliest date of actual sales in Skinner's ledger. In 1831 he was doing a considerable business in Sheffield, and making experiments upon the article, as appears from specimens before me bearing his name. Stress has been laid upon the improvement of the double slit, introduced by Gillott, but if Levesley's statement is to be taken literally, he was the inventor of a specialty upon which, even more than on excellence of material, the merit of a steel pen is found to depend, viz., the grinding of a small hollow at the back of the nib, and about the eighth of an inch from the point. My informant described not only the beneficial action of this thinning of the metal, as well in yielding the gradual flow of the ink as in flexibility of writing, but the pleasure with which he took a specimen to Birmingham to show Gillott, and the surprise of the latter at so great and so beneficial an effect, provided by so small a cause. He at once adopted an improvement of which every pen made by him bears evidence; and when his friend visited him he told him he had fifty women employed in grinding pen points. It is pleasant to add that Gillott never visited Sheffield without calling to see his old friend Levesley, while the latter spoke of his early and later life with respect and commendation, especially in his domestic relations. It is pleasing to review a life of such humble beginnings, culminating in opulence and usefulness like that of the late Joseph Gillott, of Birmingham; nor is it less to name in connection therewith, as an early experimenter in steel pen making, our worthy townsman, William Levesley, to whose ingenious improvement every writer is so much indebted, and of whose verbal communication to me the foregoing is an imperfect sketch."
Now, in this statement, there are some dales given, but others are omitted, and that is a very unfortunate circumstance. Levesley told the writer of the article in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph that he made use of the fly press for working tools for shaping, bending, and slitting pens. If the writer had only given the date of this it would have been a valuable contribution toward a history of the invention. The claim of Levesley to having invented the process of grinding pens and teaching Gillott seems, to say the least, curious, because the latter was a Sheffield grinder, and the idea would certainly be quite as likely to occur to Gillott as Levesley. Besides, why did Levesley communicate the idea to Gillott in preference to Skinner, with whom he had business relations? The statement that Gillott had fifty girls employed when Levesley* called upon him on his next visit to Birmingham looks like a mistake. Fifty girls would grind on an average seven thousand gross of pens in a week, and as this correspondence appears to refer to the early part of Gillott's career, it is scarcely possible that such a number of pens were produced weekly at that period. Besides, as a matter of fact, boys were, in the first instance, employed to grind pens.
* Mr. Sam: Timmins says, "that Levesley told him that Gillott started in Birmingham as a jobbing cutler; that Mitchell had the secret of pen making; that Mitchell sent for Gillott to come to Birmingham, and that he (J.G.) first lived at the top of Water Street; that Gillott began to make pens in Bread Street; that Perry made pens from flattened steel wire, the breadth of the pen (the steel was 3s. 6d. per lb., and drawn at Old Ford); that he had seen cross grinding (at Gillott's) in Newhall Street, and fifty women at work; and that pens had double slits and cut holes. Levesley certainly knew all the Gillott family, personally, in Sheffield, and he (S. T.) had a long interview with him shortly before his death, when he mentioned all the facts given here."
Herr Ignaz Nagel, in his "Report on Writing, Drawing, and Painters' Requisites," at the Vienna Exhibition, 1873, says:
"From careful inquiries that we made in Birmingham, we learned that a knife cutler, of Sheffield, was the first man who had the idea of making pens of steel, and that a tinman of the name of Skipper [Skinner], of Sheffield, afterwards manufactured the pens in great quantities. His son developed the idea still further. This, according to our informant, was fifty years ago. A steel pen artisan, working in Birmingham, remembers perfectly well reading the announcement in a window of the High Street, in Sheffield, 1816: 'Steel pens are repaired here at sixpence apiece.' There was a man named Spittle, in