Antiques Roadshow Detours

Adam Monahan:

If you are an Antiques Roadshow fan and have ever thought of bringing your stuff to one of our events, I have some bad news for you.

Marsha Bemko:

I'm sorry to tell you all out there, you don't have anything worth sharing with the nation.

Adam Monahan:

My boss and the executive producer of GBH's Antiques Roadshow, the brutally honest Marsha Bemko.

Marsha Bemko:

So most of you are going to come and you're going to find out you have a vase that's worth $50

Adam Monahan:

If you're lucky.

Marsha Bemko:

If you're lucky.

Adam Monahan:

Five to ten!

Marsha Bemko:

Exactly.

Adam Monahan:

Five to ten bucks.

Marsha Bemko:

Five to ten bucks. Having things worth a lot of money is a rare thing.

Adam Monahan:

Making Antiques Roadshow involves making lots of cuts and breaking lots of hearts from thousands of guests down to about 45 to 60 appraisals that air on TV. But the hardest cuts to make are the very last ones, the appraisals that we tape but never see the light of day.

Marsha Bemko:

So it's this judgment of the weakest of the good stuff.

Adam Monahan:

One of those guests with the weakest of the good stuff was Lucinda.

Lucinda:

PBS just played all three Akron shows and I wasn't on any of them.

Adam Monahan:

See, not happy. But luckily, you know what's great, Lucinda? This has never happened to me before, and we did not plan this, but there's an episode coming out tonight called Junk in the Trunk. Have you ever heard of that?

Lucinda:

Yeah.

Marsha Bemko:

So JIT, as we call it, behind the scenes, is leftovers from the city. We try and save some good things. We don't want to leave just total real junk.

Adam Monahan:

But junk can be entertaining.

Marsha Bemko:

Hey, there's some six-figure junk we save for that.

Adam Monahan:

Yeah.

Marsha Bemko:

So junk can be money too.

Adam Monahan:

Now, can you see where I'm going with this and what the topic of today's podcast might be?

Marsha Bemko:

No. Where are you going with this?

Adam Monahan:

We are going to the junk pile of history to rediscover a forgotten invention, rescued from the Antiques Roadshow cutting room floor, and fulfill the TV dreams of the guest who owns it.

I'm Adam Monahan, and this is Antiques Roadshow. Detours. Today, treasure from the trash heap.

Our treasure owner, Lucinda, was one of about 3,700 guests at our 2023 event in Akron, Ohio, hoping to get her item on TV. When she got there, she had to park about a mile away off-site. So her journey to our appraisers table started on a shuttle bus surrounded by a whole bunch of other attendees.

Lucinda:

And everybody had their arms full of furniture and lamps and expensive jewelry and all of this wonderful stuff, and they were all showing each other what they brought, and mine just didn't look like very much. It was just a little pen.

Adam Monahan:

It wasn't really just a little pen. According to family lore, the pen she'd brought was invented by none other than Thomas Edison, the man behind the light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera. When Lucinda got off the bus, she was sent to wait in line at the collectibles table.

Lucinda:

I get to the front of the line and the appraiser looked at it and said, "I'm not the right person, but this guy over here is." And he signaled for an appraiser to come over, and this appraiser's eyes just lit up.

Adam Monahan:

Lucinda didn't know it, but the appraiser, Gary Piatone had been waiting a long time for this pen.

Gary Piatone:

All the appraisers have a short list of stuff they just love to see, and that Edison Electro Pen is definitely on my short list of things that I'd love to have just kind of turn up.

Adam Monahan:

Gary's been on our show since our second season, and he's bounced around the categories. It all comes in handy in his job as an independent appraiser.

Gary Piatone:

Most of what I do is household contents, but I'm definitely a person that people come to with oddball stuff. So I have brushed with Edison quite a bit.

Adam Monahan:

What do you think of him as a historical figure? Does he remind you of anybody in contemporary society? Like how big he was and what he meant to the world?

Gary Piatone:

I think the most true comparison would be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is someone who's looked up to now by many folks across technology industries as someone who revolutionized the world in many ways, and Thomas Edison in his day did the same thing.

Adam Monahan:

Gary was so excited about the electric pen that he pitched it to the producers. They agreed it's worth filming.

Gary Piatone:

You brought an interesting item in today. Tell me the history behind it.

Lucinda:

According to my grandmother who wrote a little note about it-

Gary Piatone:

I see.

Lucinda:

... It is the first paper copier ever made.

Adam Monahan:

This little pen, it turns out, was an ancestor of the copying machine. Thomas Edison was 28 when he came up with this idea in 1875, and by then he was already an accomplished inventor.

Bill Burns:

He invented things even from his teenage years, particularly in telegraphy, but he tended to work for other companies. He'd get a job with someone and he'd invent something for them and did that for quite a while.

Adam Monahan:

Can I get your name, where you're from and what your area of expertise is?

Bill Burns:

Yeah. My name is Bill Burns. I'm an English electronics engineer. I am publisher and webmaster of the electricpen.org website, which traces the history of the pen and tries to keep track of any pens that show up and be a resource for pen owners.

Adam Monahan:

Edison struck out on his own in 1869 at the tender age of 22. He was a young start-up guy of sorts at a time when technology was changing fast. Inventors were racing to develop the telephone, light bulb, phonograph, movie camera. A lot of the inventions had one important thing in common.

Bill Burns:

The second half of the 19th century, up into probably the 1930s really when television was developed and commercialized, that period is probably one of the most important periods in modern history because it was when electricity became a technology and then it was commercialized and then it came to change everybody's lives.

Adam Monahan:

And Edison had plenty of ideas for how electricity could be used, including the electric pen.

Bill Burns:

Initially, he didn't call it an electric pen. The patent is for a system of autographic printing. In other words, printing things you could write by hand, and that wasn't easy at that time.

Adam Monahan:

If you wanted to make a copy of a handwritten letter in the 1870s, you had a few options. You could wet the paper and squeeze it in a copying press. You could use a special crayon to write on a lithography stone or you could make a silkscreen. But these methods took a lot of work and skill.

Bill Burns:

So Edison saw an opening in the market and that was his system for autographic printing.

Adam Monahan:

The electric pen looks more or less like a pen, but it doesn't write an ink. Instead, it used a needle to poke little holes in a piece of paper, like another better known appliance.

Bill Burns:

Growing up in England, my mother had a treadle-powered sewing machine, and she would sometimes let me play with it. And you put a piece of paper on the bed, you take the thread out of it, you run the treadle, and you move the paper and the needle punches little holes in the paper and you move it around and you can get patterns on it, and that's exactly what Edison did.

So how does this work? So you take a shaft about the size of a ballpoint pen, but instead of a ballpoint tip that goes in and out when you push the clicker on it, it has a needle on a shaft that goes up the body of the pen. If you hold the shaft vertical, you could run that needle with your other hand up and down, up and down, up and down while moving the pen, and it would draw a series of dots. But Edison was an electrician, so he comes up with a tiny electric motor that goes on top of the pen body, and now you've got a little device that weighs a few ounces, but you can hold it in your hand and you spin the motor, which starts it going, and as you write with it, it'll perforate a lot of holes in your stencil and you can then have drawings and handwriting, a reasonably good resolution.

Adam Monahan:

Our appraiser, Gary, explained this all to Lucinda at our event.

Gary Piatone:

And once you were finished, you would take that piece of paper and you would take it to a special press where you would ink it and it would press the ink through and voila, you would have a copy of that letter. One of the marketing phrases was "Like kissing, every successive impression is the same as the first."

Adam Monahan:

Edison claimed you could make thousands of copies from a single stencil. Granted each copy would have to be individually printed, but it was a vast improvement on prior duplication methods. And it was simple, clean and safe, except the battery.

Bill Burns:

There were no batteries as we know them. A 9V, AA, AAA. If you wanted a battery, you made it with chemical solutions and electrodes of various types. And the problem with those batteries is the fluid tends to be quite noxious like car batteries. So you can imagine the average office person in the 1870s and the boss says, "Oh, I got this brand electric pen. Would you get the battery going?" And you've got to mix up the solution in that case and put it in. So the battery is probably the pitfall and the downfall.

Adam Monahan:

But that didn't stop Edison from patterning his invention in 1876 and finding someone to bring it to market later that year.

Bill Burns:

After one of his people had done a pre-production run, let's call it, he then contracted the whole thing out to Western Electric in Chicago, and they had the manufacturing and the distribution rights for it. So they're basically, they're making it and selling it as if it was their own product, and they're paying Edison royalties on it.

Adam Monahan:

Edison and his crew moved on to inventing the phonograph a couple of years later, allowing people to hear recorded sound for the first time in history. Thanks Edison. And Western Electric moved on to producing and selling Edison's electric pen. But how much money was made and how many electric pens were sold was a bit of a mystery.

Bill Burns:

I saw this writing of 60,000 made, and like any urban myth, once the number appears in print, it propagates. And the sloppy researchers writing books today read these sloppy people who wrote books a hundred years ago who copied it from something they saw in a newspaper publicity release in the 1880s, and it becomes fact. So I thought, this doesn't sound right. So I thought, well, how can I find out?

Adam Monahan:

If there were really 60,000 electric pens made we should definitely be seeing more of them on Roadshow. After the break. We do some math to see if the numbers add up and we add our pen to the annals of history.

Bill Burns discovered Edison's electric pen by accident

Bill Burns:

Up in Maine there's a transport and technology museum, and they used to have an annual fundraise auction, and you never knew what they would get. Some of it was donations, I guess. But anyway, my wife and I went up for this till 20 odd years ago, and they had an Edison Electric pen there, and I only knew very, very vaguely about it. But anyway, it sold for $42,000. And so then I thought, well, that's interesting. And I started doing some research and up on eBay pops, something that doesn't say it's electric pen, it's a lot of telegraph equipment, and down in the corner it's a tiny little thing that looks like an electric pen. So I blow it up a little bit and it is an electric pen, so I put my bid in and I win it.

Adam Monahan:

Do you still have it?

Bill Burns:

I do, yeah. It's now part of a complete outfit for the electric pen. What you have is the printing frame. There's an ink roller with which you distribute the ink. There's even a brush, which you use to spread the ink around uniformly. And then there's the wet cell battery, which has two glass jars each marked with the Edison's name. And then there's the pen itself, and there's also little cast iron holder of, looks like a candlestick stand, where you put the shaft of the pen in there and that's where you hold onto it. And that complete outfit was $47.50 in 1876.

Adam Monahan:

That's something like $1,500 today. It wasn't exactly a household item, but it gained a foothold among private businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.

Bill Burns:

I do have also printing samples, including one from the Illinois State Prison. And the reason is that one of the staff there probably needed it for creating multiple records, but also he decided to do the Christmas program for the prison's Christmas celebrations. And all four pages of it are lavishly illustrated by electric pen.

Adam Monahan:

Bill bought that first pen online in 2005. Through a technicality he managed to get it for a mere $479. Not long after he set up his website.

Bill Burns:

I actually took apart the one I had bought on eBay, disassembled it, just component parts and photographed it, and I put those on the site and put a description of how it works and some information from the Edison Papers Project. So it was really just a one-pager initially.

Adam Monahan:

Edison kept a lot of his documents and financial records, and Rutgers University's Thomas A. Edison papers put them online. Their website had tons of useful information, but there was nothing about the claim that 60,000 electric pens had been sold. So Bill had to find a workaround.

Bill Burns:

In order to research this further, I went to the Edison Papers and I found statements from Western Electric who were manufacturing and distributing the outfits for Edison in Chicago.

Adam Monahan:

Here is a real-life word problem for everyone who ever said, "I'm never going to use math in my real life." The original contract between Edison and Western Electric said that Edison would get $3 for each pen set sold. If you know the total amount he was paid, can you figure out how many pens were sold? Bill could.

Bill Burns:

So in 1877, there are, let's see, six royalty statements through the year, and his royalties were about $3,800 then. And that amounted to about 1,260 pens. So 1878, 677 sold. 1879, 575. 1880. Uh-oh. This is starting to not look quite as good. So I tracked this right through the 1880s and all the way down to 1894 when the last royalty payment arrives at $6.63. So based on that, I can document an estimated, not quite 4,000 pens made.

Adam Monahan:

That is a far cry from the 60,000 number Bill saw kicking around. Ultimately, Bill thinks that astronomically high number was just a marketing claim, but Bill knew for a fact there were more than 4,000 pens made because he runs the Electric Pen Registry and he keeps track of every serial number he can find.

Bill Burns:

The first serial number I record of is 2508, which is at the Oregon Museum and Science and Industry. And then the last one is number 8739, which is the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Torino in Italy. If we allow that I've under calculated by 50%, I think a reasonable conclusion, there were no more than about 10,000 sets ever made.

Adam Monahan:

Well, as a fact-checker for the show, I concur. I don't think he sold more than 10,000 of these things.

Bill Burns:

Good.

Adam Monahan:

Okay. That's encouraging.

Bill Burns:

I'll take your expert view on that.

Adam Monahan:

I'm just going with you. That sounds reasonable. And knowing that I've worked on the show 20 years and we've seen two.

Bill Burns:

Yeah, I've seen them both.

Adam Monahan:

Bill mentioned the pens at the Museum of Science and Technology and the Museum of Criminal Anthropology, but they show up in other less expected places too, like tattoo parlors,

Bill Burns:

Yeah, Edison's Pen, it's a little needle running up and down. You can perforate things with it. So wouldn't it be handy if you could get some ink into a person's skin using that? So Mr. O'Reilly came up with his tattoo gun, the very first electric tattoo machine, and it's basically an electric pen with a little ink reservoir bolted onto it. And if you're a tattooist, they have a lot of historical material that they keep. So I get emails from tattoo people and I add their information.

Adam Monahan:

How many pens are there on the registry today?

Bill Burns:

Oh, let me take a quick look here. Registry, okay, I've got 53 of them listed as of January last year. There has not been one show up since January, 2023 at this point.

Adam Monahan:

But we were about to change that. I took all the information I'd learned back to Lucinda to see if we could get her pen on the site. The highest known serial number he has is 8739. So can you find a serial number on that?

Lucinda:

I see patent number, but then that's the year 1878. It's kind of inky, so I can't see. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. Hold on. There's a little wheel here.

Adam Monahan:

Ooh. And the wheel.

Lucinda:

And the wheel says 4207.

Adam Monahan:

That's great. 4207. A new one for the registry. Number 54. I passed the number along to Bill and you can now see Lucinda's pen listed on electricpen.org with a link to the Jump in the Trunk episode it aired on.

Gary Piatone:

Edison, I say he was a genius. He was more than that. He was an American hero, and he is an American hero to a lot of business people, entrepreneurs, inventors, because he had so many patents, he had so many inventions. And so he is collected and of interest to a lot of folks. And this pen, because it's scarce, is of interest to a lot of folks as well. And at auction, it could bring as much as 10,000 to $15,000.

Lucinda:

This? Oh my goodness.

Adam Monahan:

10,000 to $15,000 at auction. What did you think of that number?

Lucinda:

I was just like all of the other people on Antiques Roadshow and just, "Oh my goodness. I don't believe it."

Gary Piatone:

Honestly, I know initially we talked about it not being the prettiest thing in the world. To me, it's beautiful. It's just a lovely device, and I love it. It's a jewel.

Lucinda:

Oh, I'm very glad to bring it. Very glad to find out.

Adam Monahan:

Gary the appraiser told me he's glad the appraisal made it to air, but he has a theory for why it landed in Junk in the Trunk.

Gary Piatone:

I think part of the issue might be is that these things are super exciting to me and sexy to me, but it's certainly not for a lot of people. And we even joked about it with the guest because she was saying it's just a thing that sat in a drawer and it didn't look very interesting. And I said, "I think it's beautiful."

Adam Monahan:

Well, I'm happy to report to you that your pen is now a part of the Edison Electric Pen Registry, captured for the world for all of time.

Gary Piatone:

So I've become immortal. Thank you.

Adam Monahan:

Immortalized with Lucinda, one of the Lucky Road show guests who hit the double jackpot with an item that was both valuable and interesting to one of our very nerdy appraisers. An item worthy of being shared with the nation. What's kind of fun is though I interviewed the guest, she was on the bus with all these other people and seeing their beautiful antiques, and here she's got a dinky little pen that she was very self-conscious, basically, about her ... Why am I even bringing this? Look at those gorgeous things. So she was like, "My pen wasn't good enough. It's junk."

Marsha Bemko:

You bet it is.

MUSIC:

I know love is not a walk in the park.

It's a once a century storm.

Adam Monahan:

Antiques Roadshow Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Galen Beebe, edited and mixed by Tyler Morissette. Our assistant producer is Sarah Roach. Our senior producer is Ian Coss and Devin Maverick Robins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH. Marsha Bemko is the executive producer of Antiques Roadshow Detours. And I'm your host and co-executive producer Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Daly from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.