The Story of the Invention of Steel Pens | Page 9

it for one shilling, and immediately set about
making tools to imitate and improve upon it. He spent, he said, L.30 in
not unsuccessful, though unremunerative, experiments. The flypress
was at least as well known in Sheffield as in Birmingham, and its
power was at once brought into requisition to work the tools for
shaping, bending, and slitting the pens which were made out of sheet
steel, Perry's being made out of thick wire, rolled flat, by 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