Page 10 Knife World November 2014

Here is a knife that I bought a couple ofyears ago on eBay. The master blade was bro-ken and crudely reshaped, but it was the han-dles that interested me. I figured I woulduncover their significance, then write about ithere. Thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and otheronline resources, I can usually do this kind ofresearch in a matter of minutes, at most anhour or two.

But not this time. This time I was thrown offthe scent by a whole school of ripely attractivered herrings.

The knife is a two blade senator pen knifewith coined nickel silver handles -- possibly sil-ver plated -- 3-1/8 inches long closed. I show alot of coined-handle knives in this column, bothbecause they exist in wild profusion, andbecause they tell lots of stories. Often theyopen doors to aspects of American history thatare commonly overlooked.

This particular knife carries the tang stampTHE W. & H. CO. (curved)/ NEWARK, N.J. onthe master blade, and THE/ W. & H. CO. on thepen blade. These are the usual markings onknives sold by The Whitehead & HoagCompany.

Benjamin Whitehead and Chester Hoag

became partners in 1892. Their company soldall types of advertising, promotional, society,union, and political items. Their specialty wasprinting in color on celluloid, which they did intheir own large factory. They held manypatents related to this process, including theoriginal pin-back badge patent. The Whitehead& Hoag Company endured until 1959, but itsheyday was prior to World War I.

The W. & H. Company also sold privatebrand products made for it by other firms,notably advertising, souvenir, commemorative,and presentation pocketknives. Most The W. &H. Co. marked knives that I have seen wereevidently made by H. Boker & Co. Boker set upits U.S.A. factory in the old Valley Forge plantin Newark in 1899. That means this knife is20th century, made after 1900. Various styleclues suggest it is no later than about 1915,and probably a few years earlier.

The knife appears to be an advertising, sou-venir, or commemorative knife of some sort --but exactly what sort is not obvious. Both han-dles are outlined with a varied array of draw-ing instruments in relief, the tools used byartists, draftsmen, engineers, mapmakers, sur-veyors, and other creative and technical types.

Along the center of the front handle is a longraised riband, hand engraved with the nameM. P. Hench. Up the center of the back handle,vertically, is a slender torch, atop a round lau-rel wreath, centered on a small riband markedTEC. No periods, just TEC in Roman style cap-ital letters.

Red herring Number 1 distracted me fromthe lack of periods in TEC, and I howled off inpursuit of an abbreviation. My first thoughtwas the US Army Corps of TopographicalEngineers, whose main duty was mapmaking.This outfit had a fascinating history, beginningin 1816, but which alas came to an end duringthe Civil War, in 1862 -- decades before thisknife was made. Plus its abbreviation was TE,never TEC, or even CTE.

But this distraction fixated me on militarymapmaking, and after some more digging Ifound that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineersdid in fact have a branch called T.E.C. This wasthe Topographic Engineering Center inVirginia. It too, alas, got disqualified by itsdates. This T.E.C. was stood up in or a littlebefore 1991, and in 2009 it got renamed theArmy Geospatial Center -- many decades afterthis knife was made.

In between those two periods (1862 to 1991),I delved into the history of the Army Corps ofEngineers in World Wars I and II. I found lotsof great stories, especially of the 20thEngineers Regiment, whose history in WWIcan be downloaded free (11 mb pdf)http://www.20thengineers.com/images/ww1-20thEngineersBook.pdf. But there was no hintof any military T.E.C. in all that time.

Red Herring Number 2 was the torch. I con-

WHUT IZZIT?by Bernard Levine www.knife-expert.com

November 2014 Knife World Page 11

vinced myself it was the Torch of Liberty. ThenI dug out some close-up pictures of MissLiberty’s Lamp. It is totally different. Then Ichecked out the 1943 “For Defense” 3-centtorch postage stamp. It’s not a Liberty Torch --indeed its handle is a fasces -- but it’s not aTEC torch, either.

The online Acronym and AbbreviationFinder http://www.abbreviations.com/ found 75meanings for T.E.C. I went down this list untilI sniffed...

Red Herring Number 3. This was “TheEngineers Club,” and it reminded me of the“Transportation Clubs” that I wrote about herein December 2013. That seemed promising, soI began to dig... and dig.

The first American club of that name was inPhiladelphia, established in 1877, and stillactive. Its abbreviation is E.C.P. There wereother Engineers Clubs in other cities --Baltimore, Dayton, St. Louis, and several oth-ers still exist. But the big one, the one thatclaimed national prominence, was TheEngineers Club of New York City. It began in1888. In 1907, with financial help from AndrewCarnegie, it built a splendid new building at 32West 40th Street in Manhattan, facing BryantPark and the New York Public Library. Thebuilding is still there -- but has been convertedto luxury apartments, since the club is but ashadow of its former self.

That 1907 date got me howling with antici-pation. I was on the right trail now... I thought.Or at least in the right time period. But thenvia Google Books I found a 1922 volume, TheEngineers Club: Constitution, Rules, Officers,and Members -- with a list of everyone, living ordead, who had ever been a member from thebeginning. Holding my breath, I looked for M.P. Hench. Alas, no Hench. Not even any of hishenchmen.

Swallowing my disappointment, I caught anew scent. If I can’t find T.E.C., maybe I canfind M. P. Hench. Happily Hench is not a com-mon name.

So I went back to Google Books. In no timeat all, it came back to me with... one M. P.Hench. Fully expecting more disappointment, Ifollowed the link... to the August 24, 1907,issue of a trade journal called The AmericanStationer, pages 26-27. There was the name, allright, in a promotional article about a companycalled Technical Supply Company. Ho-hum.Except the headline of the article read,“ABOUT THE TEC.” The TEC!!!

I read the article -- devoured it. What theT.S.Co. did was it sold... well, it sold all thedrawing tools shown on my knife. It also soldeverything else of possible use to designers,draftsmen, engineers, and architects -- also tostudents of those arts and crafts. It sold draw-ing tables. It sold pens and ink. It sold specialpapers -- it even had patents on special papers.In its two New York City branches (on East14th Street and on East 23rd Street) the com-pany had the largest most up-to-date facilitiesfor making blueprints, brownprints, and black-prints from engineering drawings, along withhigh-end color printing for catalogs, presenta-tions, and displays. I’ll bet a lot of the membersof The Engineers Club on West 40th Street hadaccounts at Technical Supply Company.

In its home office, in Scranton,Pennsylvania, Technical Supply Co. had a fac-tory, along with a mail order warehouse forsupplying students around the world, particu-larly students who studied engineering andallied arts via correspondence courses. T.S.Co.printed special catalogs for those students.

from the 1920s. The spear blades are stamped LUNA in ital-

ics, out on the flat. Both tangs of all the bladesare stamped with a logo of a moon face sur-rounded by four five-pointed stars, beside A.FEIST & Co./ SOLINGEN. Anthony Carter’s

book, The Sword and Knife Makers of Germany1850-2000, A-L, lists A. Feist & Co., Lunawerk,on page 154. The firm began in 1850, but wasonly first registered in 1894. It used a widerange of MOON and LUNA trademarks fromthe 1870s, if not earlier. Carter wrote, “Thefirm advertised their combat knives during the1914-1918 War [the German Army issuedtrench knives to enlisted men, but officers hadto buy their own], and included military itemsas products in 1920. During the mid-1920sthey listed in their specialties: pocket knives,razor blades, scissors, cutlery, and luxury arti-cles.” He added that the firm was still active in1939, but he had no later information. Goins’Encyclopedia indicates that the firm closed in1948.

These knives have astriking vertical design onthe front handle, depictinga classical building withpalm leaves, probablymeant to represent theTemple of Solomon inJerusalem, beneath a vividblazing star.

The horizontal designon the back handleincludes a compass andsquare, a triangle, a ruler,a mason’s trowel, and oneother item that might be ahammer. All of these aresurrounded by an unbro-ken chain. The lack of anyinscriptions, even abbrevi-ations, suggests that theknives were intended to besold all over the world, nomatter what language wasspoken.

*If you have a metal handled pen knife with

an applied three-dimensional shield in theform of a logo, please send in clear sharp pic-tures of the whole knife.

*Please send me an email to brlevine@ix.netcom.comor mail paper correspondence to Whut Izzit,

c/o Knife World, Box 3395, Knoxville TN 37927.Be sure to enclose either an email address, or along self-addressed stamped envelope withyour letter, and also a flatbed scan, photocopy,or photograph (taken on plain LIGHT GRAY orWHITE background please) of your knife. Donot write directly on the picture. Indicate theknife’s handle material and its length (lengthCLOSED if it is a folder). Make enlargedimages of all markings and indicate where theyappear. p

Indeed International Correspondence Schools,founded in 1890, was a neighbor in Scranton,and T.S.Co. advertised I.C.S. textbooks andcourses in its own catalogs.

And M. P. Hench? In 1907, he was the super-intendent of the Technical Supply Co. factoryin Scranton.

What about the TEC? Well in 1907, TEC wasthe company’s newest trademark, used on pre-mium merchandise, much of it made in house,in Scranton. This blurb from a T.S.Co. catalogexplains, “The trade mark ‘TEC’ stands forquality; the longevity, wear, and honesty of aproduct rather than its low price; but our pricewill be as low as large purchases can make it;not as low as cheapening the product can makeit. We thank the trade for the generous supportgiven us, and respectfully solicit a continuationof your inquiries and orders.” The 1907 journalarticle reports, “The trade took kindly to the‘Tec’ line.” Nearby is pictured an example, alithographed tin stamp pad, recently offered oneBay. Note the torch logo.

Another brand used by the company, espe-cially on drawing sets for students, wasTESCO ACADEMIC. I saw a few of those setson eBay, all of them imported from Germany.

*A fourth red herring for the above knife --

dragged in front of my nose by others, but notfollowed by me -- was the suggestion that theknife might be Masonic. Indeed the builder’ssquare and compass (together) are traditionalMasonic symbols -- but not the protractor, theFrench curve, and all the other drafting toolson that knife.

However here is another knife, also withcoined nickel silver handles, also with drawinginstruments depicted in relief on one handle,that does appear to be Masonic -- even thoughit doesn’t come right out and say so. At leastthree examples of this same knife have beenoffered on eBay in the past three years.

It is an oval pattern with a spear masterblade. The second blade is a pen clip, but thatblade on one of three examples has been short-ened and reshaped. The handles have a raisedrim around the edge, to help protect the art-work from wear, and also a stippled back-ground. Both features suggest the knives dates