This is pretty neat, huh? I bought this on eBay about a month ago, as an addition to my collection of writing instruments. I’ve always wanted a drop-action pencil, ever since a friend showed me one in her own collection. One day I was browsing eBay, and found a few which were for sale, and ended up buying this slick, smooth-sided cylindrical deal from the late Edwardian era.

The pencil is in sterling silver, and is made by the famed English manufacturer, Sampson Mordan & Co.

Sampson Mordan – the man, not the company – was an 18th and 19th century English silversmith and inventor. In his youth, he was apprenticed to the equally-famous English locksmith, Joseph Bramah (of ‘Bramah locks’ fame).

Mordan didn’t become a locksmith, but he was fascinated by mechanical doohickeys, and ended up inventing, in the early 1820s – the first ever mechanical pencil! The pencil operated on a screw-type mechanism where by rotating the pencil advanced or propelled the shaft of graphite out of the tip of the silver housing, allowing a person to write with a pencil without getting graphite all over their fingers, and without having to constantly sharpen the point. Since the action of the pencil’s mechanism propelled the graphite out of it, they became known as ‘propelling pencils’.

Mordan made a HUGE name for himself as the inventor of, and chief producer of, graphite propelling pencils! Largely made in sterling silver and gold (he was a silversmith, after all), the Sampson Mordan silversmithing firm started cranking out all kinds of whimsical designs for pencils. In the 1800s, there was no such thing as a portable fountain pen, and the ballpoint was a century away – so having a compact, easy-to-operate writing instrument in your pocket that you could whip out at any moment was very useful. Mordan (and other companies) started manufacturing all kinds of novelty shapes and styles.

You could buy pencils which were shaped like rifles, golf-clubs, cricket-bats, wine-bottles, and polo-mallets! In sterling silver, or in a wide variety of gold.

One of the company’s greatest inventions came out in the late 1800s – the drop-action pencil holder!

Pencil-holders had existed before Mordan, but they were all slide-action. You grasped the barrel of the holder, and then with your other hand, you pulled the slide down the barrel, and the pencil inside slid out, held in place by the clutch-ring inside the mechanism. These were good, sorta, but the need to always have two hands free to operate them was always a bit of a faff!

The drop-action pencil-holder, by comparison, was a big improvement!

The mechanism is very simple, and works entirely on gravity (so long as you have the right pencil size!). After seating the pencil firmly in the circular clutch-ring inside the barrel, you press the release-button on the back of the holder. The whole thing works on a catch-and-release system. Pressing the button both drops the button down, and twists it slightly. This releases the clutch-ring that holds the pencil, and allows it to drop down through the barrel and out the end of the holder, exposing the pencil, and locking the ring in place.

When you’re done writing, you press the release-button again, and, with another in-and-twist motion, the clutch-ring is released from the barrel opening and drops back into the base of the holder.

Hence ‘drop-action’. That said, they’re also called gravity-action pencils, because they work entirely on gravity. Since the pencil could be operated entirely by one hand, it became very popular. Such holders were compact, portable, easy to use (which made them great when you were busy and needed to take notes) and economical, because they allowed you to use up the last few centimetres of a pencil before having to throw it out when it at last, wore down to a stub!

Pencil-holders like these started losing favour among writers after the First World War. When fountain pens started coming onto the market, the need to always carry a pencil around with you diminished greatly, and eventually, pencil-holders and propelling pencils started losing ground to the modern mechanical click-action clutch-pencil used today.

Regardless, antique silver and gold drop-action and slide-action pencil-holders are still popular, and still collected today, for their artistry, their uniqueness, but also for their practicality – unlike the antique propelling pencils which relied on specifically-sized graphite leads or rods to operate – these pencil-holders simply require another pencil!

Such holders do have a few drawbacks – ONE – their small size means that only small pencils fit into them, so you can’t have anything longer than 2-3 inches – TWO – the pencils have to fit into the clutch-ring that holds the pencil-stub in place inside the barrel. This means you have to whittle down the pencil to fit in – THREE – modern hexagonal pencils are a bit fiddly. They still work, but it’s better to use pencils which are cylindrical, instead, since they slide in and out of the holder more reliably. You can use a hexagonal pencil if you want to, however you’d have to round-off the edges on the shaft first, to prevent them from rubbing on the sides of the barrel and jamming the mechanism.

The release-button and the slide-and-lock mechanism may also need some cleaning with a bit of oil for lubrication, but once everything does work, it works very smoothly, with a solid ‘click’ at each end of the slide, to indicate that the pencil has been locked into position.

The final drawback to these pencil-holders is that for them to function – they must be in really good condition. Any big dents or dings on the sides of the barrel will render the holder completely useless, since they would jam the sliding mechanism inside, meaning that the pencil would be stuck in the open or closed position. If you’re looking to buy such a pencil for your own use – always check for dents – even a small one can incapacitate a pencil with relative ease.