34, The Onoto,

[rhr]

Here's one last orange one, and I think I just may have found the source for the "Onoto" pen company name. [The most often quoted explanation is that the name was chosen because it "sounded the same in any language", but that sounds more like a rationalization after the fact. And David Cooper states in A Brief History of Onoto Pens, "It is possible that it was named after Ono Tokusaburo, a Japanese watchmaker [who] registered a patent in 1885 for a stylographic pen whose features may have been incorporated in the Onostyle and other stylographic pens made by Thomas De La Rue at the turn of the 20th Century", such as the De La Rue "Nota Bene".] [Later addition.] But this is the reference that got me thinking about the meaning of the name. I was looking for pen company ads in the vast database of the "Making of America" website at Cornell University, and when I did a search for the word "Onoto" I found the phrase, "colored red with onoto, the pigment of the bixa orellana". It's in the magazine The Living Age, Vol. 23, Issue 293, Dec 29, 1849, p. 592, in the last paragraph in the first column. The word is also spelled "arnatto" and "anotto" in other sources, and is now standardized to "annatto", but it's that particular spelling of the word in The Living Age that's of interest here. It is the only use of the word with that spelling in the whole website, almost making it a hapax legomenon, at least within the constraints of that enormous website. Elsewhere, there are the exceptions and more-prevalent, modern uses of the word as the English pen company name, and as the name of a French bicycle and motorbike company.

 

Trademark no. 54,838, Thomas De La Rue & Co., July 31, 1906, used since 1904, is for "Certain Named Pens", perhaps fountain pens. There is no image on the USPTO website, so I don't know whether this is the trademark for the word "Onoto", and whether or not it is for fountain pens, although it is definitely the US equivalent of UK Registered No. 268,944. But trademark no. 74,488, Thomas De La Rue & Co., "Reservoir And Fountain Pens, &c.", July 13, 1909, used since Sept 7, 1905, is definitely for the word "Onoto". Perhaps the name was taken from the word "onoto", the pigment of the Bixa orellana, to match the favored color of their first red hard rubber fountain pens and ink-pencil stylographs. Eureka! There's red in them there hills. And it just might be the meaning of the pen company name, "Onoto".

 

Maybe it's a stretch, but let me try to talk you through my reasoning. Thomas De La Rue & Co. started out as a printing company that produced government stamps and decks of playing cards among many other printed items. In that business they had to become familiar with and had to produce pigments for their printing inks. There are various printing artifacts that are collected by philatelists as an extension of postal history collecting, an area called "Collateral Material". Thomas De La Rue & Co.'s in-house book of recipes for pigments and dyes for inks for printing postage stamps, their Ink Formulation Register, is an example of this kind of material. A sheet from this book showed up at the June 17, 1995 auction of the Don Bowen collection of 10 cent Small Queen Canadian stamps. Catalogue item number 2431 specifically is a page from the De La Rue book for the color "Permanent Violet 115B", the color used to print that particular stamp, the Canadian Scott #40, enlarged. So it's conceivable that Thomas De La Rue & Co. was familiar with onoto as a pigment. They may have tried it out as a possible coloring agent in printing inks, and it may have been used by them in their business of producing other coloring, dyes, and pigments. As well as the fact that a lot of their early Onoto fountain pens and stylographs, or ink pencils were made of red hard rubber, such as this pen, and this stylo, the Onoto company's earliest identifying advertizing image was the familiar British red pillar mail box, used in their advertisements, catalogues, playing cards, and their ink bottle labels, along with the advertising character "Peter Pen", as in advert 1, advert 2, pillar ink, and ink label. Now, I'm not saying onoto was used as a coloring agent in the making of red hard rubber, but only that it looks like the coloring agent in red hard rubber, and so the pen company may have been named after this "red matter", the favorite color of this plant-based dye stuff.

 

Onoto is, however, used as a food coloring agent, and as a dye for silk and wool. See British patent no. 3,125 from Aug 1, 1879, W. McDonnell's patent for abstracting color from "annatto or arnatto". There are various US patents for such things as extracting the coloring matter from annatto seeds, 2,815,287, for edible annatto coloring compositions, 2,831,775, for water dispersible carotenoid compositions, 2,861,891, for vegetable-base food coloring for oleomargarine, 3,162,538, and for a method of removing pigment from annatto seed, 4,204,043. By the way, some of my other favorite "red matters" include the color of koa, pernambuco, cocobolo, padouk, fox fur, turmeric, paprika, lily pollen, saffron, and other carotenoids, and erythrisms. ;~)

 

George Kovalenko.

 

 

If you want to perform the trademark searches, simply cut and paste, or type the trademark numbers into the search window in the Trademark Document Retrieval Portlet.

Edited July 6, 2010 by rhr

[northlodge]

The Onoto repair book suggests the pen was named after a Japanese gent whom was a mutual friend / mentor of the two inventors (if I remember correctly).

[gmberg]

Here's one of my favorite Onotos.

Gerry

 

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a152/gmberg/IMG_3680.jpg

[rhr]

The Onoto repair book suggests the pen was named after a Japanese gent who was a mutual friend/mentor of the two inventors (if I remember correctly).

That's interesting. I don't think I have ever heard that before. I've seen the explanation that the word was chosen because it sounded the same in any language, but that seemed like a rationalization that was thought up after the fact. The Onoto website says that the name has no special meaning and that "it was chosen because it was easy to remember, easily pronounced, and sounded the same in any language". It goes on to say, "One source suggests that the name was chosen because De La Rue had a large market in the Far East". I knew that the word was a name in Japanese, because if you do a search in Ebay for the word you find books written by Onoto Watanna. Do you think you could dig up that reference from the repair book and scan and post it here?

 

George Kovalenko.

 

Edited July 5, 2010 by rhr

[simp]

The Onoto repair book suggests the pen was named after a Japanese gent whom was a mutual friend / mentor of the two inventors (if I remember correctly).

This article:

 

http://hubpages.com/hub/A-Brief-History-of-Onoto-Pens

 

refers to Ono Tokusaburo, that made a stylographic pen getting a patent in 1885. Is seems that this patent was used in some stylographic pens made by De La Rue (before they used the Onoto trademark).

 

Regards

Simone

[rhr]

Thanks, Simone. The stylograph referred to by David Cooper might be the De La Rue "Nota Bene" from around 1895. I looked for Ono Tokusaburo in the English and Japanese patents in the European Patent Office website, but their database goes back to only 1920. Perhaps someone familiar with the Japanese patent website can search for Ono Tokusaburo's 1885 patent. I tried it once, but it's quite labyrinthine, especially if you don't know the Japanese language. ;~)

 

In the meantime, here are the US trademarks for Onoto inks, and Onostyle inks.

 

George Kovalenko.

 

Edited July 6, 2010 by rhr

[Vintagepens]

I don't find the connection with color very compelling; early Onoto pens are no more often found in RHR than any other brand of the era -- which is to say, the great majority are plain black.

[rhr]

Granted, most people opted for the more affordable BHR and BCHR pens, but there's also the corporate imaging and advertising that utilized Peter Pen along with the red Pillar Box, and the ad line, "When you see a Pillar Box, remember to get an Onoto", which they used over and over again. They wanted the buying public to identify the pen with the iconic red Pillar Box. But as I said, maybe it's a stretch.

 

George Kovalenko.

 

[david@onoto.com]

Excellent information, brilliantly researched and presented by RHR. You certainly have a nose for sniffing out a story!

 

Of course, it's a topic which has great significance to me, as a director of Onoto, and we have made efforts over the past 5 years to find something which we can say definitively is the reason why Onoto is Onoto.

 

Sadly, there doen't appear to be a definitive answer - just a series of suppositions.

 

Another one which came to light recently, is that there is a connection between the pen company and Onoto Watanna and that when Onoto opened its office in New York in 1909 it sought permission from the author to use her name. Nice try... but as the Onoto name was first used in the UK in 1905, it's another failed link in my eyes.

 

The simple fact is that many of the original company records went up in smoke in 1940 when the company's Bunhill Row offices were hit in the London Blitz. The Onoto archive retained by De La Rue in their Basingstoke (UK) offices today is very small and contains mostly information from the 1950s, which I suspect were removed from the factory in Scotland when it closed in 1958.

 

Thanks for all your efforts to reveal the truth about the naming of Onoto. It's much appreciated.

 

David Cooper

 

Incidentally, you may be interested to see we are still using the red pillar box! Here's a photo of it at the recent University of Cambridge graduation ceremony, where we were promoting our 2010 Onoto Graduation pen.

[rhr]

Hi David,

 

Thanks for your kind words. And thanks also for the photo and all the new information that you contributed here. I was hoping to flush one of the new Onotoists out of the wordwork with my theory of red. If you scratch an Onotoist, do they not bleed? ;~)

 

I'm glad to hear that the new Onoto Co. is maintaining the long-standing tradition of using the red pillar box! You might also want to consider using some of the new RHR rodstock that is now available from the various hard rubber factories to remake one of the vintage Onoto pens, perhaps a streamlined Magna, or an old-style, straight-sided model, both chased, of course. ;~)

 

We might never know the true source of the Onoto name, but in the meantime, a lot of new information is being discovered along the way. Personally, I still think that if you scratch any Onoto pen it will bleed red. Even that pretty blue celluloid pen in the picture posted above by Gerry Berg. ;~)

 

George Kovalenko.

 

[tsunami31]

Still a mystery, then

 

De La Rue (assuming it is the same company) not only have produced stamps, but make (and have long made) banknotes for many countries around the world. An intimate knowledge of inks would have been a prerequisite for this business, so George's theory has credibility.

[Readymade]

Interesting! I'm wondering if all three theories so far might be, in their own way, correct.

 

It's likely the De La Rue management were selecting from a list of possible names, so Ono Tokusaburo may have been the inspiration for "Onoto" and eventually selected because someone thought "hey it also sounds the same everywhere and might help us sell more pens" or "hey it sounds like the red dye we printers use." Who knows?

 

Hapax legomenon is one of my favorite words btw.

[iandonnachie]

Hi

As one who served an apprenticeship with TDLR at Strathendry Works in Leslie Fife, the name ONOTO never came up in any discussions that I recall. The factory was always known as "the pen factory" or just DLR, the pen making facility was a minor part of production, most taken up by military parts. There are not many of us left in leslie, and at 75 I am probably one of the last to be involved.

[rhr]

I fear that both you and I would have to be 125 years old for the name "Onoto" to have come up in any of our discussions, even if we could remember them. By the time the factory was mostly taken up by making military parts for WWII, the name was no longer an issue. There are not many of us left at all who would even bother to be involved in a discussion of the etymology of the name.

 

George Kovalenko.