Vintage WEN Model 21 Electric Pencil Engraver, Chicago, c. 1970–1990

The Piece

A WEN electric pencil engraver, the little red vibrating stylus that put a man's driver's licence number on every television, toolbox and outboard motor in America.

The body is moulded in a hot orange red, pebbled over most of its surface and polished smooth where the hand goes, drawn out to a long tapered nose and swelling to a rounded tail where the cord comes out. It is one of those shapes that could only have been designed to sit in a palm, and it does, pen fashion, with the weight over the fingers.

At the nose a chromed collar holds the tungsten carbide point, worn grey at the tip from use. At the tail sits the white knurled adjuster that sets the stroke, so the same tool scratches a fine line on the back of a watch or bites deep into a steel casting. Beside it a second white collar takes the strain of the cord, which is the original white flex.

The nameplate is brushed aluminium, foil printed and still crisp. MODEL, with MODELE beside it, then 21. The WEN mark in its red rectangle. Burin Electrique above Electric Pencil Engraver, both in script. Then the ratings, 120 volts, 12 watts, 60 hertz, with the UL listing mark on one side and the CSA roundel on the other, and at the foot WEN PRODUCTS, INC. CHICAGO, IL.

History & Provenance

WEN was founded in 1951 by Nick Anton in the Chicago area, and by its own account its people developed the electric soldering gun, the electric jigsaw, the electric engraver and the chainsaw. The soldering gun claim was contested hard enough to reach a federal courtroom in Chicago in 1954, when Weller took WEN to trial over it, which tells you something about how seriously both firms took the patent. The engraver is the one that stayed in the catalogue, and the Model 21 is the shape it settled into.

The nameplate sets the floor, and it does it in two languages. Every line is doubled into French, MODELE beside MODEL and Burin Electrique above Electric Pencil Engraver, with the Canadian Standards Association roundel beside the UL mark. That is a plate built for a tool crossing the Canadian border, and Canada passed its Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act in 1970, after which American manufacturers selling north moved onto dual language plates through that decade. The address helps too. It reads CHICAGO, IL. rather than Chicago, Ill., which is the two letter postal form that took hold from the later sixties.

Two things set the ceiling. This is the plain Model 21, and the engraver WEN sells today is the 21B, so this is the earlier designation that the B superseded. And the plate reads WEN PRODUCTS, INC. CHICAGO, which is the original firm. The WEN name now sits with a company in West Dundee, Illinois, so a Chicago plate belongs to the first company rather than the brand's later life.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1970 to 1990, with the earlier end the better supported of the two. Three things would narrow it: whether the original box or instruction sheet survives with a printed date or catalogue number, whether the cord is original or a replacement, and whether the plate matches a dated WEN catalogue page, which is how these are usually pinned down.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

It is a design object that happens to be a tool. Six inches of hot red plastic drawn into a teardrop with a chrome nose is exactly the industrial design that made American tools of that period worth keeping, and it photographs like a prop from a film about the future as it looked in 1972.

It also still has a job. An engraver marks glass, metal, ceramic, leather and hard plastic, and anyone who signs work, labels tools or has ever had a bicycle stolen has a use for one. The adjustable stroke is what separates it from a scratch awl.

And it is a genuinely American story in an object you can hold. A Chicago firm, a patent fight serious enough to reach federal court, and a tool that ended up in enough basements that most people over fifty will recognise it on sight and tell you what their father engraved with it. That recognition is worth more across a counter than most objects twice the price.