Eagle Simplex

Eagle Pencil Company produced a wide variety of writing instruments.  One was an interesting mechanical pencil named Simplex.  It was cheap and came in several styles.

The Simplex has a patented, simple mechanism –

As the metal cylinder is screwed along the outside of the wooden body, a rod pushes the lead forward.

But there is also an older type of Simplex pencil that is completely different –

The lead is exposed by tearing off pieces of material around it.  This is similar to Blaisdell’s paper pencils, which were patented a year earlier (1895).