The Sheaffer Skrip ink bottle: a patent that isn't Sheaffer's, and a trademark seven years older than the bottle

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

A genuine Sheaffer Skrip ink bottle carries a patent number embossed right into the glass — 1,759,866. That patent was never assigned to Sheaffer. It belongs to an independent Seattle inventor named Owen E. Raab, with no recorded link between him and the pen company whose name sits on the same bottle. The SKRIP trademark itself is older than that patent by seven years. Here is how to read a bottle, and what each number actually proves.

The patent on the glass belongs to a man Sheaffer never credited

Turn a classic Sheaffer Skrip ink bottle upside down and the glass itself usually carries three lines: "SHEAFFER'S SKRIP," "PAT'D 1759866," and "THIS SIDE DOWN — FILL POCKET." Sellers routinely read that as Sheaffer's own patent on its own bottle. The patent record does not support that.

U.S. Patent 1,759,866, titled simply "Bottle," was filed November 9, 1927 and granted May 27, 1930. The inventor of record is Owen E. Raab of Seattle, Washington. No assignee is listed on the patent at all — not Sheaffer, not any Sheaffer-affiliated company. The specification describes a bottle built around an internal well "shaped and proportioned... so that a small amount of ink will fill it to a depth sufficient to submerge the entire point portion of the average pen when the pen is inserted therein," with the well's upper edge positioned "to serve as a stop against which the end of the pen holder may strike to prevent the pen from being dipped too deep." That is the mechanism every Skrip-well bottle still performs: tilt, fill a shallow pocket, dip once, stop.

Raab's own patent text never mentions Sheaffer. No assignment of 1,759,866 from Raab to the W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. turned up in this research. The most likely explanation is a license or supply arrangement between Raab (or the glasshouse producing his bottle) and Sheaffer, rather than Sheaffer inventing the shape in-house — but that is this guide's inference, not a documented fact, and it is offered as such rather than as settled history.

The SKRIP name is seven years older than the bottle

SKRIP became a registered federal trademark on May 17, 1921 (Registration No. 142,760, Serial No. 71,133,851), filed by the W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. on June 17, 1920. The application swears a first use in commerce of April 10, 1920, covering writing fluids in Class 16. Raab did not file his bottle patent until seven years later, in November 1927.

That gap matters for how a bottle gets dated. The name "Skrip" on a label proves only that the ink inside postdates April 1920 at the earliest — it says nothing about the well-shaped bottle, which did not exist as a patented design for another seven years and, per the collector timeline below, was not actually in Sheaffer's own packaging until the mid-1930s. A plain early bottle with no internal well and a Skrip label is an entirely different object from the familiar stepped bottle, separated by a decade and a half, wearing the same brand name the whole time.

The SKRIP registration has outlived the bottle design it is now associated with. USPTO ownership records show it passing from the original W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. through a chain of recorded owners that includes Textron Inc. and, most recently, an entity called A.T.X. International, Inc. A Section 8 and 9 use-and-renewal filing was received November 16, 2021, and the registration's status reads "Registered And Renewed" — the mark is still legally alive, more than a century after that 1920 first use.

Sheaffer did patent something — just not this

Sheaffer was not entirely absent from the patent record on this problem. U.S. Patent 1,963,261, "Auxiliary Well for Ink Bottles," was filed February 20, 1933 by William R. Cuthbert and granted June 19, 1934 — assigned, this time, to the W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. directly. It describes a separate "cup-shaped shell" insert, with its own passageways to let ink flow in, meant to be dropped into a bottle rather than molded as part of the glass. The specification frames the same problem Raab's patent solved — dipping "result[s] ordinarily in the soiling of the barrel of the pen," and an open well invites "evaporation, dust and precipitation" — but answers it with a removable insert rather than an integral blown-glass well.

This is not a case of two patents covering the same invention twice. It is a company that owned one real, assigned patent on this exact problem — and still ended up selling its flagship ink in bottles embossed with somebody else's unassigned number instead.

How collectors date a bottle by its cap and label

Fountain-pen collector sites and forum threads describe a rough progression: simple glass bottles with no internal well from the early 1920s; the molded "Skrip Well" bottle appearing by the mid-1930s under brown-and-yellow labeling; a switch to the better-known blue-and-yellow label scheme used through the 1950s, with "Chemopure" wording appearing 1939–43; a lighter, brighter label scheme from 1960 onward, coinciding with the branding shortening from "Sheaffer's" to "Sheaffer"; and the well-bottle design itself discontinued entirely sometime between 2006 and 2009, replaced by a plain cone-shaped bottle with no well at all and a smaller 50 ml fill.

None of those transition years is tied to a dated primary document this guide could verify. They are offered as the dating framework the secondary-market trade already uses, not as a confirmed company timeline.

How to tell a real one

• The clearest test is the embossing itself. A genuine well-era bottle reads "SHEAFFER'S SKRIP" and "PAT'D 1759866" molded directly into the glass, with "THIS SIDE DOWN — FILL POCKET" near the well. A bottle with a similar stepped shape but no Sheaffer embossing is very likely a different brand entirely — see the look-alikes below.
• A bottle embossed with patent 1,759,866 cannot predate that patent's 1930 grant, which rules out an "early 1920s" claim for any bottle actually carrying the number.
• Cap style tracks roughly with era, per the same collector sources flagged above: a domed black metal cap on earlier bottles, a flat black cap later, and eventually a gold screw cap with a white dot on the final production run before the well-bottle design was dropped.
• Label color scheme is a softer clue than embossing — brown-and-yellow, then blue-and-yellow, then a lighter late-era palette — and should be read alongside the cap and embossing, never alone.

The look-alikes: Esterbrook, and every other well bottle

A stepped or shouldered ink-bottle profile is not, by itself, diagnostic of Sheaffer. The Esterbrook Pen Company of Camden, New Jersey patented its own dip-less inkwell mechanism — U.S. Patent 2,621,629, filed April 30, 1947 and granted December 16, 1952 to Henry C. Klagges, assigned to Esterbrook — built around the same basic idea of a narrow internal well that limits dip depth. Carter's and Waterman also sold stepped ink bottles in the same general period. The shape alone proves nothing; the embossed text or label is what identifies the maker, and a bottle missing both should not be attributed to any brand on shape alone.

Where the company went

Walter A. Sheaffer founded the company in Fort Madison, Iowa, in 1912–13. It eventually came under Textron's ownership, confirmed independently by Textron's own appearance in the SKRIP trademark's recorded chain of title. From there the sources checked for this guide disagree on dates — one account places a Bic acquisition in 1997, another places it in 2008 with the closing of the Fort Madison plant — and that conflict is not resolved here. What is better documented: A.T. Cross Company bought the Sheaffer brand in August 2014 for a reported $15 million, and William Penn Private Limited, an Indian company, acquired it in August 2022. The SKRIP trademark itself survived every one of those changes and remains registered today.

What Skrip bottles actually sell for

No confirmed realized auction price for a Sheaffer Skrip ink bottle was found through any source this research could reach. WorthPoint's own price-history pages for this exact item are paywalled behind a sign-in, and no auction house's public lot archive turned up a result. Every figure below is a current or recent asking price, not a sale.

A used clear-glass well bottle with its original cap, embossed "Pat'd 1759866," was listed at $15.99 on eBay. A similar bottle complete with its original box — the seller's own listing calls it "a rare early skrip item" despite some wear to the box — was listed at $25.00. Colored and boxed variants (an unopened emerald green bottle, for instance) turn up regularly on Etsy and eBay at prices this guide did not capture a confirmed figure for; check current listings directly rather than relying on a number that will be stale by the time this is read.

Where the records disagree

Three disagreements turned up in this research, left unresolved on purpose.

First, when Skrip ink itself launched. Several dealer and pen-company blogs state 1922. The SKRIP trademark's own sworn first-use date is April 10, 1920 — two years earlier, and the better-documented figure, but the two-year gap between what the trade repeats and what the federal filing actually says is not explained anywhere checked for this guide.

Second, which year Bic acquired Sheaffer. One source (Wikipedia, citing a 1997 sale for under $50 million) and another (a pen retailer's company-history blog, citing a 2008 date tied to the Fort Madison plant closing) give different years for what may or may not be the same transaction. Both are presented here as conflicting secondary accounts, not as a resolved fact.

Third, whether Owen E. Raab had any formal relationship with Sheaffer at all. One collector blog states that Raab assigned his patent to the company; the patent record itself shows no such assignment. This guide treats the collector claim as unverified rather than repeating it as settled.

For more Art & Paper history from this shop, see the guide to Lewis Waterman's fountain pen patent and the guide to the Eversharp mechanical pencil patent. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.