From "The Cyclopædia of American Biography." 1925

John Conrades Whal

WAHL, John Conrades, inventor and manufacturer. Born near Morrisonville, Illinois, 7 February, 1876. He learned the trade of a machinist, and worked at it in Peoria, Illinois, after 1897. In the meantime, he pursued an. extensive course in draughtsmanship, which he completed in 1902, and was then engaged as a tool designer by the Universal Adding Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1903 he designed one of the earliest visible typewriting machines, and in 1904 he perfected the famous Wahl adding and subtractting attachments
for the Remington Type writer In 1905 the Wahl Adding Machine Company was incorporated, and a plant erected in Chicago for the manufacture of the adding and subtracting machine. In 1907 a contract was negotiated with the Remington Typewriter Company which covered a period of eighteen years.

Thirteen years later (1920) this attachment had become such a necessary adjunct to the Remington machine that the Remington Company bought outright from the Wahl Adding Machine Company, all its machinery, equipment, and patents. In 1915 Mr. Wahl perfected the "Eversharp" pencil, which has since become famous. This and the Wahl Fountain Pen are manufactured and marketed by the Wahl Company, of which he is first vice-president.

In recent years Mr. Wahl has directed his inventive genius toward effecting improvements in the design of writing implements and equipment for their manufacture. He has been granted over fifty patents for various inventions. Among the important awards of merit received by Mr. Wahl may be mentioned the industrial medal of the Panama-Pacific Exposition (1915), and the John Scott Legacy's medal and premium of the Franklin Institute,
Philadelphia (1915).

Mr. Wahl married, in1897, June Estabrook. They have one child,
J. Estabrook Wahl, a graduate of Cornell University in 1922.