Boucher and Ciner? Who designed this double clip brooch?

Marcel Boucher was the inventor of five different designs of clip brooch frames.
2,032,907 ( granted March 1936  applied for Oct 16th 1935)
2,032,908 ( granted March 1936  applied for Oct 16th 1935)
2,034,129 ( granted March 1936  applied for Nov 1st 1935)
2,072,080 ( granted March 1937  applied for Nov 23rd 1936)
2,143,538 ( granted Jan 1939     applied for Oct 10th 1935) Yes, this is really what it says.

Of these, the patent documents show that 2,032,907 and 2,032,908 are assigned to Mazer Bros. who were his employers in 1936, while the last three granted are left unassigned.
Boucher set up his own company in 1937 so it is not very surprising that the patent resided with him for the last two designs, even though they were submitted earlier than 1937, but it is unusual that the third design also seemed to belong to him rather than being assigned to his employers. However, he and his employers were on very good terms and so they may have felt that he deserved to retain the third patent granted during one month.

After Boucher left Mazer Bros. and set up in business on his own it is not clear whether he produced clip brooches using his frames or whether the frames and clip backs were mass produced and used by other companies on some sort of license system as very few of the clip brooches found using these mechanisms have any markings other than the frame marked with a patent number. Sometimes there is a Mazer mark on the ornamental part of the clip but not on the frame. Thanks to Robin Deutsch I have evidence that Mazer used the later clips frames as well as those which were assigned to them.

There have been mentions made that mechanisms of this type have also been seen marked Ciner and suggestions that perhaps there was some sort of licensing agreement between either Boucher and Ciner or between Boucher’s employers, Mazer, and Ciner. But no-one seems to have any other information about collaboration between these firms.

So I was very excited when I found a clip brooch of this type for sale and advertised as Ciner.
After corresponding with the seller it became clear that the clips themselves weren’t marked but that the supposed CINER mark was on the frame of the clip brooch, with the words being US. PAT 2034129  CINER PAT PEND.
So the Ciner attribution was based solely on a frame mark.
This reminded me of a piece I owned which also used the same frame but was marked US.PAT 2034129  OTHER PAT PEND.

At this stage the actual ornamental part of the design became of less interest to me than the marks so I do not reproduce this ornamental part here.

In the case of the seller’s piece which is attributed to Ciner, shown below left by the courtesy of the seller, I believe it is possible to see that the middle letter is an H as you can see the cross piece of the letter although the top and bottom are indistinct. If it were an N as in Ciner you would see a clear diagonal at this point.
I believe that this is a mis-struck mark which creates confusion and allows the word OTHER to be mistaken for the word CINER.

On my piece, shown below right, the words are struck clearly and there is no room for confusion.
The words on my piece are clear, on the first section it is specified that the US PAT is 2034129 (normally patent numbers are just struck without any mention of the country) then the information follows that there are OTHER PAT PEND. This makes sense as at that time patents had to be taken out individually in all countries where you wished to protect your idea. The world was a much bigger place then and the international treaties we take so much for granted had not been agreed, it is obvious from the study of world-wide patents found on www.espacenet.com that patents for the same jewellery inventions were often taken out in Britain, France and Germany as well as in the US. These patents usually appear a couple of years after the US patent where the inventor was a US citizen and the patent was first granted in the US.
So, to give a US patent number and the information that other patents were pending makes perfect sense.

Where pieces using a Boucher mechanism have been found also to bear a Mazer mark the Mazer mark has appeared on the back of the clips NOT on the frame or clip mechanism. This would suggest that the frame was marked during the production of the mechanism and the ornamental clip design was marked during its production.

When you consider the huge investment required for tooling up for mass production it seems common sense that the ornamental parts bore the mark which was placed on them in the tooling up stage: and therefore the only marks on the frame would be standard marks from their tooling and would not include a maker’s name.
To incorporate a maker’s name on the frame stamp would require a new punch to be cut as a master punch, and then other punches to be made from this so that stamping could take place at more than one machine or on more than one frame at the same time. This is a totally unnecessary expense when the ornament can be marked instead.

My opinion about the costs of retooling is strengthened by the fact that the patent number used on this frame does not correspond with the look of the frame but that instead the look of the frame matches the patent design 2,143,538 granted to Boucher in 1939. It would appear that retooling was so expensive that they used the old punch on the new frame design
Both patents are shown at the bottom of this page.