| Born | 14 March 1851, Wheeling, West Virginia |
| Died | 9 October 1919, Baltimore, Maryland |
| Resting place | Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Maryland Institute College of Art (Certificate in Applied Industrial Design, 1872) |
| Spouse | Agnes née Tolliver (m. 1880) |
| Known for | Invention of the haskin, a corrugated rubber pen and pencil grip sleeve |
| Fields | Applied industrial design, Stationery manufacture, Ergonomic writing instruments |
| Era | Late 19th century |
Charles Homer Haskins Beauregard (14 March 1851 – 9 October 1919), commonly known as Charles Homer Haskins, was an American educator and domestic scientist chiefly known for inventing the haskin, a segmented rubber sleeve placed over the end of a pen or pencil to prevent slippage during extended writing. His design, patented in Baltimore in 1883, is regarded as the direct precursor to the modern pencil grip and is still manufactured in substantially unchanged form.
Charles Homer Haskins was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, the fourth of seven children of a notary public named Edmund Haskins and his wife, Clara née Rowe. The family relocated to Baltimore in 1859, where Edmund Haskins secured a position with the Baltimore municipal land registry. Charles attended the Calvert Street Boys' School, where he was noted less for academic distinction than for an unusual habit: he wrapped the barrels of his school pens in strips of leather cut from his father's ledger-binding offcuts, complaining that the smooth lacquered wood caused the instrument to rotate unpredictably between his fingers. A school report from the 1863–64 term, held in the Baltimore City Archives, records his penmanship instructor observing that "the boy Haskins writes with great deliberateness and apparent discomfort, owing to some eccentric modification of his pen." In 1868, Haskins enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied technical draughtsmanship under the supervision of Professor Alonzo T. Crewe. He graduated in 1872 with a certificate in applied industrial design.
In 1876, while employed as a draughting clerk at the Baltimore office of the Chesapeake Survey Commission, Haskins began formalising his early leather-wrapping experiments. Working in the evenings in a rented room on North Charles Street, he tested successive prototypes made from gutta-percha, vulcanised rubber, and eventually a compound of sulphur-cured natural latex he sourced from the Baltimore rubber merchant firm of Aldiss & Crane. The key innovation, documented in a notebook now held at the Maryland Historical Society (Accession No. MHS-1891-HKN), was a series of circumferential ribs moulded into the outer surface of the sleeve, which he found increased grip without requiring pressure from the user. Haskins filed US Patent No. 274,812 on 3 March 1883, describing the device as a "corrugated digital writing aid of vulcanised India rubber." The patent was granted on 11 June 1883. A brief account of the invention appeared in the *Baltimore Manufacturers' Circular* of August 1883, which described it as "a small but practical contrivance for the relief of writers and draughtsmen subject to cramp of the pen-fingers." Haskins subsequently arranged manufacture through the stationery supply company Horner & Wills of Fells Point, Baltimore, which produced the first commercial run of 4,000 units in the autumn of 1883. By 1887, Horner & Wills reported annual sales of approximately 38,000 units, primarily to telegraph offices, counting houses, and government departments.
In 1889, the Haskin sleeve was listed in the procurement catalogue of the United States Post Office Department as a recommended writing accessory for postal clerks, a designation that substantially accelerated its national distribution. The following year, the *American Stationer and Office Outfitter* journal published a comparative review of pen-grip accessories that credited Haskins with having "solved, at modest cost, a problem which had frustrated clerks and correspondents for a generation." The device was adopted by the Baltimore City Schools Board in 1891 for distribution to pupils in the intermediate grades, following a recommendation by the school district's physician, who had observed a reduction in reported hand fatigue among students using the sleeves in a trial conducted at two schools in the Waverly district. Haskins attended the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where a display of the haskin sleeve was included in the Illinois section of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, apparently due to a cataloguing error that misattributed its origin to a Chicago supplier. Haskins submitted a formal correction to the Exposition's records office; the matter was acknowledged but not rectified in the printed catalogue.
Haskins died on 9 October 1919 at his home on Calvert Street, Baltimore, survived by his wife, Agnes née Tolliver, whom he had married in 1880, and their two daughters. His obituary in the *Baltimore Sun* of 11 October 1919 noted that he had "spent forty years refining a simple instrument that made the labour of writing less burdensome to many thousands," and recorded that the haskin sleeve remained in active production at the time of his death. The word *haskin* entered general commercial usage by approximately 1891, appearing in stationery trade catalogues without attribution to its inventor — a pattern common to small utility inventions of the period. A revised and expanded version of his original patent was licensed to the National Pencil Company of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906, and formed the basis of the rubber pencil grip as standardised by the American Stationery Trade Association in 1924, five years after Haskins's death.
Haskins is occasionally referenced in histories of ergonomic writing instruments, most notably in a 1977 survey article published in *The Penman's Quarterly* (Vol. 14, No. 2), which identified the haskin sleeve as "the earliest commercially successful device designed specifically to reduce occupational fatigue in clerical workers." A replica of Haskins's original 1883 patent model, reconstructed from the patent drawings by a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, was displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Industry during its 1994 exhibition *Tools of the Counting House: Office Equipment 1840–1920*. No portrait of Haskins is known to survive, though the Maryland Historical Society holds a silhouette believed to depict him, dated approximately 1885.