Fountain Pens

CHAPTER TWO

A HISTORY OF THE FOUNTAIN PEN

Now that we have examined the fountain pen in detail, dissected it, seen how and why it works, and immersed ourselves in the words and technical terms the industry uses, it is time to take a brief look at the history of the fountain pen.

Who Invented the Fountain Pen?

The fountain pen as we know it today was never invented as such, but developed over thousands of years, from the simple stylus used for cutting marks into clay tablets, to the brush, the reed, the quill, the steel-nib dip pen and finally the self-contained fountain pen.

It is very difficult to be specific about the fountain pen's development because many of the early inventions overlapped in time, but let us go back to our definition of a fountain pen - 'a writing instrument that has a nib and contains its own supply of ink, fed to the writing point by capillary attraction and gravity'. The first of the criteria could be said to be fulfilled by what most people would consider the first real pen - the quill, which superseded (actually overlapping) its forerunner - the reed. To some extent, the quill also fulfils the second criteria, inasmuch as capillary attraction allows it to hold a small quantity of ink, fed to the nib by gravity.

So where do we begin our history? Most fountain pen experts use patents as the basis of tracing the history of the fountain pen. While not strictly accurate in terms of actual lineage due to the overlapping previously mentioned, patents do allow a chronology of sorts. Since most of the experts tend to use this system, I will adhere to it here.

Reeds, Quills and Dip Pens

There is no record of the precise type of reed the ancients used for writing but, whatever type were used, they were cut to a point and split, just like the later quill. This did not produce pen strokes as fine and clean as a quill, nor would they write for as long without dipping. Nevertheless, they continued to be used even after the quill became fashionable around AD700.

The reed.

The quill.

Quill pens became the most common form of writing instrument in medieval times. The producers made them from the flight feathers of large birds, most often geese, and usually sold them in bundles. Righthanded writers preferred feathers from the bird's left wing because of the direction in which it curved, and vice versa.

The shaft of the feather acted as a reservoir, sucking up ink by means of capillary attraction, thereby holding a small quantity that fed back to the paper by the slit cut into the end (the nib), with a small knife. This is the origin of the word pen-knife.

In modern books and films, pictures usually show full quills including the barbs, but if you look carefully at some old drawings and paintings, you will notice that these are often missing and only the shaft used.

Although the quill offered a degree of flexibility, its main drawback was that it needed constant sharpening and reshaping, and so the search was on to find a more permanent solution - such as a metal nib.

Although there have been references made to metal pens down the years, the first recorded maker of steelnib pens was Samuel Harrison, a split-ring maker from Birmingham who produced his first pens around 1780. Steel nib pens fitted to a wooden holder appeared around 1800. By 1850, Birmingham had become a major centre for nib production with such famous names as Joseph Gillott, Wm. Mitchell, Geo. Hughes and Perry & Co, and the range was upwards of 1000 different varieties of style shapes and uses.

Nicholas Bion's pen.

Although there are seventeenth and eighteenth century references to pens that hold their own supply of ink, the earliest pen you are likely to come across hails from France, Nicholas Bion's Plume Sans Fin (pen without end), of which little more than a handful of examples are still known to exist. These metal pens worked by pouring ink into the end, sealing it with a stopper, and then shaking the pen to get the ink to the nib.

Frederick Fölsch's pen.

Recognition for the development of the fountain pen using our patents model should begin in the United Kingdom with the London-based inventor Frederick Fölsch, who patented his reservoir fountain pen in 1809. This pen had a plunger and spring at the end, used to boost the ink flow to the nib. The pen had no feed as such, but a groove in the nib itself.

It was Joseph Bramah who patented the first primitive feed, coincidentally also in 1809. His feed consisted of a piece of cork into which he had cut a narrow groove. Not very sophisticated, but nevertheless the forerunner of what was to come.

John Scheffer's pen.

There were a number of other designs and patents over the next decade, but the first fountain pen to be mass-produced hailed from a patent granted to John Scheffer in 1819. Known as the Penographic, it had an inner tube made from some organic material encased in an outer tube of silver or gold. A button on the side squeezed ink to the nib. A collector of historic pens can still find some of these, mainly in the hands of other collectors. The chances of unearthing one in a car boot sale are very slim though.

J.J. Parker's pen.

Up until 1832, all pens were eyedroppers, but it was in that year that J.J. Parker (no relation to George Parker of Parker Pen fame) patented the first self-filling fountain pen. This was an early piston-filler and worked by turning the outer case of the pen, creating the vacuum necessary to draw up the ink.

In 1839, Charles Goodyear developed the vulcanization process for the production of 'hard rubber', patenting it in 1844. Up until this time all pens had been made from metal, usually silver or gold, but hard rubber was easier to work and cheaper to produce and became the favourite material for pen production for the next seven decades.

L.E. Waterman's feed.

One of the myths surrounding fountain pens is that Lewis Edson Waterman invented the modern-day fountain pen in 1884. Certainly, it did the Waterman Pen Company no harm to have the public believe that to be true. But the real truth is that L.E. Waterman's contribution to the advancement of the fountain pen was in the patenting of the dual-channel feed, in which the ink flowed down a feed channel by capillary attraction and gravity, replaced by an equal volume of air through further cuts in the channel. This development gave fountain pens a much more reliable (though far from perfect) flow. Therefore, although Waterman did not invent the fountain pen, the patenting of his feed was the springboard that opened the door for both Waterman and other manufacturers to popularize the fountain pen.

THE WATERMAN STORY

There is a story often told in pen circles about how Lewis Edson Waterman came to invent the fountain pen. There are slight variations, depending on who is telling the story, but it goes something like this.

In the early 1880s, L. E. Waterman was an insurance salesman in New York. On one fateful day he was about to complete the signing of a large insurance contract with an important client. At the critical moment, the pen he was using flooded ink onto the page, ruining the document. He went away to prepare another, but by the time he returned, a rival salesman had beaten him to it, and claimed the client and the business for himself. Waterman vowed there and then to invent a pen that would not flood. And so, armed with a knife, a saw and a file, he invented the capillary feed on his kitchen table.

A nice story, but to me it does not ring true. However, like all good myths, it will contain within it a grain of truth.

The Development of the Fountain Pen

Once Waterman had pretty much solved the problem of erratic flow, which had queered the use of pens for decades, the pen makers now turned their attention to filling systems.

We have already taken a more detailed look at the various filling systems devised over the years, but for our purposes as far as this short history is concerned, there had already been two types of filling system, Scheffer's Penographic, which utilized an inner tube, and Parker's piston-type filler. Other manufacturers took up the reins and developed these two systems along parallel lines, with the inner tube system dominating, once perfected as the rubber sac.

Conklin's crescent-filler.

Conklin's crescent filler, in which you press a small crescent protruding from the barrel in order to collapse the sac, was the first practical filling system and remained popular until W.A. Sheaffer invented the lever-filler. Of the two, the Conklin was the more efficient system, but Sheaffer claimed that, as their lever was inlaid in the barrel, it made for a cleaner line, since it did away with the crescent protuberance. The lever-fill became the standard filling system for many years to come.

W.A. Sheaffer's 1908 patent.

I do not personally feel that customers were as concerned about filling systems as the manufacturers seemed to think at the time. Rather than switching systems to what they thought was a more popular method, I feel they each would have been better sticking with their own system and perfecting it, just as Pelikan have with their plunger filler, which is almost the same in principle as when they first conceived it. Give me a crescent filler to a lever any day.

The next big innovation in the development of...