It is probably safe to assume that the first instrument was the human finger used in soft dirt or perhaps with some sort of media like charcoal or a natural dye that would transfer to a surface. It is truly amazing how slowly this crucial element of civilization developed. The earliest writing we know of is Cuneiform. It is the oldest known because it survived due to what the circumstances under which it was created. Because the symbols were pushed into wet clay tablets and many of those clay tablets survived in the dry desert environment, we know much more about these people than we know about many other, possibly more advanced civilizations. Just a rudimentary knowledge of archaeology shows us how little we really do know about our past. As we get closer to our own era, we know more about how people communicated. The Greeks used a stylus to mark on wax-coated writing tablets. Egyptians used hollow reeds to transfer pigments onto papyrus.
It wasn’t until sometime long after the fall of the Roman Empire while Western Europe struggled to find their way out of the Dark Ages that the quill became the writing tool of choice. Bird feathers, split and cut on an angle and dipped in various sorts of ink worked on a crude capillary action. This is where the word for our revered little tool came from. The word pen came from the Latin word for feather; penna. For some reason we decided that naming things in Latin lends credibility. As it turns out its also a useful way for doctors to hide the fact that they really have no idea what is wrong with you. One would think that Leonardo DaVinci at least would have come up with something better than a bird feather. But...no. There are a couple of reasons for this. The most obvious was that very few people actually wrote. All through the Middle Ages, writing was pretty much confined to monks hanging out in monasteries, copying religious manuscripts. Also, there was just no real impetus for innovation. People were just pretty much cool with the way things were. More accurately, they hadn't seen any change, so they didn't expect any.
The earliest reference to a quill that I am aware of appeared in the writings of Isidore of Seville in the early 7th century, but the lack of documentation from that period of history would lead us to believe that quills had been in use long before that particular reference. The feather of a goose wing was the most commonly used feather for quills.
The attitude toward writing began to change a couple of centuries ago. Yet, development of a truly easily workable pen was remarkably slow. It would appears from some of the endeavors that people knew what they wanted, achieving it was much more complex than it might seem at first glance. The main hurdles were coming up with a good writing point and a decent ink delivery system. Both took decades of serious effort to figure out. By the mid 19th century, steel nibs were finally worked out. That was about a 70 year process once inventors started to seriously pursue it. The capillary action of a decent ink delivery system wasn't really dealt with until 1884.
In 1809 Joseph Bramah invented and patented a machine that cut quills into several separate nibs cut transversely so they could be inserted into a holder, rather than just cutting off the end of a feather and having to constantly trim and sharpen it. This also kind of got people used to what was coming later in the century with steel nibs in holders.
In 1818 Charles Watt patented a process for gilding quills and pens. The common perception is that steel nibs were in wide use by this time, but, actually, they didn't really become popular until the 1840s. After Bramah's gold plated quills, the next major step came in 1822. J.I. Hawkins and S. Mordan patented the making of nibs out of horn and tortoise shell. The tip of the nib was fitted with a diamond chip, or a piece of ruby or gold.
Iridium had been discovered in 1803. Much later it became the material of choice for tipping nibs. But this early there were still a number of problems to be worked out. Iridium is a metal from the platinum family and it the most corrosion resistant metal known. However, it is so hard and brittle, it simply wasn't workable with the tooling of the early 19th century. In Britain, in 1803 a man by the name of Wise tried making and selling steel pens. They were cut and rolled into the form of a tube, with the edges coming together to form the slit. Durability was a objective. But they were just too rigid and expensive for anyone to really be interested.
Bryan Donkin also patented a steel pen in 1808 that was much more like the nibs we know. It was essentially two flat pieces of steel, placed together and bent to the proper angle and inserted into a steel tube. But, still...the same problems. The next stage of development came with the collaboration of James Perry, Josiah Mason and Samuel Harrison. Perry is believed to have been the first to make steel slip pens. The other two were in business together making split rings. Harrison saw Perry's pens for sale in Birmingham and realized that he could machine them using his equipment for the manufacture of split rings. He contacted Perry and they negotiated a deal. Then, in 1830, Perry realized that a hole between
the slit would increased flexibility. He also put several later cuts in the side. The final improvement of the first real working steel nib came from Joseph Gillot in 1831. He realized that elongating the ends of the slit into prongs would add another significant amount of flexibility.Pen development is directly tied to the Industrial Revolution in that it took significant advances in metallurgy the development of the steel dipping pen finally brought the next major development for handwriting. Steel pens, which used steel tips called nibs, were a huge step forward because they did not require the frequent sharpening that quill pens did. Nibs…yes, it sounds like a cheese flavored snack food. Actually, it is more Latin that loosely translates as bird's beak. It is kind of a goofy little word, but, what else are you going to call it? You wouldn’t want to call the end of your pen “that pointy thing” or the “thing that looks like a bird’s beak”….just not dignified. You know you have a problem when you go the Latin route and it is still goofy. But, fountain pen afficianados have made the best of it. It's a good word to help separate the purists from the dilitantes. Sure, it’s a bit elitist, but we need to feel like we’ve got the lock on the lingo.
HOW THE FIRST STEEL NIBS WERE MADE
These nibs were made out of the finest steel available at the time, made from Swedish charcoal iron. Strips of this steel were annealed in a muffle furnace and pickled in a bath of dilute sulphuric acid to clean the oxidation off. Then the blanks were rolled to a thickness of 1/160 of an inch. Then after another annealing they were heated up in boxes of bones ash and quenched in oil. This is basically the same process that was used to harden the steel of firearms.
A personal note: Gunsmithing is another of my avocations and this method of treating steel for nibs is the same as what we still use to make spring steel, case harden and fire blue. Heating steel to 1500 degrees and then quenching it in oil has a very interesting effect. On fine, small pieces like a nib it turns it a beautiful cobalt blue and adds a spring quality to it. On larger pieces, like the receiver of a
Winchester rifle, it gives the steel a rainbow effect.
Back to the nibs...then the blanks were rolled, heated and polished repeatedly. Birmingham was the center of nib making in England. In America, the Esterbrook pen company became the center of nib production in 1860 in Camden, New Jersey. Even though they still needed to be dipped in ink, they made writing by hand much easier and enjoyable because they helped the writer make his writing much more uniform and they held much more ink more evenly than a quill. Some early visionaries made small improvements such as adding a coiled wire to the top of the nib so it would retain even more ink for the capillary action and make it possible to write much longer between dips in the ink. In fact, steel nibs offered so much more to the writer than the quill that they became the impetus for a number of penmen to elevate writing to an art form.
The earliest reference to a quill that I am aware of appeared in the writings of Isidore of Seville in the early 7th century, but the lack of documentation from that period of history would lead us to believe that quills had been in use long before that particular reference. The feather of a goose wing was the most commonly used feather for quills.
The attitude toward writing began to change a couple of centuries ago. Yet, development of a truly easily workable pen was remarkably slow. It would appears from some of the endeavors that people knew what they wanted, achieving it was much more complex than it might seem at first glance. The main hurdles were coming up with a good writing point and a decent ink delivery system. Both took decades of serious effort to figure out. By the mid 19th century, steel nibs were finally worked out. That was about a 70 year process once inventors started to seriously pursue it. The capillary action of a decent ink delivery system wasn't really dealt with until 1884.
In 1809 Joseph Bramah invented and patented a machine that cut quills into several separate nibs cut transversely so they could be inserted into a holder, rather than just cutting off the end of a feather and having to constantly trim and sharpen it. This also kind of got people used to what was coming later in the century with steel nibs in holders.
In 1818 Charles Watt patented a process for gilding quills and pens. The common perception is that steel nibs were in wide use by this time, but, actually, they didn't really become popular until the 1840s. After Bramah's gold plated quills, the next major step came in 1822. J.I. Hawkins and S. Mordan patented the making of nibs out of horn and tortoise shell. The tip of the nib was fitted with a diamond chip, or a piece of ruby or gold.
Iridium had been discovered in 1803. Much later it became the material of choice for tipping nibs. But this early there were still a number of problems to be worked out. Iridium is a metal from the platinum family and it the most corrosion resistant metal known. However, it is so hard and brittle, it simply wasn't workable with the tooling of the early 19th century. In Britain, in 1803 a man by the name of Wise tried making and selling steel pens. They were cut and rolled into the form of a tube, with the edges coming together to form the slit. Durability was a objective. But they were just too rigid and expensive for anyone to really be interested.
Bryan Donkin also patented a steel pen in 1808 that was much more like the nibs we know. It was essentially two flat pieces of steel, placed together and bent to the proper angle and inserted into a steel tube. But, still...the same problems. The next stage of development came with the collaboration of James Perry, Josiah Mason and Samuel Harrison. Perry is believed to have been the first to make steel slip pens. The other two were in business together making split rings. Harrison saw Perry's pens for sale in Birmingham and realized that he could machine them using his equipment for the manufacture of split rings. He contacted Perry and they negotiated a deal. Then, in 1830, Perry realized that a hole between
the slit would increased flexibility. He also put several later cuts in the side. The final improvement of the first real working steel nib came from Joseph Gillot in 1831. He realized that elongating the ends of the slit into prongs would add another significant amount of flexibility.Pen development is directly tied to the Industrial Revolution in that it took significant advances in metallurgy the development of the steel dipping pen finally brought the next major development for handwriting. Steel pens, which used steel tips called nibs, were a huge step forward because they did not require the frequent sharpening that quill pens did. Nibs…yes, it sounds like a cheese flavored snack food. Actually, it is more Latin that loosely translates as bird's beak. It is kind of a goofy little word, but, what else are you going to call it? You wouldn’t want to call the end of your pen “that pointy thing” or the “thing that looks like a bird’s beak”….just not dignified. You know you have a problem when you go the Latin route and it is still goofy. But, fountain pen afficianados have made the best of it. It's a good word to help separate the purists from the dilitantes. Sure, it’s a bit elitist, but we need to feel like we’ve got the lock on the lingo.
HOW THE FIRST STEEL NIBS WERE MADE
These nibs were made out of the finest steel available at the time, made from Swedish charcoal iron. Strips of this steel were annealed in a muffle furnace and pickled in a bath of dilute sulphuric acid to clean the oxidation off. Then the blanks were rolled to a thickness of 1/160 of an inch. Then after another annealing they were heated up in boxes of bones ash and quenched in oil. This is basically the same process that was used to harden the steel of firearms.
A personal note: Gunsmithing is another of my avocations and this method of treating steel for nibs is the same as what we still use to make spring steel, case harden and fire blue. Heating steel to 1500 degrees and then quenching it in oil has a very interesting effect. On fine, small pieces like a nib it turns it a beautiful cobalt blue and adds a spring quality to it. On larger pieces, like the receiver of a
Winchester rifle, it gives the steel a rainbow effect.
Back to the nibs...then the blanks were rolled, heated and polished repeatedly. Birmingham was the center of nib making in England. In America, the Esterbrook pen company became the center of nib production in 1860 in Camden, New Jersey. Even though they still needed to be dipped in ink, they made writing by hand much easier and enjoyable because they helped the writer make his writing much more uniform and they held much more ink more evenly than a quill. Some early visionaries made small improvements such as adding a coiled wire to the top of the nib so it would retain even more ink for the capillary action and make it possible to write much longer between dips in the ink. In fact, steel nibs offered so much more to the writer than the quill that they became the impetus for a number of penmen to elevate writing to an art form.
The steel pen was revolutionizing handwriting. There is a quirk in human nature that is best demonstrated today in entertainment. If something is successful, everyone else has to make a slightly different version of it. As human nature dictates, once something is a success, it must be copied and improved upon. Once the steel nib was invented, the effect it had on handwriting made way for a flurry of improvements. The most obvious addition needed was a pen with its own internal ink supply. Constant dipping in the inkbottle was messy, annoying and frustrating. Attempts to design a more practical writing instrument were increasing exponentially. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of real capitalism, an effective writing instrument to record business transactions and myriad other documents, a better, more functional type of pen was on countless drawing tables of aspiring inventors. There is a myth that we will discuss at length elsewhere, but a basic understanding of it is important here. Most people who have any sort of interest in penmanship marvel at the handwriting of the latter half to the 19th Century. You’ve heard it. “Oh, look how they used to write. It’s so beautiful. I wish people still wrote that way.” The reality is that most people of that time couldn’t read, let alone write. Of those who could write, it was the same scrawl we see today. There were a several factors that helped create this myth. First, when we see handwriting from the period, it is something that was worth preserving. We don’t see a lot of Victorian grocery lists. It was a time when several elements came together to create those ornamental scripts and people willing to devote their lives to mastering them. The 19thCentury was a time of tremendous change. It was really the start of what has put us in the position of buying electronic gadgets like addicts that are obsolete by the time we get them home and figure out how to wrestle them free from those horrible vacuum sealed containers.
The 19th Century was the beginning of the age of invention. As mentioned above, advances in metallurgy helped kicked this all into motion more than anything else. Once good quality steel was part of the picture, ideas that people had dreamed of for centuries all started becoming possible. In a nutshell, we are talking about the Industrial Revolution that we all heard about in history class but never quite understood what it was or why it was important.
All these inventions were creating all kinds of new jobs and basically just changing the way people lived. All this meant that a lot more stuff had to be written. Documents of all kinds increased exponentially. In the midst of all this inventing, no one had invented a way to mechanize document production. Sure, there was the typewriter. But, have you seen what early typewriters produced? Yes, it was legible. But we have to remember what people were expecting out of life in those days. These were times when people actually read poetry aloud. Stuff like Lord Byron was killer. Emerson, Thoreau and Sir Walter Scott…yeah, you know the names. Go and try to read them. These guys were rebelling against Industrialism. The downside of all this “progress” was actually pretty grim. So, a movement we now call Romanticism became the escape people needed from the unreal ugliness of progress. Everything was insanely lavish. Rococo (look it up) was making a comeback. It kind of started with guys like Sir Walter Scott. He and his contemporaries wrote stories romanticizing the Middle Ages. It has always baffled me. When I think of the Middle Ages, I think of filth, ignorance and intolerance. But, these guys managed to romanticize them much the same was we romanticize "the good old days". A situation arose where two essentially opposite ways of looking at the World evolved. Invention, industrialization and development and all the nastiness that came with them lead people to try to romanticize their way out of the nightmare of factories belching filth, overcrowding and a whole bunch of general uncoolness.
The point I am attempting to make here is that these documents had to be romantic and beautiful. And the only way to really achieve this was to write them by hand. Schools devoted to professional penmanship began to show up by mid century. When you see that awesome script from the 19th century that makes you wish for the good old days, more than likely it was written by a guy who went to college to study penmanship. A master penman practiced writing like a concert pianist practices the piano. They didn’t really write. It would be more accurate to say that they drew letters.
All this historical explanation is merely to help you understand how these developments influenced the development of the fountain pen. Of course, one of the primary goals in the development of pens was to get them to increase their ink capacity. Reservoir Pens as the first class was called, simply added external devices. Actual fountain pens utilized the barrel in some fashion. Certain types were utilized as early as the beginning of the 18th century.
Lewis Edson Waterman, a New York Insurance Agent, produced the first practical fountain pen in 1884. Waterman was to pens what John Moses Browning was to firearms, Henry Ford to the assembly line. There is a story that most pen people have heard regarding this invention. The gist of it is that Waterman was about to close a huge policy with a wealthy client and his pen clogged, The client took this as a bad omen and decided against the policy. So, Waterman went home and locked himself in his workshop until he invented the perfect prototype for all fountain pens to come. I cannot find any evidence as to the veracity of this story. But, maybe we should just go with it. Because, after all, he did invent the first and still, in many peoples’ opinion, one of the best designs and something had to motivate him. Revenge for loss of lots of money trumps intellectual curiousity any day.
All this historical explanation is merely to help you understand how these developments influenced the development of the fountain pen. Of course, one of the primary goals in the development of pens was to get them to increase their ink capacity. Reservoir Pens as the first class was called, simply added external devices. Actual fountain pens utilized the barrel in some fashion. Certain types were utilized as early as the beginning of the 18th century.
Lewis Edson Waterman, a New York Insurance Agent, produced the first practical fountain pen in 1884. Waterman was to pens what John Moses Browning was to firearms, Henry Ford to the assembly line. There is a story that most pen people have heard regarding this invention. The gist of it is that Waterman was about to close a huge policy with a wealthy client and his pen clogged, The client took this as a bad omen and decided against the policy. So, Waterman went home and locked himself in his workshop until he invented the perfect prototype for all fountain pens to come. I cannot find any evidence as to the veracity of this story. But, maybe we should just go with it. Because, after all, he did invent the first and still, in many peoples’ opinion, one of the best designs and something had to motivate him. Revenge for loss of lots of money trumps intellectual curiousity any day.
While both the quill and steel pens had to be dipped in ink, the fountain pen was the first to hold its own ink within a self-contained reservoir. Because of its practicality and durability, the fountain pen became the most popular writing instrument and remained so until the development of the ballpoint pen in 1938.
Waterman’s pen worked as flawlessly as a dipping pen but without the need for an external inkbottle. Waterman started producing these pens at a rate of 36 per week and selling them at his New York City cigar kiosk. However, the demand quickly soared, prompting Waterman to open a six-story production facility on Broadway, which he expanded even more in later years. The fountain pen dominated the writing instrument market for the next 60 years.
Capitalizing on Waterman’s success, other companies joined the writing instrument manufacturing business. In 2001, the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, an organization comprised of companies that produce fountain pens and other writing tools, had approximately 25 members. The larger companies now use an automated process to produce fountain pens, while some smaller companies and individuals still produce them by hand, just as Waterman did back in 1884.
Although fountain pens are available in a variety of styles offering unique features, each is comprised of the same basic components: the nib, or point; the barrel, which holds the ink reservoir, and the cap, which fits over the nib of the pen to protect it from damage. Ink flows from the reservoir to the nib at a balanced rate of flow by means of a force called capillary attraction. This is the same force that causes a blotter to absorb ink or kerosene to flow up the wick of a flame. This didn’t require a Ph.D. in physics. People had been using capillary action since before recorded history. It is one of those phenomena that one can see happening without needing to understand what is making it happen. When someone stuck of rope of a piece of material and you can see that the water is wetting the rope far above the water line. Why? Who cares? Lets figure out a way to make that work for us.
NIBS
The first nibs were made of gold alloys, often dipped in iridium for strength and resistance to corrosion. Tennant discovered iridium in 1803 in the residue left when crude platinum is dissolved by aqua regia. It is a metal in the platinum family that is difficult to work because it is so brittle. It is the most corrosion resistant metal known. However, when gold alloy nibs became too expensive to mass-produce, steel was adopted as the material of choice. Solid gold, ranging from 18-22 karat, is still used for the nibs on some pens. This is one of the great ironies of the technological advancement of things in general in the 20th Century. Nibs have actually not improved at all. Some of the best nibs were made by Sheaffer and Waterman in the early 1920’s. Yes, they’ve managed to make them prettier and such…but, you can’t beat those early gold flexible nibs.
HOW A FOUNTAIN PEN WORKS.
The nib has a slit from the tip back to the breather hole. The nib sits atop the feed, which has a channel that lines up with that slit. Capillary action draws the ink from the ink supply down the channel. Usually the feed ends just beyond the breather hole and the ink then travels down the slit to the tip where it meets the writing surface. The flow of ink is controlled by a number of factors. Trying to diagnose why a fountain pen is not writing the way it should can be very difficult if one does not understand the basic physical properties of how this capillary action works. Once one understands it, it seems amazing that it took so long to figure out how to make a good fountain pen. But hindsight is always 20/20. There are actually a significant number of factors that make fountain pens flow evenly. On a very small scale, it is the same principle as a single barrel carburetor on an engine. The precise amount of air has to mix with the precise amount of ink, just as a carburetor has to mix the precise amount of air with the right amount of produce a combustible fuel.
Fountain pens actually have many more variables. The viscosity of the ink, the proper seals where the seal is more of a vacuum where the nib sits on top of the feed rather than a gasket, the slit in the nib, the size of the surface area where the tip of the nib touches the paper are just a few of the many considerations one must entertain when fine tuning a fountain pen. These are just some of the difficulties we face after someone else actually figured it out and designed and made the pen.
The first fountain pens were filled with medicine droppers, which were later replaced with rubber sacs. First used in 1890, these sacs had a short life because the rubber material they were made from was not able to withstand the chemical action of the ink. Rubber compounds were later improved, and a long-lasting rubber sac was introduced in the late 1920s. This sac was later replaced by an even better semi-transparent, plasticized vinyl resin sac containing no rubber. Various forms of sac depression mechanisms have been used throughout the years. The first sacless pen was introduced by the Parker Pen Company in 1932.
Fountain pen barrels can be made from a wide variety of materials. The first barrels were made of black hard rubber, chosen because it is ink-resistant and easily worked. Postwar pens are more commonly made from durable plastic.
Finer, more expensive pens are made from materials such as brass, silver, or gold. Modern pen manufacturers generally use less expensive materials for pen barrels, including: acrylic resin, also known as Lucite or Perspex, which is used for Parker 51 models; cellulose acetate; and various other injection-moldable polymers. Handmade pens can be created from wood or almost any other material that is solid, stable, and can be worked with standard woodworking tools. Examples include plywood, crushed velvet, bone, leather, and even antlers. Stainless steel is generally used to make the nibs, although gold or sterling silver may also be used. The clips and other fittings are usually made from a gold alloy that has been electroplated, or they may be gold or gold filled.
CHANGES IN FILLING DEVICES
Here, I deliberately use the word change instead of development or progress. In my opinion, even to this day, this is where the least amount of progress has been made. A variety of mechanisms can be used to fill fountain pens. These include levers, buttons, pistons, and squeeze bulbs. Lever-fillers have a tiny lever built into the side of the pen. Lifting the lever causes the ink sac to compress. Then, after the nib is dipped in ink, closing the lever causes the sac to reinflate. Button-fillers have a button on the end of the pen. The button works similarly to the lever; pressing the button causes the sac to deflate, and releasing the button causes the sac to reinflate after the pen has been dipped in ink. Piston-fillers use a screw mechanism to move a piston inside the barrel, taking in and expelling ink, while squeeze bulb fillers are filled by repeatedly squeezing the bulb. Each one of these mechanisms are installed on the pen during final assembly. With Esterbrooks, I actually just remove the nib and use a medicine dropper.
