A History of: The Pen.

The true Fountain (ink storing) Pen didn't appear until the late 18th / early 19th century. No one knows when the idea of adding an ink reservoir to a quill pen originated. The period 1880 to 1900 saw a proliferation of fountain pen inventions from the world's inventors, many were not practical but over 400 Patents were granted. However the first practical fountain pen is credited to Lewis Edson Waterman a 45 year old American insurance broker in 1884. The story goes that he was getting ready to sign a vital contract on a building site and had bought a new fountain pen for the occasion feeling that it would create a good impression and be more convenient for the circumstances than the more usual dip nib pen. The contract was on the table, and the pen was in the client's hand. Once, twice and even a third time the pen refused to write and then it made an ink blot on the important paperwork. Mr. Waterman returned to his office in all haste, obtained a fresh contract and returned to the site - a rival broker had beaten him to it and the client had signed a contract with the competitor.                                                                             Waterman refused to be caught out again in like fashion and having an inventive mind designed his own fountain pen and commenced to produce them in his brother's workshop. His design was based upon the physical force of capillarity where air replace the ink used giving a smooth, even, blot free flow. His idea was patented in 1884 but he continued to sell insurance while manufacturing just a few hundreds pens per annum. However Waterman saw the benefits of advertising and sales increased rapidly. Gold nibs were obtained from New York and in 1900 a factory was built in Montreal, Canada to make the pens.                                                                                       Lewis Waterman died in 1901 but his son Frank took over the successful business and conquered Europe with sales rising to 350,000 units per annum. Another first for Waterman was adding a clip to the cap in 1905. It was still slightly impractical, as the ink had to be charged into the pen via a glass eye dropper. Lever filling to a rubber sac was offered first in 1913.                                      The potentially messy process of refilling fountain pens with liquid ink from a bottle was resolved in 1927 when the ink cartridge was invented by a Waterman Director M. Perrand. He put the ink into a small glass tube with a cork stopper. The concept was patented in 1935.

BALL POINT PENS

The principle of the Ball Point pen is that within the writing tip a metal ball housed in a socket rotates freely and rolls quick drying ink onto the writing surface. The writing ball being continuously fed by ink from the reservoir this generally is the pen barrel or a tube within. This principle of the ball point pen actually dates from the late 19th Century when Patents were taken out by John Loud in 1888 for a product to mark leather and in 1916 by Van Vechten Riesberg, however neither of these Patents were exploited commercially. Commercial models were in use from 1895 but had a number of failings; the first satisfactory model to overcome these problems was patented (498,997) by Ladislao (Laszlo) Josef Biro, a Hungarian living in Argentina. Laszlo was a Hungarian journalist and has said that the idea of a pen using a quick drying ink came to him while visiting a print shop. He saw how fast the ink dried and vowed to use something along the same lines in a new type of pen. An ordinary nib would clog up with a thick ink so he worked on the idea of a tiny metal ball rotating in a housing full of this ink.                                                        In 1940 he had to flee from the Nazi, first to Paris then to Argentina in South America where he, and his Chemist brother Georg, took out a fresh patent on 10 June 1943 and made the first commercial models. The British Government bought the rights to this patent, as Laszlo's pens were ideal for RAF Aircrew use. Not only were they more rugged but also wrote at high altitudes with the consequent reduced pressure, whereas fountain pens flooded. The ball point pen is more rugged than the fountain pen which may be why sales rocketed during World War II when the Military needed robust writing implements to survive the battlefield environment.                                                     Commercially ball point pens were sold first in Buenos Aires in 1945 by Eterpen Co. However Biro had forgotten to get a US Patent so he lost any monopoly on the giant North American market. In the US, Biro's pen was sold as 'The first pen to write underwater' this must have been an unsatisfied demand as some 10,000 were sold at the launch at Gimbel's department store in New York on October 29th 1945. Britain wasn't far behind with the first pens available to the general public being sold at Christmas 1945 by the Miles-Martin Pen Company. Back then the ball point pen was an expensive thing to have until It 1953 when the first inexpensive Ball Point pens were available when the French Baron, Bich, developed the industrial process for manufacturing ballpoint pens that lowered the unit cost dramatically.

FIBRE TIP PEN

Although the original Fibre Tip pens were used in the 1940's with coarse wool felt tips these were little more than crude applicators of ink being predominantly used for labelling and artistic work. Invention of the modern Fibre Tip pen as we know it is credited to Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company in 1962. The product was ideally suited to the strokes of Japanese 'picture' writing, which is traditionally produced with a pointed ink brush. The pens had lower viscosity inks than Ball Point pens and this ink flowed more easily and was available in brighter colours.                                                           The products have developed in many ways since that time with tips made of fine nylon and other synthetic fibres ground to a point. The ink is fed to the tip from a soft fibrous reservoir being drawn by capillary forces. These same forces pull the ink out onto the surface e.g. paper, to be marked. Other tips which have been developed include in 1973 a variation on the Ball Point pen where ink is drawn from the fibrous reservoir by a tip which then feeds the ink to the rear of a writing ball, which subsequently rolls it onto the paper. These are usually referred to generically as Roller Ball pens.                                         In parallel to the development of Fibre Tipped pens a wide range of Fibre Tipped Markers has been developed. Generally these are just larger versions of the pen products with tips up to an inch in width. As well as water based inks for colouring and permanent inks for indelible marking, inks are produced for writing on white boards which can be removed with water or a dry tissue. Specialist version of Fibre Tip pens and markers encompass products which will detect forged currency and security mark property. There is even a pen with a diamond tip, which will produce a permanent mark on steel, plastic or glass by scratching or marking into the surface.