Early Improvements in Fountain Pen Design


1884 Lewis Edson Waterman produced the first practical fountain pen with self contained ink storage.
this pen was capable of being filled externally and contained ink storage that automatically flows to
the nib point.
1890 Rubber sacs were used to hold ink within fountain pens.
1920 Long-lasting rubber sacs were introduced.
1932 First sacless pen was manufactored by Parker Pen Company.

Thanks for posting this breif synopsis of fountain pen history. I don't want to be overly critical, but two items need comment:

The Waterman feed was a very good feed design and you can more-or-less give credit to LEW for inventing the modern feed. However, Paul Wirt had several equally effective feed designs that went alongside the LEW feed, and it was actually a number of later modifications of the basics of the Waterman feed that made it the fore-runner of most modern feeds.

But Parkers claim for the first sacless pen is a bit of advertising fluff on the part of Parker. For one, they claimed the vacumatic was "sacless" when in fact it had a sac, just a funny inverted one they called a diaphragm. But more importantly, there were sacless, self-filling pens designs that pre-dated not just Parker, but even Waterman's first pens. The original Prince's "Protean" pen from 1865 was a syringe-filler. Syringe-filling pens, which have an even stronger claim to being "sacless" in that they do not have any rubber diaphragm at all, were made by Franklin and Eagle, among others, in the first decade of the 20th Century. So there were sacless self-filling pens long before Parker's Vacuum-fil.

For more background on early Fountain Pen Design, check out:
A Quasi-complete List Of Patents Upto 1873
Brand Related Patents, Patents organized by Pen Brands
Fountain Pen History - Penlovers.com


John

PS - Richard, I just noted that your location is listed as Philadelphia. I grew up outside that city. If you are not already aware of them, you might be interested in checking out the Franklin Pen Co. that I referenced above - they were an early Philly pen company. There are a few of us here that are interested in Franklins.

Indeed, this claim even drew the critical scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission, which found it to be flatly false, along with several others Parker was making in their advertising.

--Daniel

Kirch,

Fascinating - might I ask what year that was that the FTC weighed in on that?

John

The complaint dates to 1940; the decision (cease and desist order) was 1945, modified in '47.

--Daniel

So this was tied in with the Lifetime Guarantee decision then? That was the only reference I found to Parker in the Annual Reports, but I know that you dug a lot deeper into that decision.

John

Exactly -- it was part of the same action. I suppose the FTC 'bundled' the complaints. They weren't too keen on Parker's claim that their nibs were 'scratch-proof', either...

--Daniel

That makes sense. By 1945 the FTC was handling a lot more complaints than they were earlier and a lot of detail got left out of the annual reports. There are some really fascinating C&D orders that are just one-liners in the 1940s annual reports. Also, in 1934 the Federal Register started to publish more of the full-text decisions and orders of different Federal agencies, so the detail was reported there, and less was reported in the Annual Report.


My personal favorite is the Parker Bulb-fillers that they called sacless. Now I can see trying to pass off a vacumatic as sacless, as the sac is at least hidden from view, but if a bulb-filler is sacless, what do you call that rubber thing you have to squeeze?

Ah, advertising. . .

John

Would this be a good moment to mention The pen..

Where does Pelikan's Piston filler come into all of this. After all, they made the first true piston filler.