Fountain Pen Use In The Golden Era?

[jar]

During the so called "Golden Age of Fountain Pens" in the US the vast majority of folk were just plain poor and many were living in the legal equivalent of slavery called the Factory Town system; they had NO disposable money, no way they could own a house, own land, change jobs, shop where ever they wanted, and unless their job demanded they use a fountain pen pne would be way down the list of purchases.

[SteveE]

Aside from what has already been said, don't forget that if the simple working man (like my father) needed to sign a document, such as endorsing a check at the bank (or currency exchange, if he didn't use a bank), all of these businesses had desk pens at their counters. I remember when I went to the currency exchange with my mother (in the early 1950's), I liked to play with the desk pens. I think most were Esterbrooks, but there were some Parker 51's, too.

 

These places all had paper blotters, too. (Where is Len Provisor when we need a discussion of blotters through history?)

Edited March 21, 2013 by SteveE

[welch]

Another thing to remember about the so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens is that for those living in that so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens it wasn't all that Golden an Age of Fountain Pens. The fountain pens of the day were messy. Using fountain pens was messy. The feeds were not all that efficient, there was little or know air conditioning and the majority of fountain pens were lever filled sac pens and they blobs and leaked and belched and burped.

 

Ball points became popular because they were less messy and more convenient than the fountain pens of the s called Golden Age of Fountain Pens.

 

I shifted my primitive cursive writing from pencil to pen in 1957/58, when I was in fourth grade. (As best I remember, 3rd grade was all pencil: we practiced cursive letters from a green sign stretched a=bove the blackboard).

 

As JAR says, fountain pens -- of the sort we saw -- were messy. Our parents had graduated high school about 1940, having used inexpensive lever-fillers. They all had stories of friends who had had a pen burst in their shirt pocket. My Dad was an aviation machinist's mate in the Navy, meaning that he got flight pay for riding along in a dive-bomber or torpedo plane. He still laughs about other "airdales" who forgot to leave a pen on the ground when they sat through practice dives.

 

Parents did not like ink sacs or levers or ink bottles. "You'll make a mess!"

 

My first pen was a Sheaffer cartridge pen...no ink bottle. Thought to be a great advance in neatness and simplicity. Second pen was a Parker 45, which I used with Sheaffer washable ink...who wanted to hunt for the Lava soap when you had to be scrambling for the school bus?

 

Ballpoints were not necessarily comfortable, but they became reliable.

 

 

 

 

 

[CS388]

We may not be fond of ballpoints/biros, but they obviously transformed the pen world to such an extent that FPs became (almost) obsolete.

 

Maybe now is the true Golden Age of writing instruments, because anyone can grab a pen and write using ink, without giving it a second thought?

 

I didn't live through age you refer to, though caught the back end of it in my school years and had two pens I was very proud of (Sheaffer Stylist and Parker Harlequin). I remember at school that many school uniforms bore the stains from pen incidents. Spillage and leaks were commonplace. Ink blots on our homework resulted in being marked down - again, commonplace. Most of us would have blue fingers from time to time.

 

Not complaining, here. In fact, it all has a warm nostalgic glow to me now. Just musing that FPs were part of an evolution from chalk to quills to dip pens to FPs to ballpoints to keyboards etc etc

 

As with all ages, what we write is more important than what we write it with.

 

Enjoy.

[jar]

Another thing to remember about the so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens is that for those living in that so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens it wasn't all that Golden an Age of Fountain Pens. The fountain pens of the day were messy. Using fountain pens was messy. The feeds were not all that efficient, there was little or know air conditioning and the majority of fountain pens were lever filled sac pens and they blobs and leaked and belched and burped.

 

Ball points became popular because they were less messy and more convenient than the fountain pens of the s called Golden Age of Fountain Pens.

What age is this we speak of? I've used many vintage pens that aren't messy and don't leak...

 

And you don't live in that age either.

 

There was no air conditioning, really poor heating, lots of manual labor, lousy tires and suspension on cars...

 

I use vintage pens today that I hated during the so called Golden Age and quite honestly, they still leak and are still messy.

[rwilsonedn]

We may not be fond of ballpoints/biros, but they obviously transformed the pen world to such an extent that FPs became (almost) obsolete.

 

[snip]

That is the conventional story of technology progress, but I'm not sure it's accurate. As far as I know (not very far) there is no technology in the BP that couldn't have been achieved in 1900, for example by jewelers or watchmakers. The change that led to the gradual rise of the BP, I believe, was the acceleration of the pace of life, and the change, as you suggest in your next-to-last line, from caring about the act of writing to caring only about the content. Along with this shift in emphasis came a preference for the easy over the accomplished. (Why would I carry a splendid pen that requires me to have a practiced hand when I can use this pointed stick?) Those changes enhanced the attractiveness of an aesthetically inferior but less demanding writing tool.

The notion that what I'm writing is sooo important that I can ignore its appearance may make perfect sense to me, but it might have seemed the height of hubris to an educated 19th-century mind.

ron

[recluse]

 

 

That is the conventional story of technology progress, but I'm not sure it's accurate. As far as I know (not very far) there is no technology in the BP that couldn't have been achieved in 1900, for example by jewelers or watchmakers. The change that led to the gradual rise of the BP, I believe, was the acceleration of the pace of life, and the change, as you suggest in your next-to-last line, from caring about the act of writing to caring only about the content. Along with this shift in emphasis came a preference for the easy over the accomplished. (Why would I carry a splendid pen that requires me to have a practiced hand when I can use this pointed stick?) Those changes enhanced the attractiveness of an aesthetically inferior but less demanding writing tool.

The notion that what I'm writing is sooo important that I can ignore its appearance may make perfect sense to me, but it might have seemed the height of hubris to an educated 19th-century mind.

ron

 

The computational capabilities of an ordinary smartphone were not that difficult to achieve 50 years ago: just a few million dollars for the equipment and a thousand dollars a month for maintenance and here you go. Ballpoint pens made their impact when they became a mass product available for many millions.

 

I don't think that this is the pace of life (a concept I personally find quite obscure but that's a different topic) that promoted BPs. After all pencils were always ready to satisfy the need for something fast paced but they didn't move FPs out. There is something about BPs, which doesn't make them hands down inferior writing tool. A quick glance at multitude of discussions regarding FPs shows a few constantly mentioned concerns: waterproofness, smoothness, ink capacity what not. Now imagine someone offers a pen/ink combination, which is reasonably smooth, virtually no feathering and bleedthrough, highly tolerant to the quality of paper, highly water resistant, each refill lasts easily hundred pages and costs a fraction of a dollar. For a price of Pelikan M200 one can get a lifetime supply of writing tools (for some that could be even the price of Lamy Safari). What else? Oh, low maintenance, leave it for five years, pick it up and it will write straight away. All these often mentioned issues are resolved once and for all. What would be the reaction of majority?

 

Don't get me wrong. I love my fountain pens and write a lot with them (probably around of an equivalent of small cartridge a day). I don't consider them my hobby, they are part of me. But I clearly see where fountain pens accommodate my needs and habits. Were these needs and habits different, I'd be happy with BPs.

[rwilsonedn]

 

 

The computational capabilities of an ordinary smartphone were not that difficult to achieve 50 years ago: just a few million dollars for the equipment and a thousand dollars a month for maintenance and here you go. Ballpoint pens made their impact when they became a mass product available for many millions.

 

<snip>

Now imagine someone offers a pen/ink combination, which is reasonably smooth, virtually no feathering and bleedthrough, highly tolerant to the quality of paper, highly water resistant, each refill lasts easily hundred pages and costs a fraction of a dollar. For a price of Pelikan M200 one can get a lifetime supply of writing tools (for some that could be even the price of Lamy Safari). What else? Oh, low maintenance, leave it for five years, pick it up and it will write straight away. <snip>

Permit me to disagree on both of your initial points. First, no, the electronics industry in 1963 could not have come close to reproducing a current smart phone, even at an impractical price. Almost none of the attributes that make an object a smart phone would have been achievable. My point was that, had there been demand in 1920 for a tube of goo spread across paper with a rotating ball, the industry of that time could have made it at a reasonable price and volume.

Second, no, BPs became a mass product when people's changing needs made them desirable, not the other way around.

And finally, I have not experienced a BP at any price that lives up to your description. I've found them messy, unreliable, and impermanent--just in different ways than fountain pens.

To each his own, I guess.

ron

[recluse]

Permit me to disagree on both of your initial points. First, no, the electronics industry in 1963 could not have come close to reproducing a current smart phone, even at an impractical price. Almost none of the attributes that make an object a smart phone would have been achievable. My point was that, had there been demand in 1920 for a tube of goo spread across paper with a rotating ball, the industry of that time could have made it at a reasonable price and volume.

Second, no, BPs became a mass product when people's changing needs made them desirable, not the other way around.

And finally, I have not experienced a BP at any price that lives up to your description. I've found them messy, unreliable, and impermanent--just in different ways than fountain pens.

To each his own, I guess.

ron

 

I was explicitly referring to computational capabilities. The price tag should be indeed ten times higher, though.

 

With regard to BPs, there was always huge demand for them. There were several outbursts of BPs before 50-s but they all died out due to performance issues. Once, however, Parker mostly resolved the problems in mid-50s the BPs expansion got unstoppable and, I guess, by mid-60s sales of BPs firmly surpassed sales of FPs. Judging by the history of BPs those were purely technological difficulties that hold them.

And maybe I'm using all my luck on BPs but I just took a BIC from a box, which was bought at least six years ago, and it wrote almost immediately (there was a half-inch long skip). I've used a whole lot of BPs back in the days with miserable number of failures.

[Wahl]

Another thing to remember about the so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens is that for those living in that so called Golden Age of Fountain Pens it wasn't all that Golden an Age of Fountain Pens. The fountain pens of the day were messy. Using fountain pens was messy. The feeds were not all that efficient, there was little or know air conditioning and the majority of fountain pens were lever filled sac pens and they blobs and leaked and belched and burped.

 

Ball points became popular because they were less messy and more convenient than the fountain pens of the s called Golden Age of Fountain Pens.

 

Most of my pens, which I use daily are lever filled sac pens from the 1920´s and 1930´s.

 

I am happy to inform you that they don´t blob, leak, belch or burp. And that they write much better than most "modern" pens.