How Steel (Dip) Pens Were Made In 1857 (And 1890)

April 30, 2018

My latest post is one of my largest and most involved. In it I compare two descriptions of how steel pens were made. One from the US in 1857 that describes a visit to the Washington Medallion Pen Company's factory. The other from Henry Bore's 1890 The Story of the Invention of Steel Pens: With a Description of the Manufacturing Process by Which They are Produced which focuses on the British steel pen industry.

I include comparisons of manufacturing from the first real industrial factory in the US in 1857, to how they did it in a large Birmingham factory in 1890, the height of the British Pen industry. Amazingly enough, they're pretty much exactly the same. I address why that is, and show the tremendous impact a group of British-trained tool makers had on the beginnings of the large-scale steel pen industry in the US.

If you've ever wondered how they made dip pen nibs in the 19th-century, this is your opportunity to learn.

Hope you enjoy it.

Andrew

For those with an interest in the early years, it may be of interest to note that this 1857 article came out a year before Esterbrook opened his factory in Camden.

May 1, 2018

This was even better than the first article ...someone linked too, that I read a few years ago about the making of steel 'pens', which had impressed me.

This article is so very much better. The wood block picture of those hundreds of women working in four rows in that huge factory really puts the mass production of nibs in focus.

In researching a part of my western saga, I found a gold pen (nib) maker in Syracuse NY in 1850***....but that section of my book takes place in 1844, so there was no way to throw that into it.

I have to assume it was a one man shop, in I'd not stumbled across Y worked at X's shop when looking at the 1850 City Directory.

*** Checking the US census couldn't locate him in Syracuse in 1840 so I've no gold pens in that section of the book.

Thanks Andrew, I now can throw in at least English nibs into the Erie Canal section.

May 1, 2018

I've added a short addendum to the article above that ties this directly to how Esterbrook made pens. I have a map of their factory in 1885 and you can easily see where all of the various operations took place. I've also included a sales card used around 1920 that shows the various steps in making a pen. There, they're all laid out nice and clear.

May 1, 2018

Very good.

Sanborn maps were a life saver for me,

Santa Fe, Pueblo, Denver, Leadville....along with some pictures. I got building height; style, roof material, building material, and even if the taller buildings had an elevator...which was new then.

Up to 1879 if one wanted an Otis elevator, you had to dig as deep as high. So the skyscraper Windsor Hotel in Denver had a six story deep hydrophilic mechanism. They had an observation tower and viewing platform. Up to when the elevator came in few buildings were higher than three stories in most folks didn't want to walk up that many stairs.

1880 Otis came in with the basement only elevator we now know. (Escalators in stores were first before elevators.)

City Directories gave me who was working in which building, & where they lived; letting me know how well off the minor characters were.

May 1, 2018

Hope you enjoy it.

I did...Thank you very much.

There were more steps than I thought there might be & I thought they would slit before grinding.

Edited May 1, 2018 by Nail-Bender

May 2, 2018

Very good Andrew!Just tracking down the source material must have taken hours. Great job.

May 2, 2018

Very good Andrew!Just tracking down the source material must have taken hours. Great job.

Thanks for the kind words from everybody. This is a labor of love and I'm just glad a few people seem to find it interesting as well.

Writing it took hours, research is ongoing and has taken me months and months. Actually, I started researching this stuff (history of steel pens and the steel pen industry) about two years ago, and I do something on it practically every day. I have so much material, I could write posts for years and not finish. And yet there are so many gaps and remaining mysteries. It's an incredibly rich vein of research that is practically untouched for the last 100 years or so.

The curious thing I recently found out is that I can't publish any of it to Wikipedia, because it's all primary source material. I have to have it published somewhere first. I'm looking at doing just that, but where is really the question. It's such a niche topic. I've had two articles published by the Birmingham Pen Museum but that was just in their member's newsletter. It doesn't count for Wikipedia. I'm currently writing up something I think might do for the Pennant. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to crank out articles as I have time. We're only up to the 1870's, so there's still so much left to do.

Cheers