When Did Dip Pens Fall Out Of Common Use?

[BillZ]

I recall reading that the Post Office had dip pens and inkwells up until 1957. I believe that Shelby Foote mentioned it.

[Shangas]

Dip pens were commonly used until at least after WWII if some documentation is to be believed. Surely they existed in schools in the 1920s and 30s and possibly into the 50s in some places. And in most public buildings like banks and such.

 

Dip pens were incredibly cheap and easily replaced. NOT the same with a fountain pen. In institutions which had to rely on a lot of handwriting (like schools), it was easier to spend $10.00 and get a thousand nibs or whatever, than $50.00 and two two fountain pens.

[Kuscer]

I'm wondering the same thing... they're still around, personally I've always wanted one. My guess is that they were replaced by C/C using fountain pens because these new types were just more practical.

[Threadbear]

Really interesting to read all these responses. Seems there were a lot of good reasons to carry on using dip pens I hadn't considered.

 

LamyOne - I should have guessed there'd be some people here for whom dip pens are STILL in common use ;-)

[scrivelry]

 

Hello Scrivelry,

 

I am really surprised to read this! I went to elementary school in a small town in the '70s and we didn't have desks with inkwells in them anymore - we did have recesses carved out for pencils and pens, though.

 

Best regards,

 

Chris

They had stopped using the inkwells long since, and they were mostly gone, leaving only the holes, but the desks with the holes were still there until quite recently.

 

It is quite likely that your school was built after the second World War, possibly in the 60's. Those schools never had the old wooden and cast iron desks screwed down to the floor to begin with.

 

NYC has approximately one million school children in the public school system (the one funded by taxpayers, which is free to all students of school age in the city). A good number of the high schools were built new in the 1920's, and those were all equipped with the desks screwed down to the floor, coat closets at the back of the rooms, and holes in the desks for inkwells. They were very good facilities for their time, finished and furnished in oak, with very high ceilings and absolutely huge windows made up of small window panes.

 

Investment in urban infrastructure of all types fell off after the second World War and it first took a while for things to fall apart, then a while for people to decide they cared, and then a further while to actually replace things as money became available. One high school I am thinking of was wired for internet access in classrooms about the same time they replaced the desks, maybe right around the year 2000.

 

When you try to wheel a ship as large as this city, it takes a while...

[Cepasaccus]

A business partner told me, that at the post offices were regularily dip pens to write addresses onto envelopes and so on. This was in Russia in the 1980s. So it could be said they fell out of common use in the 1980s or 1990s.

[pajaro]

The only place I ever saw a dip pen was in school, in the 1950s. By 1958 we used fountain pens, in the fifth grade, a Catholic elementary in West Roxbury, MA. Mainly adults used ten cent ballpoints or the odd fountain pen. The schools thought that the right way to teach children to write was with a dip pen, then a fountain pen and ballpoints. Old fashioned thinking. I never saw a dip pen anywhere else. Banks had counter ballpoints chained to a base.

 

Frankly, moving from a dip pen to a fountain or ballpoint pen was a liberating experience. I, as a left handed writer had to move the pen to the top right of the desk to access the inkwell that was in the top right to cater to right handed writers. It was tiresome. Even a fountain pen was far better than a dip pen. I moved fast to ballpoints. They allowed me to write notes faster than a fountain pen. I am regaled with the amusing songs of those who claim to have used fountain pens to take notes in college. I did try it. A Cross Century ballpoint was faster, a Jotter better still. The reason I use fountain pens at all is nostalgia, and in the work years in IT it ellicited many amusing comments from the network smart alecs.

 

Dip pens, well, wax romantic over them if you will, but they are in deserved disuse. I tried some a few years ago and concluded they are too tiresome, with the constant dipping. Many like them, but it's just a recreation for them. Yes, you could use them to prove a point, that you can actually resist change.

[rwilsonedn]

In Riding the Iron Rooster, Paul Theroux comments that the Chinese in 1988 were still manufacturing large numbers of dip pens and that most big-city hotels provided them at writing desks in the guest rooms. He apparently found that quite amusing. As an earlier poster pointed out in mentioning Shelby Foote, who was publishing as late as the mid-1990s, some quite recent authors have used dip pens for their manuscripts. And a number of folks here on FPN use them for general writing.

So I don't think you can say they've fallen out of common use. They've become considerably less common, at different rates in different places and occupations, but they have never been replaced by fountain or ballpoint pens, any more than trains have been replaced by airliners.

ron

[peterg]

We started using dip pens in the last year of my junior school which would have been 1963 in preparation for going to senior school. There were ink wells at my senior school but most of us were using fountain pens by then. I can't remember when they were phased out but I remember a watery blue Stephens ink while most of us bought our own bottle of Quink.

[Cepasaccus]

When I came to High School (mid 1980s) they had still old wooden tables with openings for inkwells, but these openings looked like there were already empty for quite some time. View years later we sadly got new tables which were not as easily beautified as the wooden ones.

[gwyneddd]

We had desks with dip wells (empty) in the Fifties and Sixties, so I assume that post WWII, the ink disappeared. I don't remember writing with anything but Bic pens by the late Sixties, though I had a fountain pen as a child, Mom always had a bottle of Quink with that interesting glass well, and dip pens galore (and I'd have the fearful accident of tipping over India ink when I was doing lettering or drawing on my big desk at home--a door covered in linoleum that my dad made me. It went all the way across the room. I tipped it a few times doing big posters and onto the carpet it went. Nothing worse, nothing.)

 

Banks and hotels still had those wells and pens but by the Sixties the Bic and ball points ruled the world. I was interested in lettering as a kid and recently picked it up again after a random request from a client (since I painted, could I do a calligraphy certificate for them?) got me thinking ink again.

[ac12]

I still like using my dip pens.

I am writing my pen pal letters with them.

Granted it is not as convenient as just pulling a fountain pen out of the pen cup and writing. But the writing looks so much better than a fountain pen, and I can switch between inks without the hassle of deinking/cleaning/inking a fountain pen.

It is all about what you want to do, and the appropriate tool for the job.

[jasonditz]

schools are always a bit behind the times (e.g. I took a computer class in high school in 1996 and they were still using mid 80's early model Macintoshes) and this seems to have been the case with pen usage.

 

when my parents went to school (late 40's through mid-50's) it was all fountain pens here, though my dad says he remembers using pencils almost exclusively through secondary school. That's my recollection for my own early schooling (1980s) as well, though needless to say by then pens were all ballpoints.

 

My grandmother definitely used dip pens in school (this would be late 1920s through mid 1930s), because she used to say how the boys would dip the girls' pigtails on the inkwells. So they seem to have changed sometime around WW2 here, despite Fountain Pens being commonly available for decades before that. City directories here from the turn of the century here usually had an advertisement or two for Waterman pens in them.

 

My recollection of early writing in elementary school was that they made us use very large, stubby pencils, and very thin paper that tore easily. In retrospect the paper was probably designed to teach people not to press hard with fountain pens, and they just kept using it because that was what they always used. We weren't even allowed to write in pen for school assignments until 7th grade, though by then I'd discovered mechanical pencils and was using them religiously until I got to college.

 

Fountain pens were not only uncommon when I was a kid, they were unheard of. I never even saw one until I was grown, and I never tried to write with one until I bought a Lamy Safari (by mistake, thought it was a high-end rollerball) a few years back and decided I loved them.

[tonybelding]

I recall reading somewhere long ago that World War One (i.e. The Great War) brought both fountain pens and men's wristwatches into mainstream use, since soldiers in the field found dip pens and pocket watches too cumbersome. Wristwatches had previously been thought of as lady watches, I suppose.

 

I suspect those who held out against the onslaught of fountain pens were generally schools, because they needed something cheap and disposable for their masses of students, old-timers suspicious of newfangled gadgets, and the more image-conscious elites (diplomats and other officials) who couldn't afford to carry something that might possibly leak ink onto them.

[dcwaites]

When looking at the enlistment record of my uncle at the beginning of WWII, it was quite clear that the enlistee used a dip pen, whilst the officer who witnessed it used a fountain pen.

[jbelian]

A definitive reply would require more research, but I quickly (and not very carefully!) glanced at the pages of a 1938 and a 1952 Esterbrook catalog. In the 1938 catalog, approximately 18 pages were devoted to dip pens a

(straight pens, not Dip-less) and penholders. In the 1952 catlog, only 9 pages were given to straight pens and penholders. Were I to undertake a methodical study, my initial hypothesis would therefore be that market demand for straight pens dropped by perhaps as much as 50% over those 14 years. There are many obvious ways that hypothesis might prove false, but it may serve as a rough guide. I have a half-memory of seeing production numbers somewhere once that addressed this question, but couldn't find it on a quick search.

 

On the anecdotal side, I have a dip pen on my desk and several fountain pens within easy reach. All other variables being equal (paper, ink, color, etc.), I would never bother to uncap my fountain pen when I can just grab my dip pen. Too much bother. Fountain pens are for taking to places I won't have access to a dip pen, such as meetings. I've had to do many a penance cleaning dried ink from a fountain pen because I am too lazy to use them at my desk.

 

- Julia

Edited October 1, 2014 by jbelian

[Matlock]

I used dip pens in the 1950s at school and I used to help mix the ink, rather a messy job. Our teacher was not too impressed when we used the pens as darts, especially when one stuck in a school mates leg. I am not to sure that ink injection is a good idea.

I started work for British Railways in 1960 and dip pens were still in use but when I was promoted to manager at Hamilton House (Liverpool Street Station, London) the stores were full of nibs and pen holders, all still wrapped. They ended up in a skip when Hamilton House was demolished in the 1980s (if I had known then what I know now.....oh well).

[Kuhataparunks]

There is a very interesting 20-minute video on YouTube made by the Sheaffer Pen Company that traces the history of pens and writing instruments that would answer this question in rather extensive depth. I'd suggest you check it out; I forgot what it's called, but I'll come back here with a link soon.

[Dickkooty2]

http://s271.photobucket.com/user/dick168/media/school-desks-billchance-org_zpsa5bb395a.jpg.html?filters[user]=139176284&filters[recent]=1&sort=1&o=0

 

In the Philadelphia public schools in the 40's, desks were in straight non-movable rows, the seats flipped up as you stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, and in the upper right hand corner was an inkwell. You kept your straight pen with the bulbous cork finger grip wrapped in an ink-wipe and were drilled in posture, angles. and strict forms of the letters in lined practice books.

[GTVi]

In Australia, some public schools used dip pens up until the late '60s...I remember as I moved up through the years, we still had the ink wells built into the student desks, but they forced us to use biros instead.

I remember the ample ink stains and scars in the wooden desks, I'm sure a sign the teachers did not find appealing.

Edited October 9, 2014 by GTVi