Trying To Date My Technical Pens

[dune]

Hello! I recently acquired a bag of old technical pens — almost three full sets of Staedtler Marsmatic 700 pens, and two sets of Faber-Castell pens. I am trying to figure out how old the Marsmatics are. I've done quite a bit of web research but haven't found much info. And I have yet to find a picture online that matches my pens. The difference in mine is that they have a metal grip, some gold and some silver. All the ones I've seen online have a plastic grip, fluted or squares. I have discovered the fluted grip pens are older that the ones with the square pattern, but I would like to know where mine fall in the timeline. The image is of the six pens I've been able to clean up and get working so far. Thanks for any information anyone can provide.

[lallin]

According to the book The Technical Pen by Gary Simmons, technical pens were introduced in 1954 by Rotring/Koh-I-Noor. Prior to that, stylographic pens. such as Inkograph, JUCO, etc, had rounded points for writing, not squared for drawing. This gives us an earliest possible date. A quick search of books.google.com turns up a number of references to Staedtler Marsmatic 700 in publications in the 1980s, the earliest I found was 1982. I took only a cursory look out of curiosity; you may want to pursue this avenue to find earlier dates.

[Tweel]

All I can add is a datum, that I've been using Marsmatic 700s since the mid-1970s or so and have never seen one with a metal section; and a guess that these were something special. One further guess regarding that "specialness" is that these pens might have been sold with the jewel-tipped points (for drawing on hard, abrasive frosted Mylar film) already installed.

 

Dunno -- I like them!

[Rotringbug]

Hello,

I think I can provide some infos. The Marsmatic were split into three lines. The "700" : the regular one. The "707" : with silver ring on the barrel. The "709" : with gold ring on the barrel.

The "707" has an harder nib made of tungsten and steel and were designed to work on polyester films and acetate.

The "709" has an even harder nib made of saphyr and were practically indestructible. Their very high selling price (at the time) made them restricted to professional. They are quite hard to find today.

I'm not sure your pencil holds the right barrel are they are all tagged "707". See the picture I've joined and check for the wringing on the barrel.

If you could provided picture of all the silver and gold ring you've got, I'll be vert happy, as I haven't succeed determining all the nib size that were produced at the time. May be you could fil some gap in my listing.

 

[marcsoto]

Hi everybody!

 

I've been reading this forum for some time and learning some very interesting things. I'm from Catalonia in Spain and this is my first time writing in the forum. My main interest is about stylographs.

 

I was looking for some information about american technical pens and arrived here, were BIG SURPRISE, I find some of the pictures I have posted on my website.

 

I am really happy somebody found them interesting enough for this forum. I just wanted to say that the information posted by Rotringbug is absolutely right (I found it directly from Staedtler in Spain). The silver ring is for the "707" , tungsten nib, and the gold ring is for the "709", saphyr nib. Please see the pictures of the nibs.

 

And, of course, feel free to browse my website at "http://www.micerveza.es/estilografos%20por%20marca.html". It is in spanish at the moment but you will find it easy enough.

 

This is the steel regular nib

 

This is the tungsten extra hard nib

 

This is the jewelled saphyr nib

Edited February 24, 2015 by marcsoto

[stuck-in-time]

Hi, I've got a question about these jeweled nibs, when they said jeweled nib, is it only the end of the tube that is made of a special material or is the needle inside also jeweled?

 

I got one of the old sapphire (?) nibbed TG1-J and it has a broken needle, so replaced it from another new statndard nib, and I was wondering if this'll still be a jeweled technical pen or not.