Making Gold Flex Nibs; From A Victorian Pen Catalogue

[Lunoxmos]

Sorry for necropsying, but I was doing some more reading today, and I came across this book called "Forty Centuries of Ink" by David N. Carvalho, and in the chapter titled "Ink Utensils", I found another point supporting the use of the blows of a hammer to temper the nib.

 

“The iridium for this purpose is found in small grains of platinum, slightly alloyed with this latter metal. The gold for pens is alloyed with silver to about sixteen carats fineness, rolled into thin strips, from which the blanks are struck. The under side of the point is notched by a small circular saw to receive the iridium point, which is selected with the aid of a microscope. A flux of borax and a blowpipe secure it to its place. The point is then ground on a copper wheel of emery. The pen-blank is next rolled to the requisite thinness by the means of rollers especially adapted for the purpose, and tempered by blows from a hammer. It is then trimmed around the edges, stamped, and formed in a press. The slit is next cut through the solid iridium point by means of a thin copper wheel fed with fine emery, and a saw extends the aperture along the pen itself. The inside edges of the slit are smoothed and polished by the emery wheel; burnishing and hammering produce the proper degree of elasticity.”

[Bo Bo Olson]

I am writing a 1881 city slicker western, so end up looking in the 1902 Sears and Roebucks replica or the Montgomery Ward 1895.  There was essentially no inflation in gold money days. so I get prices and add 1/3 to 1/2 freight and normal profit for a number of items; if I can't find the actual prices in various places.

 

In Monkey Ward...as it use to be called....Gold nibs/pens with 'diamond' tipping was going from from #1 at $0.65-$1.87, #7 nib pen.

 

What I ran into today was styluses being sold for $0.08 with a steel tipped or the same price for porcelain tipped points.

Agate pointed stylus went for a big $0.30..............that's with stylus in all three cases..

Still, it was the first time I ran across porcelain and agate  tipped points.

 

And Agate must have been quite good to be 'so expensive'.

 

Have any seen a porcelain or agate tipped pen/nib?

 

When pens became nibs I don't know.

[dipper]

17 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

When pens became nibs I don't know.

 

For some time there must have been confusion in the meanings of the words "pen", and "fountain pen", and "nib" as language evolved.

 

In the 1870's, as seen in John Foley's marvellous book linked in the the original post of this topic, "nib" is used to mean what we now call "tines".

 

A decade later, in the 1880's, the modern use of "nib" is still not available for the wording of the Waterman advert below:

The Waterman "Ideal Pen" contains "one of the best maker's gold pens". Or your "favorite pen" can be fitted in a "Waterman pen" !

Waterman's First Advertisement? (vintagepens.com)

 

 

Two quotes from John Foley's book are too delightful to ignore....

• Steel Pens of different makes and forms are still used in large quantities, though it is now well established that their use subjects persons to cramps of the muscles, and to a peculiar kind of paralysis of the hand and arm.
• Unless you want to injure your business, never sell a friend or customer a bad Gold Pen.

 

Also, "Duplicate Copies of this Book furnished for $1.00 each." gives an interesting perspective on the relative prices of nibs, books, food, etc.

[Runnin_Ute]

Fellow FPN member @AAAndrew has a site all about the early days/evolution of what we call today "dip pens" at https://thesteelpen.com/

 

Very informative. He talks about the British pen industry and especially as it relates to the US industry which is his real focus, but he needed to bring in the former to lay the groundwork.

[AAAndrew]

So, first terminology. The word "pen" just meant anything with which you wrote in ink. It could be a reed pen, or a quill pen. By the 17th-century you had steel and gold and silver pens. These were generally not the replaceable "slip nib" style of pens we find from the 1820s and on, the one where you slip a disposable piece of steel into the end of a holder. Early metallic pens were most often made in what became known as a Barrel Pen shape. This is basically a tube of steel where one end goes over a handle, either wood, ivory, or whatever, and the other is shaped into what we call a nib, and was used for writing. These early metallic pens were sometimes permanently affixed to the handle, and later ones functioned like slip pens and you could replace them by taking the old one off the holder and putting on a new one. 

 

The "pen" part is the part that is dipped in ink and used for writing. The term "nib" was not a common term up until the last part of the 19th-century. Before this time it generally meant the tip of the pen, or the tines. 

 

Fountain pens began to need a new set of terms because it was considered, like the early reed, quill or all-in-one pens, a single unit. You didn't replace the metallic pen part except for repairs. And since the metallic part was on the very end of the "pen" it became known as the "nib" and the whole was referred to as the "pen." 

 

The term "dip pen" didn't really come into wide usage until well into the 20th century, when fountain pens, and even early ball-point pens were becoming much more common. The two largest makers of steel pens in the US, Esterbrook and Turner & Harrison, both stopped production of steel dip pens in 1952. But they still called them "steel pens" right up to the very end. 

 

As to the porcelain or agate-tipped pens, I've seen agate, and ruby-tipped pens very much earlier in the 19th-century (1810-1830), but I've not seen an actual ink pen tipped with porcelain. This was before the ability to make iridium-tipped pens became practical. 

[Bo Bo Olson]

Thank you Andrew, another bit copied to my western...

[mhphoto]

Awesome read, thanks!