The functioning of a fountain pen is relatively simple ... the pen holds ink in a reservoir and delivers it to the nib via gravity and capillary action. The earliest successful fountain pens are often called eyedroppers. Simply because you unscrewed the part that held the writing point, or nib, and used an eyedropper to fill the barrel with ink. Without a sac or a filling mechanism to take up space in the barrel, they held a lot of ink and wrote for a long time. The barrel itself was made of hard rubber. And therein lay the problem. Pens of the era had no clip on the cap to fasten them to a shirt pocket: men carried a pen flat in the pocket of coat or pants and women usually put them in a purse. When the warmth of the hand expanded the hard rubber where the nib screwed into the barrel, eyedropper pens leaked. To whit, the legend of the Waterman pen. Now what exactly are the parts of a pen? And how do they work together to form those gracefully flowing lines of ink?
Pieces and tools for putting together a Montegrappa.
A Montegrappa craftsman at work.The Parts of a Pen
The Cap: Of course, protects the point of the pen. The earliest caps were simple slip-ons, but eventually the industry went to threaded screw-on caps to prevent accidental opening. Later, the slip-on cap would make a return in the forms of the clutch cap (like the Parker 51 and 61, with a metal friction clutch) and the snap-on cap (like the Waterman Le Man or Gentleman with spring loaded retainers).
A tip: When showing a pen, always remove the cap first yourself (and some say you should hold onto the cap so as to reduce the likelihood that the pen might inadvertently “walk away”).
The metal band usually found near the mouth of plastic and hard rubber caps is not merely decorative, it reinforces the portion of the cap that gets the most stress, and stops cracks in the cap lip from spreading. The band may be gold-filled or plated, and may be plain or engraved with a pattern.
Clip: The size, shape, finish, and construction of the clip all add personality to the pen; clip design is important because the clip is the first part of the pen that a casual observer is likely to see (i.e. when it sits in your pocket). Clips were originally an option. Pens of the era had no clip on the cap to fasten them to a shirt pocket: men carried a pen flat in the pocket of coat or pants and women usually put them in a purse. Waterman simply riveted the ball-end clips on its famous early “Clip-Cap”, but Sheaffer went for clips secured by internal springs. Parker originated the washer clip, in which the clip is attached to a ring or washer that is secured to the cap by a decorative screw called a tassie or derby (the washer clip was favored by the doughboys during WWI because it helped the pen fit all the way down in a button-flap pocket). In its Personal Point and Doric pens, Wahl continued the use of the elegant roller clips used by the Boston Pen company, and later went to a fairly futuristic design in its Skyline pen. Many less expensive pens make do with clips secured to the cap by insertion and bending of tabs.
Point: Probably one of the most important parts of the pen, points are made of sheet metal, gold alloys (14 or 18 carats) on the more expensive pens, and steel or gold-plated steel on lesser pens. The original reason for using gold was its imperviousness to chemical attack from the somewhat caustic inks of the early years (not a problem now, so there’s no reason to turn down a steel point pen).
However, gold is soft and would wear rapidly if used for writing, so a tiny blob of iridium (a very hard metal) called the tipping material, was electrically fused to the point of the nib. This blob is properly called the nib (although this word is popularly used to mean the entire point). The point is slit after being shaped and fitted with a nib, and a breather hole may be cut to help with smooth ink flow and rapid filling. The breather hole also stops the tendency for cracks to form at the end of the slit. Nib making was a complicated and delicate process done mostly by hand. Making pen points was a fairly skilled craft in the old days, so much so that the point makers had their own union. A skilled craftsman ground and shaped the tipping material so that the point would write a particular line width, such as fine, medium, or broad. There are nine standard nibsizes, with three different nib-tip cuts: straight, oblique and italic. Most owners had their initials engraved on the clip. It took about four months to break in a new writing instrument since the nib was designed to flex as pressure was put on it (allowing the writer to vary the width of the writing lines) each nib wore down accommodating to each owner’s own writing style. Thus the reason why people did not tend to loan their fountain pens to anyone.
Feed: The job of the feed is to get the ink from inside the pen and out to the point and nib. The feed also has to supply a return path for air to enter the pen to take the place of the departing ink. Feed design is fairly critical, and it took many years for inventors to develop practical designs (Waterman may have had the first). One of the problems that the feed must cope with is widely varying ink flow rate (caused by changes in temperature, humidity, type of ink, pen usage, etc.). Most feeds have comb cuts or internal pockets for accumulating excess ink and keeping it from blotting the paper during writing.
Section: The section is really the linchpin of the pen; it is where all of the important parts of the pen come together. The feed and nib are placed together in proper alignment and press-fitted into the front of the section. The sac is trimmed to fit inside the pen and then stretched over a nipple or reduced-diameter cut on the rear of the section (classically, shellac was used to glue the sac in place as this gave a good seal, did not harm the section, and could be cleaned off for later re-sacking). Some pens (like the Sheaffer lever fillers) had a transparent band in the section that allowed the user to tell when the pen was running low on ink. This was a trick that partially made up for the fact that sac pens couldn’t be made transparent like Vacumatics or other sacless pens.
Sac: Sacs were made from rubber, although later penmakers would use more exotic polymers (such as Parker’s “pliglass” transparent sacs in the aerometric 51s). If ink is left to dry in a sac pen, it will leave a hard residue that can petrify the sac; a collector trying to fill the pen for the first time in twenty years or so will feel a nasty crunch as the sac
splits...time for a replacement.
Barrel: On many pens, the barrel is finished off with a decorative screw or “jewel”, typically resembling the tassie. A flashy looking jewel was often a cheap way to finish off a barrel or cap, less labor-intensive than tapering to a point (as with the Sheaffer Balance pens). Button fillers, vacuum fillers, and bulb fillers have “blind caps” at the end which can be removed to get at the works.
Filling Mechanisms
All pens contain an internal reservoir for ink. The different ways that reservoirs filled proved to be one of the most competitive areas in the pen industry. The earliest 19th century pens used an eyedropper; by 1915, most pens had switched to having a self-filling soft and flexible rubber sac as an ink reservoir. To refill these pens, the reservoirs were squeezed flat by an internal plate, then the pen’s nib was inserted into a bottle of ink and the pressure on the internal plate was released so that the ink sac would fill up drawing in a fresh supply of ink.
The Button Filler: Patented in 1905 and first offered by the Parker Pen Co. in 1913 as an alternative to the eyedropper method. An external button connected to the internal pressure plate that flattened the ink sac when pressed.
Lever Filler: Walter Sheaffer patented the lever filler in 1908. The W.A. Sheaffer Pen Company of Fort Madison, Iowa introduced it in 1912. An external lever depressed the flexible ink sac. The lever fitted flush with the barrel of the pen when it was not in use. The lever filler became the winning design for the next forty years, the button filler coming in second. Click Filler: First called the crescent filler, Roy Conklin of Toledo commercially produced the first one. A later design by Parker Pen Co. used the name click filler. When two protruding tabs on the outside of the pen pressed, the ink sac deflated.
The tabs would make a clicking sound when the sac was full.
Matchstick Filler: Introduced around 1910 by the Weidlich Company. A small rod mounted on the pen or a common matchstick depressed the internal pressure plate through a hole in the side of the barrel.
Coin Filler: Developed by Lewis Waterman in an attempt to compete with the winning lever filler patent belonging to Sheaffer. A slot in the barrel of the pen enabled a coin to deflate the internal pressure plate, a similar idea to the matchstick filler.
