Most of us write far less than we used to: we laser print documents typed on our computers, pay for things by swiping credit cards, and even send our most personal thoughts to other people by email, instant message or SMS. Have you ever wondered about a generation that did not have all these facilities? There was a time when people loved to write, the smell of ink and yellow shaded paper made a lot of people to be a narrator or poet. Having a fountain pen was a part of status. No, fountain pens are not outdated.
It still has all its pride and status. A fountain pen is technically a nib pen that is entirely different from all other different brands of pen in the market. It is a kind of dip pen that contains an internal reservoir of liquid ink.
The invention of fountain pain was few centuries before. There are arguments showing that the first construction of a fountain pen was by Leonardo da Vinci during the Renaissance period.
There are evidences from his journals that contain drawings with cross-sections of a reservoir pen that works by both gravity and capillary action which substantiate the arguments.
Lewis Edson Waterman , was the inventor of the capillary feed fountain pen and also the founder of Waterman Pen Company and Ideal Pen Company. In , Waterman improved a fountain pen. He and his brother started experimenting with different tubes and in the end, they found out that if air is let into an ink reservoir of a fountain pen through capillary pipes, ink will flow out of the reservoir under the force of gravity but slow enough not to cause leaking.
On February 12, Waterman patented fountain pen on his name and, at first, he assembled pens himself. In he made a modification to the nib of the pen.
The problem was when a pen is nearly empty, a bubble would form. He solved this problem by making overflow pockets on wither side of the channels in the feed. Waterman Pen Company is one of the few remaining first-generation fountain pen companies.
Figure 1. Soft copies of patent owned by Petrache Poenaru for the invention of Fountain pen. The working principle of fountain pen is simpler than what we can imagine. The whole process is the combination of gravity and capillary action. The fountain pen has the capability to draw ink from the reservoir through the feed to the nib and transfer it on the paper.
When we write in paper using fountain pen the ink will flow partly through gravity from reservoir onto the page by its own weight that pulls it downwards. Along with that there is the capillary action, the phenomenon where the liquid will automatically draw itself along a very thin tube. It is due to the feed linking the nib to the reservoir is quite narrow. When we place the nib on paper and drag it along on the paper, the ink is pulled downwards on a slit in the centre of the nib, and down the feed due to the capillary action.
It means it is pulled partly by the adhesive forces between the ink and its container and partly by the cohesive forces between every ink molecule and one following on behind it. Air enters inside the pen at the same time through the breath hole and it moves in the opposite direction and it gradually filling up the reservoir as it empties the ink. The ink which is used on fountain pen is not same as the ink that we used for the ball point or gel pen that we are using now.
Because of the special feed system in the fountain pen to bring the ink to the tip of the pen, fountain pen inks must be solutions rather than the pigment based like many of their ballpoint pen. Generally, we use water soluble inks for the fountain pen instead of tinctures. This is because most of the pens during the 20th century is made from celluloid or ebonite which are soluble in alcohol, so the tincture inks can damage these pens. In olden days we used Iron gall ink in fountain pens.
Iron salts and tannic acids from vegetable sources are used in the making of the blue-black ink. Iron gall ink was often homemade. But the iron gall inks are not suitable for the fountain pen, because it causes a phenomenon called flash corrosion which destroy the metal parts of the fountain pen.
The normal Indian ink was also not so suitable because of the presence shellac as a binder which clog the fountain pens very easily. The fountain ink is mainly made of water, the solvent of the ink. The solute that we are using inside the fountain pen is normally a water-soluble aniline dye composed of a Nitrate group bound to a phenyl group forming a basic amine, phenylamine.
Rather than these there are some other solutes which are, surfactants to increase the flow of ink, such as biocide compounds for the prevention of fungal growth in ink and glycerine to increase the viscosity of ink. In the case of polar covalent solutes, addition of the solutes that dissolve into multiple ions or ring-based covalent hydrocarbons for the making of the inks with lowered freezing point.
Also, by the addition of the solutes that bond with the cellulose of the paper the paper permanence is achieved which ensured the ink remains permanently on the paper. Decreased drying times are created by the addition of higher surfactant levels than usual and the by increasing the flow.
Progress in developing a reliable pen was slow until the midth century because of an imperfect understanding of the role that air pressure plays in the operation of pens. Furthermore, most inks were highly corrosive and full of sedimentary inclusions. The Romanian inventor Petrache Poenaru received a French patent on May 25, , for the invention of the first fountain pen with a barrel made from a large swan quill.
Thousands of skilled craftsmen were employed in the industry. These were sold worldwide to many who previously could not afford to write, thus encouraging the development of education and literacy. In , American inventor Azel Storrs Lyman patented a pen with "a combined holder and nib". However, it was only after three key inventions were in place that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument.
Those were the iridium -tipped gold nib, hard rubber , and free-flowing ink. The first fountain pens making use of all these key ingredients appeared in the s. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, created stylographic pens with a hollow, tubular nib and a wire acting as a valve. In the s the era of the mass-produced fountain pen finally began.
Waterman soon outstripped Wirt, along with many companies that sprang up to fill the new and growing fountain pen market. Waterman remained the market leader until the early s. At this time, fountain pens were almost all filled by unscrewing a portion of the hollow barrel or holder and inserting the ink by means of an eyedropper — a slow and messy procedure.
Pens also tended to leak inside their caps and at the joint where the barrel opened for filling. In , W. Purvis became the first African-American to patent a self-filler.
Self-fillers began to arrive around the turn of the century; the most successful of these was probably the Conklin crescent-filler, followed by A. Waterman's twist-filler. Sheaffer's lever-filler, introduced in , [16] paralleled by Parker's roughly contemporary button-filler. Meanwhile, many inventors turned their attention to the problem of leakage. The most successful of these came from Francis C. Brown of the Caw's Pen and Ink Co. Moore of Boston.
In , George Safford Parker released the Parker Jointless , named so because its barrel was single-piece to prevent leakage. The section assembly fit into the pen's end like a cork stopper; any leaked ink was kept inside the nib. In , Waterman began marketing a popular safety pen of its own.
In Europe, the German supplies company which came to be known as Pelikan was started in , and first introduced their pen in The decades that followed saw many technological innovations in the manufacture of fountain pens. Celluloid gradually replaced hard rubber , which enabled production in a much wider range of colors and designs. The inter-war period saw the introduction of some of the most notable models, such as the Parker Duofold [26] and Vacumatic , [27] Sheaffer's Lifetime Balance series, [28] and the Pelikan During the s and s, fountain pens retained their dominance: early ballpoint pens were expensive, were prone to leaks and had irregular inkflow, while the fountain pen continued to benefit from the combination of mass production and craftsmanship.
By the s, refinements in ballpoint pen production gradually ensured its dominance over the fountain pen for casual use. Retailers such as The Goulet Pen Company or JetPens continue to sell fountain pens and inks for casual and calligraphic use. The feed of a fountain pen is the component that connects the nib of the pen with its ink reservoir.
It not only allows the ink to flow to the nib in what is often described as a "controlled leak" but also regulates the amount of air flowing backwards up to the reservoir to replace this lost ink. It does this through the use of a series of narrow channels or "fissures" that run down its lower edge.
As ink flows down these fissures, air is simultaneously allowed to flow upwards into the reservoir in an even exchange of volumes. The feed allows ink to flow when the pen is being put to paper but ensures ink does not flow when the pen is not in use. The feed makes use of capillary action; this is noticeable when a pen is refilled with a brightly coloured ink.
The ink is taken up and into the feed by way of capillary action and is often visible in clear demonstrator pens , but is not dispensed onto the paper until the nib makes contact. How the feed is shaped may determine the wetness and flow of a particular pen. For this reason, feed material alone and its surface roughness may have a significant effect on the way two pens of the same nib size write. Pen feeds are crucial to preventing ink from dripping or leaking. Feeds often feature finned structures intended for buffering fountain pen ink.
Buffering is the capacity to catch and temporary hold an overflow of ink caused by other conditions than writing towards the nib. When a fountain pen nib receives such an overflow it will result in ink blobbing or dripping also known as burping.
A pen with a misconfigured feed might fail to deposit any ink whatsoever. According to Mathur et al. Gold is considered the optimum metal for its flexibility and its resistance to corrosion , although gold's corrosion resistance is less of an issue than in the past because of better stainless steel alloys and less corrosive inks. Further gold plating provides favorable wettability , which is the ability of a solid surface to reduce the surface tension of a liquid in contact with it such that it spreads over the surface.
Gold and most steel and titanium nibs are tipped with a hard, wear-resistant alloy that typically includes metals from the platinum group. These metals share qualities of extreme hardness and corrosion resistance. The tipping material is often called "iridium", but there are few, if any, nib or pen manufacturers that used tipping alloys containing iridium metal since the mid s. The nib usually has a tapering slit cut down its centre, to convey the ink down the nib by capillary action , as well as a "breather hole" of varying shape [1] The breather hole has no actual function regarding controlling the ink or air flow.
Its main function is to provide an endpoint to the nib slit and forestall inaccuracies during nib slit cutting. Adding distance between the breather hole and the nib tip adds elasticity or flexibility to the nib. The breather hole also acts as a stress relieving point, preventing the nib from cracking longitudinally from the end of the slit as a result of repeated flexing during use.
The whole nib narrows to a point where the ink is transferred to the paper. Broad calligraphy pens may have several slits in the nib to increase ink flow and help distribute it evenly across the broad point.
Nibs divided into three 'tines' are commonly known as music nibs. This is because their line, which can be varied from broad to fine, is suited for writing musical scores. Although the most common nibs end in a round point of various sizes extra fine, fine medium, broad , various other nib shapes are available. Examples of this are oblique, reverse oblique, stub, italic and degree nibs. Finer nibs e. EF and F may be used for intricate corrections and alterations, at the expense of shading and sheen.
Oblique, reverse oblique, stub and italic nibs may be used for calligraphic purposes or for general handwritten compositions. The line width of a particular nib may vary based on its country of origin; Japanese nibs are often thinner in general. Flexibility is given to nibs in several ways. First, thickness of the nib metal changes flex. When the nib alloy has been pressed thick it will result in a hard nib, while thinly pressed nibs are more flexible.
Nibs can be pressed so that they are thinner at the tip and thicker at the feed to mitigate stiffness or to give a more controlled flex. Second, the curve of the nib determines in part how stiff the nib will be. Nibs pressed into more deeply convex curves, or into three or five faceted curves, will be stiffer than flatter nibs. Third, the "breather hole" size, shape, and position alter the stiffness. Heart shaped holes will improve flex as they widen, while round, small holes stiffen the pen.
Fourth, the length of the tines determines how far they can spread under pressure, shorter tines make a stiffer nib. Fifth, the alloy used can affect stiffness: as mentioned before, gold is considered superior for its flex compared to steel. Moreover, purer gold 18k and 21k is softer than most lower gold concentration 14k alloys. Fountain pens dating from the first half of the 20th century are more likely to have flexible nibs, suited to the favored handwriting styles of the period e.
Copperplate script and Spencerian script. By the s, writing preferences had shifted towards stiffer nibs that could withstand the greater pressure required for writing through carbon paper to create duplicate documents. Furthermore, competition between the major pen brands such as Parker and Waterman, and the introduction of lifetime guarantees, meant that flexible nibs could no longer be supported profitably.
In countries where this rivalry was not present to the same degree, for example the UK and Germany, flexible nibs are more common. Nowadays, stiff nibs are the norm as people exchange between fountain pens and other writing modes. These more closely emulate the ballpoint pens modern users are experienced with. Despite being rigid and firm, the idea that steel nibs write "horribly" is a misconception. Ideally, a fountain pen's nib glides across the paper using the ink as a lubricant, and requires no pressure.
Good quality nibs that have been used appropriately are long lasting, often lasting longer than the lifetime of the original owner. Many vintage pens with decades-old nibs can still be used today. Other styles of fountain pen nibs include hooded e. Parker 51, Parker 61, Parker and Hero , [54] inlaid e.
Sheaffer Targa or Sheaffer P. M or integral Nib Parker T-1 and Falcon, Pilot Myu , which may also be ground to have different writing characteristics.
Users are often cautioned not to lend or borrow fountain pens as the nib "wears in" at an angle unique to each individual person. This, however, is not a point of concern in pens with modern, durable tipping material, as these pens take many years to develop any significant wear.
The reservoirs of the earliest fountain pens were mostly filled by eyedropper. This was a cumbersome and potentially messy process, which led to the commercial development of alternative methods that quickly dominated the industry. For some the simplicity of the mechanism, coupled with the large volume of ink it can encapsulate, compensates for the inconvenience of ink transfer.
After the eyedropper-filler era came the first generation of mass-produced self-fillers, almost all using a rubber sac to hold the ink. The sac was compressed and then released by various mechanisms to fill the pen. The Conklin crescent filler, introduced c. The crescent filling system employs an arch-shaped crescent attached to a rigid metal pressure bar, with the crescent portion protruding from the pen through a slot and the pressure bar inside the barrel.
A second component, a C-shaped hard rubber ring, is located between the crescent and the barrel. Ordinarily, the ring blocks the crescent from pushing down. To fill the pen, one simply turns the ring around the barrel until the crescent matches up to the hole in the ring, allowing one to push down the crescent and squeeze the internal sac.
Several other filling mechanisms were introduced to compete, such as the coin-filler where a coin or 'medallion' was supplied along with the pen , match-filler using a matchstick and a 'blow-filler' which unsurprisingly required the pen owner to blow into the barrel to depress the internal sac.
In , Walter A. Sheaffer patented the Lever filler, using a hinged lever set into the pen barrel which pressed down onto a bar which in turn compressed the rubber sac inside, creating a vacuum to force ink into the pen. Introduced in , this innovation was rapidly imitated by the other major pen makers.
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