Evolution Of Fountain Pens

The First Fountain Pens

Using writing instruments with portable ink supply existed for over one hundred years before Waterman decided to improve it. The earliest people to invent fountain pens discovered that the hollow channel of a bird’s feather had a natural ink reserve. They tried recreating this when they built a pen, hoping it would hold more ink and not require constant re-dipping.

However, feathers and pens are different. Filling a long, thin rubber reservoir with ink and adding a metal ‘nib’ at the bottom did not create a smooth writing instrument. M. Bion, a Frenchman, designed the oldest known fountain pen in 1702.

Peregrine Williamson, a Baltimore shoemaker, was the first to receive an American patent for such a pen in 1809. John Sheaffer followed him by receiving a British patent in 1819 for attempting to mass manufacture a half-quill-half-metal pen. In 1831, John Jacob Parker patented the first self-filling fountain pen. These also faced ink spills like Waterman and had impracticalities, making them hard to sell.

People in the early 19th century used an eyedropper to fill the reservoir. By 1915, most pens had self-filling soft and flexible rubber sacs. When refilling these pens, an internal plate squeezed the reservoirs flat. All you had to do was insert the pen nib into the ink bottle and squeeze. This released the pressure on the internal plate to fill up the ink sac, drawing in a fresh supply of ink.