Research in progress: rewriting the history of the first retracting-nib safety pens

 

I recently promised Pennant editor Jim Mamoulides a few short articles on early safety pens. Over the years I'd managed to accumulate some interesting examples by Horton, Moore, and Caw's -- the "Big Three" in this rather obscure byway of fountain pen history -- and it seemed as if it would be easy to throw together some simple descriptive articles.

Silly me. "Can of worms" doesn't begin to describe what I've opened up. It turns out that a lot of what has been repeated for decades about the first safeties simply doesn't add up. Nor is it proving any easier to figure out what actually did happen. Clearly there are huge missing pieces to this particular puzzle, which is why I am putting this post out here in the hopes that others may have information that I might have overlooked -- though I suspect the answers I'm seeking are not to be found in any online records currently available, as I've been quite diligent in searching all the standard databases, free and paid.

Here are some of the more interesting issues I've identified to date:

• The Caw's safety was introduced in 1895. Ads and imprints reference patent US533942 of 2/12/1895. No one seems to have remarked that the only claim in that patent is for the nib and feed arrangement. In fact, the pen shown is a sliding-action safety of the sort described in Moore's patent of 1896! 
• The key patent for a safety with a turning internal helix was Peck & O'Meara's US523234 of 7/17/1894. And in 1895 the Horton Pen Company was just getting started after having acquired Peck & O'Meara's entire manufacturing operation -- including, it would appear, their patents. How could Caw's have gotten away with such a brazen infringement? The more I think about it, the more impossible it seems. Surely F. C. Brown was a licensee, though no mention of the Peck & O'Meara patent appears in Caw's ads, catalogs, or imprints. Seeing how Brown didn't lose an opportunity to trumpet all the patents he had (on later Caw's safeties the patent imprints run almost all the way around the barrel, headed by "F. C. BROWN PATENTS") I can only surmise that the flip side of this was an aversion to acknowledging any patents other than his own. [UPDATE: Upon closer examination, I can now see how Brown might have been able to evade the Peck & O'Meara patent at least in part by using a single-slot mechanism and a separate internal sleeve to carry that slot]
• It has been claimed that Caw's bought up all the assets of the Horton Pen Company after it failed. I can find no evidence of any such failure. Horton appears in New Haven city directories all the way through 1901, after which it was acquired -- but by Frazer & Geyer, not Brown. There are plenty of retailer ads for Horton pens through 1899 at least as well as other mentions indicating production overlapping with that of Caw's for several years.
• If Caw's was a licensee of Horton, as the notes above suggest, was Horton also supplying pens or pen parts to Caw's? Caw's was already producing the Dashaway so did not necessarily need a new subcontractor. On the other hand, making the safety spirals was something new. It may be significant that the interior structure of Caw's and Horton safety barrels is different, the straight tracks being cut directly into the barrel interior for the Horton, but cut into an inserted sleeve for the Caw's. 
• Whether or not Horton was doing any manufacturing for Caw's, it does appear to have been doing so for Morris W. Moore during his short-lived effort at independent pen production, prior to selling out to Cushman. The evidence for this is just one pen: the unmarked safety that I shared in a private Facebook group a while back that is virtually identical to what is shown and claimed in Moore's first 1896 patent. There are a couple of construction details that differ from the patent diagrams but which correspond to peculiarities of early Hortons, including near-interchangeable caps.
• The one patent date that appears on Caw's safeties that doesn't reference one of Brown's inventions is Sep 8, 1896 -- the date of the two Moore patents assigned in part to F. C. Brown. It is likely the second that was actually used, which claims a tapered rather than a cylindrical barrel mouth bore. This raises the question of what relationship Brown had with Moore at the time that the 1896 patent-style pen was made (which could have been as early as late 1894). Did Brown provide any sort of assistance to Moore? Or was it nothing more than Brown paying Moore for patent rights?
• It has also been claimed that Waterman acquired or licensed patents belonging to F. C. Brown for their own safeties. I can find no evidence for this, and it is noteworthy that no such patents are referenced in Waterman safety imprints where one would expect them.
• It has been claimed that Caw's patent US612013 of 1898 was for the helical retraction mechanism, and that this patent was sold to Waterman. Except that's not what the patent claims: it is solely for an improvement to such mechanisms, where the driving peg is equipped with a rolling bearing to reduce wear.
• The Nichols patent of 1903, referenced on the caps of older Wateman safety pens, doesn't seem to contain much that is novel aside from the inner cap plug closure.
• Possible missing-link or offshoot models that I don't own but would like to be able to acquire or examine: Phelps Safety; Lincoln Safety; Atlantis.

Petrache Poenaru's fountain pen: a mystery solved

A few years ago, I noticed that a number of online reference sites had quietly been updated with the claim that the first fountain pen (or, sometimes, the first cartridge fountain pen) had been invented in the 1820s by Romanian polymath Petrache Poenaru. It was not easy to figure out exactly what sort of pen Poenaru had invented, so I threw the question out here.

It took three years, nearly to the day, but now we have the answer, thanks to Simone Piccardi, who has posted a copy of the French patent here, with transcription.

The description, translated into English, is as follows (my translation, quick and dirty):

Explanation of the diagrams on Plate 1 which depict the pen assembled and in its details (the same letters denote the same parts in the different diagrams).
Fig. 1 shows the pen closed up in its case and ready to be placed in the pocket like a pencil. It consists of a tube A taken from an ordinary large swan quill of the sort used for making paintbrushes intended for map notes. At the end of this quill tube is fitted a little tube B in thin metal, whose end is threaded on its exterior, and which screws into a cap C, closed on top. The lower end of the tube A is fitted into the upper part of a little tube of thin metal shown in Fig. 2, which has three different diameters D, E, F. The upper part D receives, as we will explain, the lower end of the quill tube A, the lower diameter [step] E is a friction fit with the goose quill G, which is cut like an ordinary quill pen and which can be replaced as desired either by a quill of the same nature or by a metal nib. The middle diameter [step] E is a friction fit, a bit tight, with the end of the cap H, in metal, which covers the quill point G when one no longer wishes to write. At the bottom of this cap is soldered the base of a long needle I whose point, when one caps the nib after having written, goes into the end of the quill G and fits into a little hole of the same diameter as the needle's point drilled in the center of the base of the little end of tube F, to stop the ink from escaping.

In this fountain pen [plume sans fin], the quill tube serves as the reservoir, into which the ink is introduced through the end of the quill, all that is necessary is to unscrew the little cap C.

The advantages of this pen over those already existing for the same purpose, being that the tube A is of quill rather than of metal or glass, the instrument is by this means much lighter, less breakable, and to make the ink arrive at the point of the nib, it is not necessary to shake the pen, which is very inconvenient, all that is required is simply to squeeze the tube A with the fingers and the ink will in this manner be made to flow in greater quantity through the little hole drilled in the center of the base of the little holder F, fig. 2. This method also remediates any problems arising from temperature differences between the metals.

Poenaru's pen was not a cartridge pen, and the description clearly states that it was intended to be an improvement on existing fountain pens. Its distinguishing feature was a barrel made from a swan quill. There is no evidence that Poenaru's pen was ever put into production, or that it influenced the development of fountain pen design in any way. 

Nib talk

The manner in which tipping material was applied to nibs a century ago often differs markedly from how it is done today. This is particularly pronounced with broad nibs; two good examples recently crossed my repair bench, one of which is shown above (the other was a Waterman slender #2 New York nib, mounted in a 402 straight-cap). At first glance, it seems there is no tipping at all.

Flip the nib over, however, and it is apparent that there is a healthy chunk of tipping present -- but attached so as to be covered with gold when viewed from above. The tip has not been worn down; rather, the tipping material was soldered into a recess ground into the underside of the nib's tip, so that the gold of the nib wraps around and supports the tipping material to the greatest extent possible.

This nib is a New York-made Mabie Todd #3, from a slip-cap eyedropper with an ebonite underfeed and a gold overfeed. Note that the forepart of the nib's underside has deliberately been roughened: a carryover from gold dip pen nib manufacturing practice, soon abandoned for fountain pen nibs.

Two early fountain pens

At the Washington, DC pen show this year I was fortunate to be able to acquire two rather esoteric bits of fountain pen history. Both formerly belonged to Mike Fultz; after he died, they ended up with a pen friend, who very kindly held them for me for months after I expressed interest, until we could finally get together in person at a show to work out a deal.

The older is a metal pen whose design owes much to contemporary propelling pencils, including the inset seal stone in the crown. The nib is extended by pushing forward the sliding collar at the rear, but that's not all, as it also reveals an opening with a thumb-operated pressure bar -- a very early sleeve-filler.

How early? It is marked "DARLING'S PATENT", the patentee being John Darling, of Stane, Lanark County, Scotland. The pen's design corresponds, albeit not exactly, to USA patent 68418, issued September 3, 1867. Darling had already successfully applied for British patents, including 3215, issued December 6, 1866, 74, issued January 11, 1867, and 288, issued February 2, 1867 (the last discussed but not illustrated in the Cantor Lectures), but as yet I only have these patents' titles, so cannot say if they differ substantially from the US patent in any key details. The US patent describes two main variants: in the first, the pressure bar was intended to be used to keep the underside of the nib supplied with ink (the feed was really nothing more than a bent tube) with the pen's reservoir to be filled by opening the end and pouring in ink; in the second, a second barrel aperture was added, the pressure bar being depressed through both apertures in order to fill the pen. It now seems obvious that the second aperture was redundant, and that a single central aperture would serve equally well to both fill the pen and expel ink as required, and this is fact appears to be how the pen shown above was made to be used, as there is no provision for opening the end of the reservoir and hence no other way the pen could have been filled. The pen appears to be of British rather than American manufacture, judging from its overall styling and appearance.

The second pen took a little more research to identify. The key was the October 2, 1877 patent date on its side. This would have been USA patent 195719, issued to John Morrow Might and William Hope Taylor of Toronto (Canadian patent 6462, awarded August 24, 1876; British patent 7617, awarded July 10, 1877). The construction is typical of contemporary US retracting dip pens and mechanical pencils, with similar gold filled trim and hard rubber components bearing the Day's patent stamp. The original cap is missing, and the patent drawings are not close enough to the actual pen to give a good idea of what the cap looked like. There are a number of features on the pen that do not appear in the drawings, including a rotating shut-off valve at the front of the barrel and the sliding collar which seems to have been intended to compress the internal sac by pushing inwards upon the slotted barrel. There is no nib, but interestingly enough the US patent explicitly states that the pen is designed to use "any ordinary pen-nib" (it is also noteworthy that the patent uses "pen" and "nib" in their modern senses).

UPDATE: The full Canadian patent may be viewed here -- thanks to George Kovalenko for the pointer.