Fountain Pens

Anciently a man with bunched shoulder muscles squatted on his lean haunches and, with a piece of chipped flint, scratched a design on a piece of bone. That was writing.

A Babylonian tucked his curled black beard out of the way and with a wedge-tipped stylus stamped cuneiform characters into soft clay bricks, which he later baked and for security wrapped in an envelope of clay. That too was writing.

In Egypt a thin-shanked scribe squatted cross-legged and on a broad sheet of papyrus spread across his lap drew, with brush dipped into ink-the hieroglyphics of his master's discourse. That too was writing.

In Greece, a helot trotted down to a river marsh to gather kalamoi, hollow tubular stalks of grass. Each kalamos he whittled to a tapering point and handed with ink to his master, who forthwith wrote out the accounts of his battles and of his business deals.

A Pompeian artisan pounded a sheet of bronze into the shape of a reed pen. It served well for writing. Then Pompeii was drowned in Vesuvian dust and barbarians destroyed what part of Rome that the Romans themselves did not destroy. Men forgot metal pens.

An ancient with an inventive mind discovered by cutting off the butt end of a feather on a bevel that he had a tube shaped like a reed pen. It also served for writing; it was a quill pen. Who that ancient was no one, of course, knows. However, St. Isidore of Seville, in the early part of the 7th Century, remarked that he was writing his pages with both a kalamos made of a reed and a quill plucked from a bird. Writers used such quills--usually made from the stout wing feathers of the ever-present goose--into the 19th Century. Their use remains as an affectation.

Steel pens, made to slip into a holder, were a 19th Century development, although some experiments occured before. Scientist Joseph Priestly, in 1780, designed and ordered made a steel pen that resembled a quill, just as anciently the quill imitated the reed. Birmingham, Eng., became the home of the steel pen; it continues so. In the U. S. Camden, N. J., where the Esterbrook Steel Pen Mfg. Co. was established in 1860, has been the great center.

For use all these pens, from marsh grass to steel, must be dipped repeatedly into ink reservoirs. How well it would be, men early reflected, to have an ink reservoir attached to the pen. Many were the experiments during the past 100 years to do so; many the failures. About 50 years ago, Lewis E. Waterman succeeded. The hard-rubber barrels of his early pens were made in two sections screwed together. Mr. Waterman furnished medicine droppers with those early pens.

Since Lewis E. Waterman pioneered, and notably since his basic patent rights expired about 15 years ago, other makers of good fountain pens have come into the U. S. market-- Sheaffer, Conklin, Parker, Wahl, Ingersoll and a dozen others. Most of them, make in addition to pens, mechanical pencils. And so well have they presented reasons for owning pen & pencil that now to carry both in purse or pocket is almost as general as to carry a clean handkerchief.

The grace and attractiveness of desk sets added this autumn to the holiday madness through which fountain pen manufacturers pass at the end of each year. For some reason the retail sellers of the pens & pencils always underestimate their holiday trade. Stocks run low; telegrams and long distance telephone talks beg for shipments.

Out of last week's pandemonium boomed a happy note from Fort Madison, Iowa, headquarters of the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Co. Walter A. Sheaffer, now 61 years old, had been a prosperous jeweler there 15 years ago. In all merchants prosperity and alertness are not concomitants. In Mr. Sheaffer they were. He organized his fountain pen company; hired skilled salesmen, skilled advertisement writers. They wrought as he expected. Last spring the 9,734 shares in the company were each worth $100. Last week a buyer was obliged to pay $852 for a share, and Mr. Sheaffer sent word to stockholders that they had best assemble in Fort Madison at once to change their capitalization from the 9,734 shares to 20 times that amount (194,680). The change is to distribute their vast profits in a thinner, more seemly layer.