"will Write A Letter From Beginning To End With One Dip"

February 21, 2018

From a compiled book of articles of 1901. Not sure why it's referred to as a fountain pen though.

Edited February 21, 2018 by Bluey

February 22, 2018

That seems like quite a promise to make for a dip pen! I do love those old timey ads, though. Newspapers had more charm back then, didn't they?

Though, the "Camel" seems a misnomer - is it not dromedaries that have just one bump, whereas camels have two?

- P.

February 23, 2018

Dromedaries are camels. Bactrian camels (which are what you're thinking of) are the two humped ones. But they're both camels.

(Or, as a friend of mine who did her anthropology graduate level field work in Costa Rica said about llamas vs. alpacas -- "They're ruminants. They ALL spit....!" )

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

February 23, 2018

I can get a good-sized paragraph from a Hunt 99 with a wire spring around it, if they contrived to hold more ink than that it could last a really, really long time.

March 10, 2018

“Fountain” pens were dip pens with a built-in or attached reservoir. They produced a “fountain” of ink. What we call fountain pens today were originally just an extension of the reservoir pens, but they began to put the reservoir of ink in the body of the pen rather than on the nib. Feeding it from the body to the end of the nib was the trick. Waterman was one of the first to figure out a better way of doing it, but was far from the first.

They even had reservoirs for quills, usually a metal insert into the shaft of, one would presume, a fairly short-cut quill end.

The earliest shaft-reservoir fountain pens often just used steel dip pen nibs, with the fancier ones using gold. Now we’re coming back around full circle with the fad for putting dip pen nibs onto fountain pens for the flex.