The Pen Room

1. The lost art of making flexible nibs.
2. The lack of competition amongst nib manufacturers.
The pellet of iridium, or other suitable hard alloy, welded to the nib tines.
The lack of skilled grinders to the level of "maestro".
The introduction of the Biro, the ball point pen. 

Let's briefly discuss these main five points.

The Lost Art of Making Flexible Nibs

As a result of the need to write documents with carbon copies manufacturers concentrated on producing hard nibs for fountain pens. Consequently, the skill to make flexible nibs through a choice of appropriate alloy of metals, especially if precious metals were used, and the operator skill in judging the right colour temperature during the hardening and annealing processes, died away with such skilled craftmen.

The Lack of Competition among Nib Manufacturers  

According to my knowledge, there is only one manufacturer left in Europe that produces fountain pen nibs for Europe and North and South America. I exclude the Far-East countries, except for Japan, where I know that the skill in making fountain pen nibs is perhaps higher that what we have left in Europe. To get back to the point, the lack of competition in this industry has stifled the need for product differentiation.  And this is the result: almost all nibs are produced by Peter Bock AG, a venerable 70 years old company located in Heidelberg, Germany.  Even Parker (the pen company obviously) has stopped making its own nibs, though, I believe Waterman still produces its own nibs in the USA (must check though).  So far as I know, all of the fine fountain pen manufacturers located in Italy, France, Germany, and the USA, and of course the UK, use nibs produced by the Bock company.

That said, we still have Leonardt of Highley, Bridgnorth, that produces some steel nibs for low cost fountain pens, as well as acting as an OEM steel nib supplier for other pen manufacturers.

The Pellet of Iridium Welded to the Nib Tines

There were two reasons for adding a pellet of iridium (nowadays an alloy of hard metals as iridium is quite scarse on earth). We have a couple of small jars of iridium pellets in the Pen Room, though I must check that they are truly iridium, a treasure trove if confirmed!

The addition of the iridium pellet was due to two key factors: 1- to remove irregularities or roughness in the nib tines in order to smooth the contact with the paper and avoid the nib point digging into the paper or causing scratching; and 2- to increase the duration of the nib by reducing its wear; this may seem amazing, but it is true. Nib tines do wear out over time, especially if the nib is made from gold, as gold is basically a soft metal, hence it required strengthening.

The presence of the the iridium pellets, though, exarcerbated the demise of the copperplate style as the nib tines now acquired a bigger size, even in the EF size, than was the case without the added pellets. Consequently, the contrast between pressured and unpressured lines reduced; add to that the increased stiffiness of the nib itself, then you have the situation we have today. The unsuitability of the fountain pen to write in a copperplate style.

The Lack of Skilled Grinders to the Level of "Maestro"

The addition of the iridium pellet makes the final grinding and polishing operation of the nib, the most precious and skilled of the whole fountain pen manufacturing process. For nib sizes BB, B and M there is no real problem in ensuring that grinding and polishing results is a pen nib as light as a feather when in contact with the paper.  Achieving this result with F nib becomes more difficult: I tried several Montblanc Boheme pens and none were perfectly smooth; some residual scratching at some angles was still present. The problem becomes acute with the EF nib size. In this case, the tip of the nib is around 0.7 to 0.6 millimetres in width. Each tine is therefore less than half this width because of the slitting of the tines. Grinding the remaining 0.25 mm of pellet to a smooth and symmetrical shape on both tines is, admittedly, quite a task.

In my collection of fountain pens, 99% with EF size nibs, there is only one that is truly magnificent and scratch free; another five get close, and all of the others are not so close.  That explains why the skill of the maestro grinder is so important. There are some "maestros" out there, but they are very few and far in between. Two names come to mind: John Mottishaw in the USA: I have a vintage Parker 51 with the nib reconstructed and polished by John Mottishaw: a masterpiece. I also had the fortune of meeting in Milan, at the historic Ercolessi pen shop in the summer of 2005, the Japanese Maestro Nobuyoshi Nagahara from the Sailor Pen Company Ltd., Japan. He is the king of nib design and polishing. At his venerable age of 80 he just observed the way you wrote and then polished your pen nib, on the spot, to match your writing style. Both these two gentlemen should be awarded an Emmy for their accomplishment and contribution to Art and Skills. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Maestro Nagahara

The legendary nib designed by Maestro Nagahara and used on some limited edition of the Sailor Pen Co.

It glides on the paper and writes at any angle.

The introduction of the Biro

The inventor of the ball point pen was László József Bíró, an Argentinian born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1899. He and his brother Georg, a chemist, tried to develop a new pen that allowed the ink to dry instantly instead of the wet ink used in fountain pens. They thought of adapting the viscous ink used in the newspaper printing industry for such use. After some trials at making this viscous ink to flow in a fountain pen, an impossible task, he came up with the idea of using a ball that was free to rotate inside a socket. The friction caused by the turning of the ball inside the socket created sufficient heat to liquefy some of the immediate viscous ink in contact with the ball, and allow it to run on the paper. It worked, and the ink was from then on fed from a cartridge which also contained the ball tip at one end.  Bíró patented the invention in Paris in 1938, and in 1943 the two brothers moved to Argentina. On June 10 of that same year they filed another local patent. Subsequently, they formed a new company, Biro Pens of Argentina, and commenced marketing of the ball point pen.  The patent was licensed by a British company, who produced ballpoint pens for the aircrew of the Royal Air Force, in order to overcome the known flooding problem of fountain pens at high altitude. However, it was not until the Frenchman Marcel Bich bought, in 1950, from Biro the patent for his new pen, that the success of the Biro pen was achieved and a new name was born: the Bic. Biro died in Buenos Aires in 1985.

The Bic proved extremely successful and brought about the beginning of a new technology life cycle. A fact that was not well understood by the pen manufacturers of that time, and resulted in the demise of the previous technology pen industry, i.e. the steel nib and to a large extent, the fountain pen industry as well. The steel pen industry, centred in Birmingham, England, was totally displaced whereas the fountain pen industry was significantly contracted. Some of the big names survived by endorsing the new technology and producing ball point pens as well as fountain pens, pencils and later the new roller ball pen, which basically is a ball point pen fed with quick drying liquid ink instead of a viscous ink.

From the calligraphic viewpoint, the problem with a ball point pen is that the thickness of the line is always constant because the section of the ball in contact with the paper is always constant, hence writing thick and thin lines becomes impossible. Size variation is possible, fine or medium ball pens are readily available, and some manufacturers can even attain an extra-fine size, but line thickness variation is not possible, hence they are totally unsuitable for calligraphy or copperplate scripts.

Modern Fountain Pens with Semiflexible Nibs

So far as I know there are no current fountain pens available with a flexible or semiflexible nib. I know of one Italian company, Omas, that about eight years ago produced a very limited edition of their fountain pen "Italian Art" together with fifteen 18c gold nib sections; 11 nibs are standard H nibs ranging from EF to BB plus a Stub and Italic version. The remaining four nibs are EF, F, M and B, exclusively made to be flexible. I own one of these few and beautiful limited editions, and I must say that the four flexible nibs are not flexible but semiflexible.  They can be used for copperplate handwriting but require some skill to produce the thin and thick lines.

The EF Semiflexible nib and section.

Vintage Fountain Pens with Semiflexible and Flexible Nibs

One of the display cabinets in the PenRoom contains a number of vintage fountain pens, some real beauties. I selected two pens that I thought would be suitable for a copperplate test: 1) a Parker Duofold 1920 and 2) a Swan Blackbird 1940, as shown in the adjacent photograph.

COMMENTS

The Parker Duofold is a beautiful copperplate writer. I would go as far as to say that it could be used as a reference, the Standard against which other pens could be tested. Its size is small and thus ideally suited for the hands of a petit lady; with the cap posted the overall length will feel comfortable to most hands.

The nib tines are barely tipped; whether this is the result of wear it is hard to say but given the nib size, an F to EF, the original pellet would have been quite minimal anyway. The nib number  was hidden by the section hence I could not report on it.

I did not look inside the barrel but obviously the sac had disintegrated and the button filler has no spring action to it. The writing test was conducted by dipping the pen and flooding the ribbed feeder. The pen was made in Canada and I am not sure if the number 26 on the barrel inscription refers to a model number or the year 1926. Duofold pens are still made today by the Parker Company and every year they release a new model; but the nibs are hard and you cannot write in Copperplate style.

The Mabie Todd Swan Blackbird is also a beautiful pen but the nib is too flexible. Though I am a light finger writer I had difficulty in holding back the opening of the tines with the slightest applied pressure. But someone with even lighter fingers than mine could find it quite suitable. The nib tines are pelleted.  The sac was broken up. In those days sacs were made of rubber which over time disintegrated. Nowadays they use latex sacs and this should make them last a lot longer. The writing test was done by dipping the pen in an inkwell, flooding the ribbed feeder and they wiping it dry/wet.