Waterman Pen Company

The Waterman Company engineered a key technical solution for ink flow and marketed the first modern fountain pen in 1884.

The first practical fountain pen is credited to Lewis E. Waterman, a 45 year old American insurance broker.

He frustrated with inefficient pens of the day, invented the capillary feeding fountain, the first practical alternative to a pen dipped in an inkwell.  Mr. Waterman produced the first widely successful modern fountain pen design and started the Waterman Pen Company in 1884.

Waterman was the first to use the term ‘fountain pen’ with the claim that his pen held ‘a fountain of ink’.

Lewis Waterman died in 1901, and his son Frank took over the successful pen business. The younger Waterman added a clip to the cap in 1905, which was nice improvement, but getting ink in the pen was still a messy process. The hands and clothes 0f writers grew black with ink.

Waterman’s director, M. Perrand, who invented the ink cartridge, refined this refilling process. He put the ink into a small glass tube with cork stopper. The concept was patented in 1935.

Fountain pens were widely used until the invention of the ballpoint in 1945. While fountain pen are still popular, the ballpoint pen has continued to gain a popularity so that it is the pen most frequently used and most frequently encountered by a document examiner.

In 2000 Newell Rubbermaid acquired the business including Waterman brands to make their Office Products Group the world leader in writing instruments with 3,000 different products.
Waterman Pen Company 

Paper mate

Fran Seech was an unemployed chemist who had work for a ballpoint pen company that went bankrupt in the big pen bust in early 1950s.

Working out of his house, Seech invented a new ink formula. In 1949, Patrick J. Frawley Jr bought Seech formula. With an investment of $40,000, he bought the Todd Pen Company, changing its name to the Frawley Corporation.

Frawley improved the design and in 1950 he began producing a pen he called Paper Mate.

It was an immediate success, and within a few years, Paper Mates were selling in their millions around the world.

In 1950, the company’s sales were $500,000. By the following years, they had reached $12 m, and by 1953, the company was turning over $20 m in sales.

By the mid 1950s, Gillette had entered the ballpoint pen business with the acquisition of Paper Mate for $15.5 million.

In 1979 the Paper Mate Company introduced an erasable ball-point.
Paper mate

History of Parker pen

The classic Parker pen dates back all the way to 1892 and played a vital role in world history during the course of the 20th century.

George Safford Parker was a teacher of telegraphy at the school in Janesville, Wisconsin. At that time, typewriters were not yet in use, and telegraphers used pen or pencils to copy message. Parker‘s students were suing the early version of the fountain pen and found them unreliable.

He gave up his teaching career and in 1888he began experimenting with the new pen. He established his own company and the following year he registered his first patent.

Lucky pen and ink-feed system was patented in 1894 and this was the real breakthrough for Parker and the pen was an immediate success.

In 1902, Parker pen was first sold to stationer in Denmark after seeing a Parker advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post magazine.

During the First World War, Parker introduced the Trench Pen for use on the Western Front. A tablet of pigment was inserted in a blind cap at the end of the pen.

In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower used his Parker pen to officially put an end to World War II when he signed the peace treaty in Paris.

When Japan surrender to the Allies latter the same year, the treaty was signed with General Douglas MacArthur old Parker pen onboard the warship USS Missouri.
History of Parker pen