Pens For Particular
Hands I remember the first time I looked at a Waterman 7 in Red Ripple, took off the cap and saw above the standard nib imprint the word “RED”. I’d just figured out a good part of the Waterman numbering system, but this was new and a bit of a mystery. In fact, it remained in part a mystery until 2004 but before I unravel the mystery for you, let’s go back over a little history. Nib Numbers The #7 nib had come into the Waterman line when Aikin-Lambert became the primary supplier of their nibs ca. 1901-02. Waterman had originally offered a line of nibs that ran from #1 through #6 inclusive. The primary supplier was Leroy W. Fairchild. As Waterman’s business grew, Fairchild’s shop could not keep up with demand, particularly for the most popular, #2 size. The need for more #2 nibs than Fairchild could produce gave rise to the star nibs of the 1896-1902 period and a search for a supplier with greater production capacity. In the boom following the Spanish-American War the demand for larger pens and larger nibs added the #7, #8 and #10 nibs. Collector and pen historian David Nishimura recently came up with a reference from a bit of Waterman literature dated in 1884 that Aikin-Lambert nibs generally ran a size smaller than the nibs from Leroy Fairchild that Waterman customarily supplied. Thus, an Aikin-Lambert #1 nib was about the size of a Fairchild #2, an ALCO #4 would be the size of a Fairchild #5 and so on. That tid-bit probably heralds the coming of the #7, #8 and #10 size nibs and holders as well as explains the existence of one Waterman #9 nib, unquestionably from the Aikin-Lambert factory, in a Waterman 20 holder. Though the holder for the #1 nib was elegantly slim and popular for that reason, the #1 nib was not a big seller. The #1 nib disappears from the regular Waterman line not long after 1900 though the holder survived at the 1X½. The line of nib sizes then ran inclusively from #2 through #8 plus the #10. The #3 nib was dropped some time around 1910 while the #7 seems to have survived until the reorganization of the Waterman numbering system in 1917.
Resting on their Laurels By the time World War I broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the L.E. Waterman Company was the largest manufacturer of fountain pens on earth. It had provided superior and reliable products for over thirty years. Under the able leadership of Frank D. Waterman as company president and William I. Ferris as vice-president in charge of production, Waterman had indeed, as it’s logo asserted, made “its mark all around the world”. The Waterman Company weathered the Great War well, even profiting by the increased need for pens by service men and their families far away. But it was also a stodgy company. It had perfected a simple and reliable lever self-filler to fend off the challenge by Walter A. Sheaffer to its supremacy but continued to rely on the eyedropper pens that were its bread and butter. Its close relationship with the Day Rubber Company of Seymour, Connecticut made Waterman far less interested in new materials than its competitors. As the 1920’s began it was at a peak. The peak, however, verged on a cliff. In 1922 George S. Parker took the pulse of the age and stumbled into the signature pen of the decade the “Big Red” Duofold. Waterman’s market share began sliding toward second place. A year later, Sheaffer, the “comer” in the pen business, went Parker one better by introducing pens in plastic and colors unachievable in hard rubber. Waterman, for its part, created a new variant of its mottled red/black hard rubber which would come to be known as red ripple as it slipped toward third place in market share. In 1925 Frank D. Waterman ran as the reform candidate for mayor of New York against the flamboyantly corrupt Tammany Hall candidate, James J. Walker. Waterman lost and lost far more than the election. The drain of cash to help finance Waterman’s campaign and the drain of time he spent away from operating the business made 1925 the first year in which the L.E. Waterman Company suffered a loss since its founding in 1883. The Parker Duofold appeared in colors in 1926 cementing its hold on the public attention and pen dollars. Waterman needed something new to grab public attention and it had no one to innovate on the necessary scale so it punted. The Magnificent Seven
The Waterman 7 that appeared in 1927 was the first Waterman pen to use the term “Ripple” to refer to its style of mottled hard rubber. It was nothing more nor less than their long-popular 55 model with a slightly larger nib and a slightly longer cap at a 50¢ increase in cost. The new 7 cost $7. just like the Parker Duofold. It wasn’t as large, as striking or as generous in its ink capacity. It needed a gimmick and that’s exactly what created the “color” nibs around which the pen was designed. The 1926 Waterman Catalogue offered a round 100 different nibs. The numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6 could be had in short, medium or long in a total of 11 widths. The short, medium and long refer to the length of the taper from breather hole to tip and roughly correspond to firm, semi-flexible and flexible. The widths were fine, medium, coarse, stub and oblique with the last two only available in the short version. The number 8 nib only came in short and medium while the number 10 came in short only. Further special nibs for stenographers, bookkeepers, accountants, manifolding, a ball point and an extra broad stub could be had in all 6 sizes. Special Falcon, ruling, music, duo-point and a special broad stub were available only in the #4 size. Other special nibs could be had by submitting specifications and paying $1 over the price of a new nib. The point being that the only thing new in the color system was color coding whose initial purpose, besides the obvious advertising gimmick, appears to have been to limit the number of new nibs for the 7 pens. But the color coding soon gained a life of its own. From its prominence in Waterman advertising and the multiplicity of advertising items aimed primarily at the 7 pens, it was Waterman’s biggest promotion and most successful draw in a decade. The Waterman Company provided dealers with special trays that had seven slots rather than the traditional dozen and seven colored dots to correspond to the colors on the plastic 7 pens. One pen of each “color” lay in the tray so that the customer might test each to determine his or her preference. A little later in the 1930’s the number of slots increased to ten although there were never more than seven color dots on the logo bar at the tray’s top. In fact, the color nibs were such a popular option that, by 1933, Waterman literature was encouraging customers and dealers to ask for and order all Waterman models from the Patrician on down by nib color. Color nibs appear in Lady Patricias, both standard and Deluxe Ink-Vue versions, 5s, 7s, 94s, 92s, and, indeed, almost every model up to the until the introduction of the Hundred Year Pens. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a color coded Patrician nib, but would not be surprised if I happened upon one. The Colors of the Rainbow
The color coding put the 6 most popular Waterman nibs initially into Ripple pens specially equipped with a band near the cap top that indicated the style of the nib. The nibs, in turn, bore the name of their color in their imprints. The initial 6 colors as follows: RED – Standard Point – medium, semi-flexible corresponding to a medium length, medium point. GREEN – Rigid Point – fine manifold corresponding to a special nib popular in business use. PINK – Flexible, Fine Point – stenographer’s fine flexible which is “designed to shade at any angle”, and also described, later as a “Bookkeeper” nib, it corresponds to a long fine. PURPLE – Stiff, Fine Point – designed for pressureless writing it is advertised as very popular with accountants. BLUE – Blunt Point – called an improved stub that is popular with rapid writers it is also said, in later literature to be slightly oblique; it corresponds to a short stub. YELLOW – Rounded or Ball point – formerly a special nib, it is designed for left handed writers. It didn’t take the folks at Waterman and the agency handling their advertising account long to figure out that having the $7. number 7 pen equipped with 7 color nibs rather than 6 was an opportunity missed. The seventh nib added was the BROWN- Fine, Flexible – it differs from the PINK in that it is a medium length nib and, thus, not as flexible as the PINK. Waterman’s field research found that the most popular of these points was the PINK chosen by 20.2% of customers. They note its suitability for Pitman Shorthand, then the dominant style though the PURPLE, suitable for Gregg Shorthand, the up and coming style, pleased 19% of their customers. The RED nib, by far the most common, was the third most popular at 15.4%. YELLOW comes next at 12.7%, not too far off from the occurrence of left handedness in the population, followed by GREEN at 11.6% , BROWN at 11.0% and BLUE at 9.8%. A sliver of the public, 0.3%, either wouldn’t state a preference or preferred another style altogether. But the color coding didn’t stop at 7 or stop with the number 7 pen. By 1928, again profitable but mired in third place for market share behind Parker and Sheaffer, Waterman had introduced the number 5 pen, a shortened version of its ever-popular 52. A mottled, full-size 54 sold for $5.50 while the 54V to which the 5 bears more than a passing resemblance sold for $5. The 5 offered colored nibs in a nominal #4 size and a flared cap top that made it tactilely distinguishable from the 7 when both were carried in an inside pocket. While the 7 pen was a substantial success, the 5 was only moderately successful in good part because Waterman undercut it with another pen and their first venture into colors other than black and orange. Almost simultaneously with the 5, Waterman created and liberally advertised their new 94 in three new colors of ripple hard rubber. The Waterman 94s in Ripple-Rose, Ripple-Olive and Ripple Blugreen (sic) are strikingly beautiful even today but the only colors the company advertised were those three holder colors. Color nibs were not initially available for the 94s though the equivalent #4 nibs in 22 styles were available. The 94s were a hit in part because of color but also because they were the pen that the 5s should have been. They are, in effect, a 55V and, consequently, just a short version of the 7s. Meanwhile, other colors appeared. The next three most popular nibs Waterman sold were the oblique, the broad or coarse and the specialty nib for stenographers. These nibs were designated the GREY, WHITE and BLACK respectively. So, to make it explicit, GREY – Oblique, actually a left oblique higher on the right than on the left, this is a short slit nib BLACK – Fine, flexible, actually ultra-flexible hardly distinguishable from the PINK, a long slit nib WHITE – Coarse or broad, probably a medium taper nib. A Muddle of Colors There is some controversy over when the 8th, 9th and 10th color nibs appeared and in what order. I have seen enough Red Ripple GREY 5s and 7s to believe that, regardless of whether it was the 8th or a later nib, it was available before 1930. I have seen one and only one Red Ripple BLACK but believe that it too was available before 1930. The WHITE nib is the great rarity of the color nibs. No collector of whom I am aware has one. In fact, its existence is only confirmed by its mention on a couple of pen trays that may date from the mid to late-1930’s. Yet it’s the BLACK and BROWN nibs that require the most explanation. When the BLACK was introduced, Waterman already had 3 fine nibs in its color line 2 of which two were fine flexibles. To understand the differences, if there are any, we need to go back to the original Waterman nib style library. You will recall that there were short, medium and long nibs that translated as firm, semi-flexible and flexible. We also know that Waterman and other nib makers produced nibs that duplicated the ultra-flexibility of gold dip pen nibs. This fourth category is more a sub-category of the long nibs and has to do with temper and thickness as well as the length of the taper toward the point. Today we refer to these nibs as ultra-flexible or the far more colloquial “wet noodle”. With that in mind, let’s return to the Waterman nib colors. We know that the PURPLE is the fine, firm or accountant nib. It is a short taper length fine. The BROWN is a fine, flexible and is a medium taper length fine. The PINK is also described as a fine, flexible nib also described at different times as a stenographer and a bookkeeper nib and is a long taper length fine. The BLACK is described as a fine, flexible or stenographer nib and is the long taper length, ultra-flexible fine. The fact that the PINK and BLACK nibs are so close in all qualities probably accounts for the rarity today of the BLACK nib and the plentitude of the PINK more than does production dates. The evidence of the pen trays we suppose are from the 1935-39 period showing the BLACK nib as a choice indicates that it probably remained in the Waterman line for some time. The ca. 1946 advertisement showing nine styles to which I referred in the introduction to this article further confirms that the BLACK nib came early and stayed late. The existence of the BLACK nib may also account for another change noted by George Kovalenko and confirmed by Waterman literature in my collection. The BROWN nib was latterly referred to as a “Fine. A finely tapered rigid point for general use. Good for the bookkeeper.” Thus, the BROWN went from being a close approximation of the PINK to being a close approximation of the PURPLE. Maybe. We have already seen that Waterman thought that bookkeepers, as opposed to accountants, required a somewhat flexible nib. After all, the PINK was advertised as suitable for bookkeepers. To explain why may explain away this apparent change. So, what’s the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant apart from some education and a state license? More to the point, what was the functional difference between those two professions around 1930 and earlier? Almost anybody could be a bookkeeper. It was a function of some trusted individual in the office of any company and a very ancient profession indeed as, in trade, someone always has had to keep the accounts of credits and debits. The complexities of global trade in the 15th Century began bringing some regularity to bookkeeping practices and the complexities - and shenanigans - of large corporations in the 18th and 19th Centuries that began separating the lower level bookkeeper from the higher level accountant. However, for our purposes, what they actually do in a ledger book determines their pen’s action. The bookkeeper not only enters numbers in columns, but the bookkeeper does a significant amount of writing that must appear in a legible hand and according to current, common writing practices. The bookkeeper indites the ledger page with its page heading, column and row headings. The bookkeeper writes the information that explains each numeric entry. The accountant must read the bookkeeper’s entries, numeric and verbal. Thus the bookkeeper nib is as much concerned with legibility as it is with numbers. The common hand of the times expected some flexibility from a bookkeeper’s nib. The accountant, however, was simply supposed to deal with numbers. His nib needed to write clear, legible numbers, usually in small spaces and little else. I rather think that the apparent change in the action of the BROWN nib was less of a change in the actual function of the nib and more a function of the target group for marketing. Color Frequencies Ranked in order from most to least common, the 10 color nibs would fall as follows: 1. RED BLUE and YELLOW could easily change places with each other in this ranking as could GREY and BROWN but there is no doubt that the first 4 nibs and the last 2 deserve their rankings above. It may seem odd that I am arguing from evidence such as labels on pen trays, but Waterman literature and advertising is particularly unhelpful because the company painted itself into a rhetorical corner. Having come up with the 7 pen costing $7 with 7 different point styles, Waterman literature consistently sticks to the 7-7-7 line. Other than the trays and the nibs themselves, we have little evidence that the other three colors existed. Colors Fade So what happened to the Waterman Color nibs? Nothing really except that they went “underground”. The Hundred Year Pens that appear for Christmas, 1939 with their script nib imprint didn’t lend themselves to much additional printing and Waterman, under new leadership for the first time since 1901, was eager for a break with the past. I’ve written a bit about the two known surviving pen trays that list the three least common nib styles, GREY, BLACK and WHITE. I’ve also identified them as being from the mid to late 1930’s but that dating is just a conjecture based on evidence of different Waterman trays known to date from 1934 and earlier and changes in decorative motifs used in the 1935-1939 period. What if my dating is off by two or three years? The answer might solve another minor mystery. The two trays in question move the color identification onto the tray where it formerly had been a feature of the pen itself as a band on the Ripple 7’s and a dot on the plastic versions. Indeed the only identification of color on the trays designed for 7’s of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s is a brass fixture for label cards on the rear of the tray to assist the sales person. Yet these trays put the color code out on the face of the tray for all to see and read. I submit that such a change was unnecessary if the color were represented on the pen itself. This could be said of trays for the Patricians or Ink-Vues, for 92’s, 32’s and 3’s but it also could be said more appropriately, given the style of the trays, of the Hundred Year Pens. We also know that the Hundred Year Pens continued the color nib motif into the mid-1940’s and that the color nibs only disappeared as an acknowledged feature of the pens as the L.E. Waterman Company declined toward financial failure and dissolution into the Bic Corporation. Final Note The title of this article comes from a Waterman brochure that dates from the 1933-34 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago. The brochure may, indeed, have antedated the Chicago exposition and been around after it closed, but my copy came from the things that a visitor collected at the Waterman booth in 1934. Though there is evidence aplenty for the existence of at least the BLACK and GREY nibs by that time, the brochure lists only the common seven.
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