The fountain pen’s design came after a thousand years of using quill-pens. Early inventors observed the apparent natural ink reserve found in the hollow channel of a bird’s feather, and tried to produce a similar effect, with a man-made pen that would hold more ink and not require constant dipping into the ink well. However, a feather is not a pen, only a natural object modified to suit man’s needs. Filling a long thin reservoir made of hard rubber with ink and sticking a metal ‘nib’ at the bottom was not enough to produce a smooth writing instrument.
Lewis Waterman, an insurance salesman, was inspired to improve the early fountain pen designs after destroying a valuable sales contract with leaky-pen ink. Lewis Waterman’s idea was to add an air-hole in the nib and three grooves inside the feed mechanism. Lewis Waterman patented the first practical fountain pen in 1884.
Writing instruments designed to carry their own supply of ink had existed in principle for over one hundred years before Waterman’s patent. For example, the oldest known fountain pen that has survived today was designed by Frenchman named M.Bion and dated 1702.
