, or pump, or piston filler, another obscure Waterman’s pen.
[Posted on L&P on July 24 2006.]
Do you remember the Waterman’s Plunger Filler? Well, here’s another obscure one for all the Waterman’s collectors out there, a Waterman’s button-activated vacuum filler. But first, let me repeat a slightly revised version of the preamble from my previous post.
Did Waterman ever produce a piston, or plunger, or pump filler in the 1930s? And how about a button-vac filler? Well, Parker had its Vac with its diaphragm filler, so Waterman’s had to have its Ink-Vue with a diaphragm, even though theirs was lever-driven rather than plunger-rod activated. So why didn’t Waterman have a vac filler as well? Sheaffer and Pelikan had some very competitive piston fillers. So why didn’t Waterman’s have a piston, or plunger, or pump filler? And if Waterman did have pump fillers, or vac fillers under development in the 1930s, but never put the pens into production, then how do you look for them? How can you look for them, when you don’t know that they ever existed? And how can you look for 1930s patents when the word “pen” isn’t used in the title of one of them? Well, the answer is you can’t, unless you stumble upon them, and even then, they’re only the patents for the pens, not the actual pens.
Well, here’s another obscure Waterman’s pen, the Waterman’s button-activated vacuum filler in their US patent no. 2,139,084, also unproduced as far as I know. Has anyone ever seen one of these? Again David Nishimura said that he couldn’t say he had ever seen an actual example of this one, but he also mentioned that the patent cited the file number for a patent application for the barrel plug that might be the one that Waterman used in their late Ink-Vue filler with the one-piece barrel that’s HELL to fix! The file number, as it turns out, is the one for patent no. 2,087,672, the standard Waterman’s “Ink-Vue” lever-actuated bulb-vacuum filler. But the later version with the one-piece barrel is patent no. 2,217,755, the goofy, late, one-piece Ink-Vue barrel.
And here’s an interesting piece of Canadian “Ink-Vue” ephemera, a pen that was sent back from the Waterman’s repair department in Montreal as unfixable due to a lack of repair parts.
George Kovalenko.
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