Profile: Sheaffer’s Balance

In My Collection

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	This very early Balance advertisement appeared on the back cover of the May 1929 issue of  National Geographic Magazine. It features an ice skater to emphasize the elegant balance of the new design.

The First Streamlined Fountain Pen: Early fountain pens were made of hard rubber, and they were of pretty generic shape, usually plain cylinders with flat ends and the occasional cap with a hemispherical end. In 1924, Sheaffer introduced the first successful plastic pen, made of celluloid; but although colors blossomed excitingly over the next few years, shapes continued dull and cylindrical and fairly heavy. (Revised March 2, 2008)

Then, in 1929, just as streamlined was becoming the watchword of major industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes, Sheaffer got the jump on virtually all of its competitors by introducing a radical departure in pen design, the Balance. Suddenly, new pens were attractively streamlined, with smoothly tapered ends. And they were light, so light they almost floated over the paper! Not only was the Balance designed to be light in weight, but what weight there was, was distributed so that the pen, even when posted, was lightest at the back end of the barrel and heaviest at the nib end; no longer would a pen lean backward in the user’s hand, gently but persistently lifting the nib from the paper. You could use a Balance all day long without worrying about hand fatigue!

This illustration shows a very early Jade Green Lifetime Balance, made in 1929 or 1930.

Despite its dramatic new shape, the Balance was a conventional pen internally. That was not a bad thing, as Sheaffer’s pens of that period were, and still are, remarkably durable and reliable.

Over the decade following the introduction of the Balance, innumerable cheap copies appeared as me-too companies rushed to get on the bandwagon. Some were obvious ripoffs even to the clip design, while others were a little less exact. One of the latter has a cap that is a very close copy but a barrel with a hemispherical end.

During the same period, Sheaffer made several subtle changes to its own design, mostly in the area of smoother, more attractive clips and gripping sections. None of them produced a pen that could be mistaken for any thing except a Balance, but the final result was smoother and even more streamlined, and it set the standard for many pen companies. Sheaffer’s economy-priced Fineline pens of the late 1940s were virtual duplicates of the final Balance design; and the style remains so elegant that in the mid 1990s Sheaffer introduced the Balance II, a thorougly modern pen whose design is very strongly reminiscent of the 1935 Balance without being an exact duplicate.

This illustration shows a Balance 500 made in 1936 or later. Note the smoothly tapered Visulated section and the streamlined clip.

For many years, collectors thought that the appearance of the Balance signaled the demise of Sheaffer’s previous model, the venerable “Flat-Top,” but such was not the case. Based on catalogs and other evidence, it appears that Sheaffer continued making Flat-Tops until at least 1939, and the company also marketed a hybrid design with the streamlined cap but a flat-ended barrel. Until fairly recently, collectors also assumed that these hybrid pens were a transitional design, to use up old parts upon the introduction of the new model. This assumption is also not correct. Sheaffer catalogs show that hybrid pens were real models and were sold well into the 1930s. The natural supposition is that these hybrids, now sometimes called “Half Balances,” were merely a less expensive option for the customer who needed to economize. (They may have been an attempt by Sheaffer to cut some of the third-tier copies out of the market.) In the pocket or posted, a Half Balance looks just like a “real” one; thus, it seems that you could have the status without the price. Overall, the price differential was small, only 50¢ — and, at that, the largest Balances were priced the same for either “Half” or “Full” models. (This pricing structure supports, but certainly does not prove, my supposition that the lower-priced Half Balance models were aimed at third-tier competitors.)

As with most other high-quality pens of the Golden Age, Sheaffer offered the Balance in several sizes, the smallest a “Petite” model and the largest an Oversize pen.

This illustration compares an Oversize Autograph Balance with a Petite Lifetime Balance. Both pens were made 1932-1934.

The most usual sizes were the “Junior” and the standard-size model. Standard-length Balances appeared in two thicknesses; when Sheaffer began imprinting numbers to indicate prices, the company assigned the number 1000 to the Lifetime of standard thickness and 500 to its non-Lifetime sibling, while the thinner pens were the 875 and 375, respectively.

The following table lists the sizes of the Balance in the 1930s. All dimensions are approximate because subtle model changes produced variation; for example, the 1929 standard-size Lifetime Balance is a little longer than its 1934 descendant because the earlier pen’s barrel taper is longer and less streamlined.

Over its long life, Sheaffer’s Balance wore many color variations. Although the Lifetime models usually received enhancements before the less expensive lines, the Blue color never appeared on Lifetime models; and colors that proved unpopular were used only briefly. The following table shows you the different colors used on Balance pens, in the order of their introduction. Use this color information in conjunction with the information in the related article on clips to estimate the age of a Balance.

The Colors of the Balance
Color	Name	Years Used
	Jet Black	1929-1945
	Jade Green	1929-1932
	Pearl and Black	1929-1934
	Marine Green	1930-1935
	Red Veined Grey Pearl	1931-1935
	Blue[1]	1932
	Grey Pearl	1934-1936
	Ebonized Pearl	1934-1939
	Golden Brown Striated	1936-1945
	class="pad4x4" Grey Pearl Striated	1936-1945
	Rose-Glow (1936) or Rose Glow (1937-1939) Striated	1936-1939
	Marine Green Striated	1937-1945
	Carmine Striated	1939-1945

Notes:

1. This color, commonly called “Blue and Black,” was named Blue by Sheaffer, and it actually contains no true black. The areas that appear black are a very dark blue, whose color can be observed where one of these areas lies adjacent to a white streak such that the white is subducted under the blue. This material is prone to discolor, however, and when it discolors the dark blue areas almost always fade to a hue that looks black even under bright light.

I am very grateful to Michael Richter, who compiled the color information, and to Roger Wooten, who has kindly contributed certain little-known information. The color illustrations in the table are from photographs of actual pens. (3D highlighting was added with a computer.)

The information in this article is as accurate as possible, but you should not take it as absolutely authoritative.

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