Design Features: Stylographic Pens

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“Gravity” eyedropper-filling stylographic pen, c. 1900

Whence the Stylo?

If a fountain pen has to have a nib, stylographic pens aren’t fountain pens. But there were reliable stylos on the market almost a decade before Lewis Edson Waterman patented his channeled feed. Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian, was first to the draw, having initially patented his stylographic pen design in Britain and Canada in 1875; in 1876 he also received a patent in the United States (U.S. Patent Nº 174,965). In actual production, however, the pens did not work well, and MacKinnon filed for a second patent that was awarded in 1879 (U.S. Patent Nº 217,888). Alonzo Townsend Cross, who founded the A. T. Cross company in 1881, began selling stylos in 1875; and in 1877 he received a patent for the first successful stylographic pen (U.S. Patent Nº 189,304). He received several more patents in short order (U. S. Patents N^os 190,130 and 191,798 in 1877; 199,621 in 1878; 225,691, 227,416, and 232,804 in 1880). Over the next few years MacKinnon and Cross competed vigorously.

Thus, based on the date of Cross’ first patent, stylographic pens had seven years to establish a market before Lewis Edson Waterman patented the channelled feed that made possible a reliable fountain pen. It turned out that the fountain pen is a much better general-purpose writing instrument than the stylo, and it rapidly wrested control of the market from the older technology.

How It Works

What, then, is a stylographic pen? Here is a schematic drawing of the system as implemented in the Gravity pen shown above, with the parts colored for easy identification:

The blue part is the nose cone, with a thin metal tube (orange) embedded at the very end. Inside the tube rides a wire (silver), which is attached to a weight (green). The red part is a cap that prevents the weight from falling out of the tip and getting lost in the barrel or, in a self-filling pen, the sac. The slightly darker area at the lower right corner of this cap is a slot that is cut out of the cap’s side to allow ink into the tip from the barrel.

When you hold the pen tip downward off the paper, the wire and weight fall forward as shown in this illustration, and the weight leaves too little space for ink to seep through. The pen doesn’t drip. When you apply the tip to the paper, the wire and weight ride upward in the tip, opening a path big enough that gravity and capillary action can combine to draw a line out onto the paper.

One very useful feature of stylos is that their tips don’t bend under pressure the way fountain-pen nib tips do, so that a stylo’s tip can press through multiple sheets to make five or more carbon copies without risk of damage as the nib is pressed more firmly into the paper. For this reason, stylos are better for manifolding work than all but the most nail-like nibs.

Like fountain pens, stylographic pens benefited from new technology. Soon after the appearance of the lever filler on fountain pens, stylo makers adopted the feature, and most stylos made after about 1920 are lever-filling models. Because the stylo market wasn’t large enough to encourage very great investment in new technology, more exotic fillers — even button models — seem to have been ignored. Better materials appeared, however, including in a few cases steel tip tubes tipped with semiprecious stones.

Whither the Stylo?

In the 19th century, Cross, Mackinnon, and McKenzie were the predominant makers of stylographic pens. In the 20th century, the top position was the property of Inkograph. The following illustrations show three Inkograph stylos: a mottled hard rubber model of the 1920s, a celluloid pen from the latter half of the 1930s, and a pen made in about 1950 of injection-molded vinylated polystyrene:

In the latter half of the 20th century, stylographic pens fell entirely out of favor as general-purpose writing instruments, but they had established a niche in which they reigned supreme until the advent of high-speed computers: known as “technical pens,” they became the principal tool for ink-line drafting and technical illustration. The same stiff tip that makes them better for manifolding than most fountain pens is also ideal for these sorts of mechanical drawing, in which a pen whose line width is unvarying is critical. Held vertically above the paper, a technical pen produces lines of identical widths in all directions. Shown here is a Keuffel & Esser “Leroy” technical pen from about 1970:

Stylographic pens, like fountain pens, can be fitted with points of different sizes. Technical pens are typically sold in sets of several capped pens, each with a tip of a different size, sharing a single barrel. These pens are eyedropper fillers, with a removable translucent plastic reservoir (called a cartridge) that is held in place by a threaded ring as shown here:

The golf-cart transmission illustrated here, with its lines of different widths, was drawn with the Leroy pen shown above:

The Last Word

It is interesting to note that Cross’ patent describes “an Improvement in Fountain-Pens.” So perhaps a stylo is a fountain pen after all. “Real” fountain pens or not, stylographic pens are a fascinating and surprisingly underappreciated chapter in the story of pens.

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

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