Page "Fountain pen" Paragraph 11

At this time fountain pens were almost all filled by unscrewing a portion of the hollow barrel or holder and inserting the ink by means of an eyedropper — a slow and messy procedure.

Pens also tended to leak inside their caps and at the joint where the barrel opened for filling.

Now that the materials ' problems had been overcome and the flow of ink while writing had been regulated, the next problems to be solved were the creation of a simple, convenient self-filler and the problem of leakage.

Self-fillers began to arrive around the turn of the century ; the most successful of these was probably the Conklin crescent-filler, followed by A.

A. Waterman's twist-filler.

The tipping point, however, was the runaway success of Walter A. Sheaffer's lever-filler, introduced in 1912, paralleled by Parker's roughly contemporary button-filler.