The Subject of Operation

There are all kinds of companies which used to make all kinds of interesting things, but which have since been lost to history. Like Burma-Shave, Rexall, Carter’s (That’s CARTER’S, not Cartier’s!) and Waltham. Add to this list one of the most famous pen-manufacturers in the world: Mabie Todd & Co.

Mabie Todd & Company was founded in New York City in 1860 as a manufactuary of writing supplies, gradually moving into the writing instruments market by making dip pens and pencils. In the 1880s and 90s, with the start of the fountain pen industry, led by giants such as Waterman and Parker, Mabie Todd & Co started making these newfangled ‘fountain pens’ as well, something that continued for several years right into the 1940s and 50s.

This last week, I was very fortunate to purchase an early Mabie Todd & Co fountain pen, a first generation “Swan” model. The Swan pen was made starting in the 1890s and it represented the best quality pens that the company made. Below “Swan” were the “Blackbird” and “Swallow” model pens.

My pen is an early 1900s Mabie Todd & Co “Swan”, made ca. 1908. It’s made of BCHR and it’s an ED pen with a threaded section and barrel and a slip-on cap and you’re going waaaait a minute what the hell are all these acronyms for?

“BCHR” stands for “Black Chased Hard Rubber”, hard rubber being the stuff that all early fountain pens were made of, black being the colour, and chasing being the heat-imprinted patterns that were rolled onto the pen-barrels when they were made. “ED” stands for “eyedropper”. These early fountain pens, such as the one which is the subject of this article, did not come with their own, inbuilt filling-systems like later pens. To fill them up, you had to unscrew them, fill up an eyedropper with ink, and then drip the ink into the pen-barrel before screwing the section and nib-assembly back onto the pen to write with it.

The pen was in surprisingly good condition for something that was over one hundred years old. BCHR is very prone to “oliving” (turning brown and green) if it’s left out in the sunlight. The sunlight leeches the black out of the rubber which was introduced into it when the rubber was being vulcanised for penmaking. This pen had very little noticable oliving, mostly around the cap, but thankfully, that was all.

Structurally, the pen was perfect. No cracks, chips, dings, scratches, gouges…even the smooth panel on the barrel reserved for engraving was perfect, unblemished and smooth. The cap, of the slip-on variety (pens this old did not have screw-on caps) was of smooth black hard rubber with a gold cap-jewel, a gold cap-band and a very large gold pocket-clip. The cap-band has the letters “A.E.E.” engraved handsomely on it. Here is the cap:

The nib of this pen featured a very unique “over-under” or “double” feed. The O/U feed was a common design-feature on very early fountain pens; feeds were not yet advanced enough to deliver enough ink to the nib, so early fountain pens had double feeds to compensate for a lack of inkflow. If ink refused to go along one feed, then it would flow along the other feed, instead.

This is the pen with the cap off and posted on the back of the barrel, which is specially shaped to take the cap:

You might be able to just see the over-under feed on the nib, on the left side of the photograph.

Restoring the Pen

Enough about the aesthetics and the mechanics. What about the restoration!?

Okay maybe “restoration” isn’t the right word. Think of it more as “repair”. I didn’t really restore anything: The cap is still olived and the nib is still a bit grimy…but I did manage to return this beauty to its original working condition. Huzzah!!

Unfortunately, doing this was far from easy. Whoever last owned this pen filled it up with blue ink, put it away in a drawer and then promptly died, or forgot about the pen entirely. The result was that the ink dried inside the pen. Now you hear a lot of people say: “If you don’t use the ink in your pens for a long time, empty the pen and wash it”.

Why?

This is exactly why. When the ink dries…it turns to CEMENT. This pen was jammed shut so tightly, you couldn’t break into it with C4 explosives! The ink had gotten into all the seams and threads inside the pen-barrel and it had dried and glued the whole thing shut. You could look like a pro wrestler and you still wouldn’t have been able to get that pen open to refill it, without cracking it in half like a pretzel first. Regrettably, hard rubber can be very brittle. Hours of twisting and wiggling on my part yielded nothing in terms of the pen opening up. It soon became painfully clear that the way to get into this pen was not through muscles and force, but with patience.

Old eyedropper pens work in the following manner: You unscrew the section and nib-assembly from the barrel. You fill the barrel with ink using an eyedropper (hence the name), then, you screw the section and nib-assembly back onto the pen and write. In this instance, the section, thanks to the blue glue cement inside, was completely unmovable. No amount of squeezing and twisting would get it to budge. To remedy this, I filled a shot-glass with water and a bit of soap and dunked the pen into it, from the nib right up to the top of the section. I removed it every hour or so, to tap it and shake it to get some of the ink out…and boy was there ever a lot of it! Bright royal blue ink! And it kept coming and coming and coming for the next twelve hours! Whoever used this pen before me really loved him some blue ink!

Finally fed up, I changed the water, added some fresh liquid detergent, dunked in the pen and left it overnight. This was necessary, partially because my wrists and arms were so tired from trying to shake and twist open the pen, and partially because the soap and water needs time to seep into the pen and loosen up any leftover ink.

The next morning…today, rather…I removed the pen from the water and wiped it down. Very carefully, I unscrewed the section. Gently, at first. Then, I felt it move. I had to be very very careful opening this pen: there is a very thin line with hard rubber, between sufficient force and accidently crushing the pen, shattering it, snapping it in half and having a pile of antique crap in your hands. I kept unscrewing and unscrewing. I had to turn several times to get the section off the barrel, because by design, eyedropper pens have very long threads (they have to, to prevent leaking). With the pen disassembled, I filled it up with water to flush it out one last time, and then filled it with ink, using an eyedropper that I bought specially for this historic occasion.

The disassembled Swan eyedropper fountain pen. The slip-on cap is on the left, the barrel is on the right. In the middle is the successfully-removed section & nib-assembly. That really long thin black thing you see sticking out the back of the nib is the feed

The pen worked absolutely flawlessly. No dripping, no skipping, no scratchiness, no fading or anything. Perfect inkflow. Not bad for a 102 year old fountain pen, eh? It now has pride of place in my collection.

Special Note:

Pen repairers, collectors and users are divided over the method of soaking a BHR pen in water. Some feel that this is dangerous and that it could damage the colour of the pen, while others actively encourage the use of water to clear out a pen. I’ve used the water-soaking method before without any ill effects and I’m of the opinion that this method is safe to use with antique hard rubber fountain pens, provided that the water isn’t too hot.