pen-and-ink war

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Parker was born of English immigrant stock and grew up on his parents' farm in Iowa. He matriculated at Upper Iowa University and then joined the Valentine School of Telegraphy at Jamesville, Wisconsin: within a year he was on the staff. He supplemented his meagre school-master's pay by selling fountain pens to his students. He found that the pens needed constant attention, and his students were continually bringing them back to him for repair. The more he sold, the more he repaired. The work furnished him, first, with a detailed knowledge of the design and construction of the fountain pen and then with the thought that he could make a better pen himself. He gave up his teaching career and in 1888 began experimenting. He established his own company and in the following year he registered his first patent. The Parker Pen Company was formally incorporated on 8 March 1892.

In the following years he patented many improvements, including the Lucky Curve pen and ink-feed system, patented in 1894. That was the real breakthrough for Parker and the pen was an immediate success. It solved the problem that had bedevilled the fountain pen before and since, by incorporating an ink-feed system that ensured a free and uniform flow of ink to where it was wanted, the nib, and not to other undesirable places.

Parker established a reputation for manufacturing high-quality pens that looked good and worked well and reliably. The pens were in demand worldwide and the company grew.

During the First World War, Parker introduced the Trench Pen for use on the Western Front. A tablet of pigment was inserted in a blind cap at the end of the pen. When this tablet was placed in the barrel and the barrel was filled with water, the pen was ready for use.

Later developments included the Duofold pen, designed and launched in 1920. It had an enlarged ink capacity, a red barrel and a twentyfive-year guarantee on the nib. It became immensely popular with the public and was the flagship product throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, until the Vacumatic was launched in 1933.

Parker handed over control of the company to this two sons, Kenneth and Russell, during the 1920s, remaining President until his retirement in 1933.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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For the first twenty-five years of his life, Gestetner was a rolling stone and accordingly gathered no moss. Leaving school in 1867, he began working for an uncle in Sopron, making sausages. Four years later he apprenticed himself to another uncle, a stockbroker, in Vienna. The financial crisis of 1873 prompted a move to a restaurant, also in the family, but tiring of a menial existence, he emigrated to the USA, travelling steerage. He began to earn a living by selling Japanese kites: these were made of strong Japanese paper coated with lacquer, and he noted their long fibres and great strength, an observation that was later to prove useful when he was searching for a suitable medium for stencil duplicating. However, he did not prosper in the USA and he returned to Europe, first to Vienna and finally to London in 1879. He took a job with Fairholme \& Co., stationers in Shoe Lane, off Holborn; at last Gestetner found an outlet for his inventive genius and he began his life's work in developing stencil duplicating. His first patent was in 1879 for an application of the hectograph, an early method of duplicating documents. In 1881, he patented the toothed-wheel pen, or Cyclostyle, which made good ink-passing perforations in the stencil paper, with which he was able to pioneer the first practicable form of stencil duplicating. He then adopted a better stencil tissue of Japanese paper coated with wax, and later an improved form of pen. This assured the success of Gestetner's form of stencil duplicating and it became established practice in offices in the late 1880s. Gestetner began to manufacture the apparatus in premises in Sun Street, at first under the name of Fairholme, since they had defrayed the patent expenses and otherwise supported him financially, in return for which Gestetner assigned them his patent rights. In 1882 he patented the wheel pen in the USA and appointed an agent to sell the equipment there. In 1884 he moved to larger premises, and three years later to still larger premises. The introduction of the typewriter prompted modifications that enabled stencil duplicating to become both the standard means of printing short runs of copy and an essential piece of equipment in offices. Before the First World War, Gestetner's products were being sold around the world; in fact he created one of the first truly international distribution networks. He finally moved to a large factory to the north-east of London: when his company went public in 1929, it had a share capital of nearly £750,000. It was only with the development of electrostatic photocopying and small office offset litho machines that stencil duplicating began to decline in the 1960s. The firm David Gestetner had founded adapted to the new conditions and prospers still, under the direction of his grandson and namesake.

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