Who is the inventer of the fountain pen?

Answer 1

Afountain pen is a pen that contains a reservoir of water-based liquid ink and should not be confused with the more ancient device, the quill pen that was dipped into a container of ink frequently while writing. The earliest mentions of fountain pens go back hundreds of years; one of the earliest citations found to date is from the the 10th century. The caliph of Eygypt Ma'ad al-Mu'izz wanted a pen that could hold ink inside it and would not leak it. Accordingly, a few days later a pen was made by the craftsmen that held ink in a reservoir and the ink was delivered to the nib due to gravity and capillary action and did not leak ink. The earliest surviving fountain pens date to the early 18th (or possibly later 17th) century; they are made of metal, and most used cut quills as nibs, although gold-nibbed examples are also known. These are often called "Bion" pens, after the French royal instrument maker Nicolas Bion (1652-1733) who described them in a treatise first published in 1709. Bion made no claim to be their inventor, nor is there any evidence that he ever made such pens himself -- let alone, held a patent on them.

Answer 2

Petrache Poenaru (1799 - 1875) was a famous Romanian inventor of the Enlightenment era. Poenaru, who had studied in Paris and Vienna and, later, completed his specialized studies in England, was amathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, teacher and organizer of the educational system, as well as a politician, agronomist, and zootechnologist, founder of the Philharmonic Society, the Botanical Gardens and the National Museum of Antiquities in Bucharest.
While a student in Paris, Petrache Poenaru invented the world's first fountain pen, an invention for which the French Government issued a patent on May 25, 1827.


For more about him check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrache_Poenaru


* Corrected by Dinoletsz

Answer 3

That depends a great deal on your definition of fountain pen. If you include quills (basically feathers with sharpened tips) then it was some folks before 900 AD. If you include dip pens, then some folks in the 1700s.

Otherwise, The first known description of a pen that could hold its own ink is of a french design by M. Bion for the Plume sans fin - feather without end in 1723.

1819- The Penographic was patented. Inkflow was managed by pulling on a valve behind the nib.

1832 John S. Parker patented a piston pen.

1884 Lewis Waterman had just lost a sale to a wealthy client because his pen spilled ink all over the document. He decided to improve on the design and patented his own design for an eyedropper filled pen that would not leak.

1900 or so Conklin started selling a pen with an internal bladder that could be squeezed by a protruding metal crescent. Other pen makers tried several ways to emulate that design without infringing on the patent. This lead to match fillers and coin fillers to push the metal bars against the sac. Sheaffer introduced a lever filler that outsold everything else. Other pen makers tried various designs until the 1960s when cartridge filled pens became the norm.

Many designs came and went over time, and some of the older designs can still be found today. So, who invented it? Maybe Monsieur Bion, but Waterman got more publicity