The most innovative decade

 

The Time At the turn of the last century the eastern seaboard was home to many of the fountain pen manufacturers in this country. However, the largely agricultural American mid-west also produced a number of pen makers who supported consumers from the educated, professional community at work in cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Toledo and Kansas City -- lawyers, physicians, educators and writers -- people who wanted to pursue their affairs free from the anchor of an ink well. Brands like Grieshaber, Weidlich, Kraker, Edison, Pick, Conklin and Waterman come to mind, along with the giants of the day, John Holland and Paul Wirt. While certainly filling local needs, some of these brands also advertised in publications that came as close as it was possible at the time to providing national, although meager audiences. It was in magazines that they built their reputation with, appeal to and demand from a wider audience. Oftentimes that demand was met by direct fulfillment from the maker via the mails, but when production output and profit margins allowed, a network of dealers (usually stationers or jewelers, or for those who could produce the quantities needed, Sears and Montgomery Ward) was organized to sell, service, and personalize the pens. The Market As demand increased, improvements were made in pen performance. The call for a non-leaking pen had been addressed by the retractable "Safety Pen" and the screw cap, but even with those advancements, at the end of the 19th century fountain pens were still being filled with an untidy eyedropper and many leaked at the section and/or "burped" ink, soiling fingers, clothing, documents. Attempts to address the problem with the design of the feed were legion. Wirt alone, held patents for four or five feeds. And then Walter A. Sheaffer introduced the elegantly simple lever, sack and yet another feed. That combination sparked the demand for Self-Filling pens and a spate of alternative - sometimes whacky - schemes to challenge the appeal and circumvent the protection provided by Sheaffer's patent. The 1900's, a fascinating, innovative and highly competitive decade in fountain pen history that saw the introduction of crescent fillers, blow fillers, saddle, hump, coin, hatchet, match-stick, sleeve, cartridge and accordion fillers...to name a few. Another important characteristic of that age was the consumer expectation of durability. Items in general, and fountain pens in particular were not made with the thought that if broken they would be discarded and replaced; they would be repaired and re-employed. Some designs may have functioned better than others, but the quality of material and workmanship was consistently good, producing products that were meant to last a lifetime, which explains why so many of these pens remain; being restored, collected and used today. Fundamentally there were no quality "tiers" as we see them appear in the 1930's. Just bigger, perhaps national brands and smaller, perhaps regional brands. That difference had less to do with consumer demand and more to do with merely output and distribution channels, in a way similar to the difference between Saab and BMW automobiles; both fine products, but differing greatly in availability. It was the introduction of celluloid in the '20s and eventually the qualitative difference between rod versus rolled stock that allowed for what are now called "tiers", although the Great Depression, lower expectations of durability and expanded use by less affluent consumers played an important role as well. In the 1930's there was a demand for cheaper pens, so cheaper pens were made. Not the case in the 1900's. It should be mentioned that today, despite the quality of material or workmanship from these early makers, for some effete sensibilities, the size of the nib is another "tier" criterion, although nib size has no bearing on nib performance. A Salz Brothers' nib on a Peter Pan is about the size of a flake of oat-meal, but a full-flex joy to use. Oftentimes this judgement is specious; used to denigrate a makers entire output on the basis of a few models. Although one cannot ignore the eye-appeal of a large, sparkling nib, for some, it seems, it not a question of how one uses what one has, but simply bigger is better. A Case History The intensity of the decade can be felt by looking into one of the smaller, lesser discussed makers of that volatile era, Betzler & Wilson from Akron Ohio, established in 1892...  Joseph F. Betzler   ...eventually with facilities at 54 and 56 E. South St. (People's Phone #1651, if you would like to call) entered the crowded market of drop fill pens offering instruments like this splendid silver filigree. This is not your buy-it-by-the-gross-from-a-jobber offering. The intricately cut, highly raised detail place it well beyond that, approaching the quality of pen cases offered by George Heath.   But as attractive as it may be, it is still a drop-fill pen, and ultimately doomed by the demand for a Self-Filler. Betzler rose to the occasion with this design patented on September 12, 1905 (#799,297) and again in Canada about a year later (#101,106)     The pen is basically a syringe fill with the added advantage of a sac, a combination that eliminates the need for perishable, moving seals fitted to contain ink within a barrel. Betzler describes it as having a "...a teat...on the inner end of the nozzle (i.e. section) to which my improved ink-reservoir and filler is secured..." . The design as rendered in the patent drawings uses a slider curved to the shape of the exterior surface of the barrel. It sits above a slot and moves along the barrel's outer surface. Attached to the slider, and within the barrel is a disk. When moved toward the section, the interior disk compresses the sack. When fully retracted the sac expands and fills. The slider is then rotated to lock, preventing an accidental discharge of ink. Clearly an ordinary, tubular sac would not be up to the task. Sliding the disk would cause it to crumple rather than compress. So Betzler designed "...a soft-rubber tube having annular lateral corrugations...". Think bellows. Or as called today, accordion-fill. A year later he ran this ad... A look at the pen as shown in the advertisement reveals that some production realities may have arisen resulting in a modification of the design. The exterior slide shown in the patent evolved to a locking plunger/piston protected by a blind cap. This catalog listing calls it a "Perfected Model".   (Catalog from the archives of Paul Bloch) The catalog also reveals an interesting and possibly problematic component of the Betzler marketing strategy. The page shows three Black Chased holders. Using the model with a narrow gold filled band as an example, notice that with the Company's largest #4 nib it was priced at $7.65. Just down the road in Cincinnati, John Holland was offering a comparable pen for $6.00 but with the additional advantage of a clip. When we consider that a school teacher in 1910 was earning on average, about $495 per year, one would need to work about an entire additional day to buy the Betzler product...and still not be able to secure it in a pocket. Although his competitive pricing was disadvantageous, with his positioning as a premiere product maker, the business must have been doing well, but then in 1913 Geyer's Stationer, (Vol.55) ran this cryptic, one- sentence announcement... "The capital of the Betzler & Wilson Fountain Pen Co. of Akron O., has been decreased from $100,000 to $50,000." What might seem like a reversal was dispelled shortly later when The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer (Vol. 40, Apr. 1, 1914) announced in an equally cryptic manner: "Betzler & Wilson have purchased the complete Fountain Pen plant formerly operated by O.E. Weidlich, Cinn. O and have moved it to Akron, combining it with their present factory." A very bullish move, at a very volatile moment. At that time the lever was about to enter the public domain where for its manufacturing simplicity, reliability and ease of use, it quickly became the filling system-of-choice for the next two decades. In fact, the move may have been more rash than bullish. A mere two years later American Stationer (Vol. 80, Nov. 4, 1916, pg.12) announced: "Kraker Pen Co. Increasing Facilities The Kraker Pen Company, of Kansas City, Mo., has just completed its purchase of the entire equipment of the Akron Fountain Pen Company, of Akron, O. The Kraker Pen Company will move their entire equipment to its present factory at Kansas City, thus greatly increasing its present facilities and allowing of a greater production. The Akron Fountain Pen Company was formerly the Betzler-Wilson Pen Company." ...and after 26 years, the end of Betzler & Wilson with yet another quirky attempt to unseat the lever. Hindsight There is no question that Betzler & Wilson was taken down by a better idea, but ineffective utilization of yet another fledgling discipline also played a role. Scarcely a generation after B&W's end, marketing and advertising principles were established to measure the effectiveness of a media program. The criteria are "Reach" and "Frequency", where Reach measures the extent to which a target audience is covered (as a percent of the total audience), and frequency records the number of times that audience is reached. The ideal frequency was determined by psychological studies that had found the average person required eleven exposures before a message was remembered for any length of time followed by regular repetition of the idea to prevent degradation of recall. Subsequently it was learned that the number of exposures could be sharply reduced when the presenter of the information is a talking gecko...but there are limits to what can be done in print. At the turn of the century two of the most prestigious periodicals for reaching a nation-wide, educated, professional audience were Scribner's and Collier's. (Scribner's had a cover price 25¢ with a paid circulation of 215,000) Holland, Wirt, Sheaffer. Waterman and Parker were regular advertisers in those publications. The Betzler ad shown above ran in The Four Track News (Vol. 11, issue 1, 1906), a "Monthly Magazine of Travel and Education" published by the New York Central & Hudson River Rail Road. With a cover price of 10¢, and circulation of 120,000, the frontispiece mentions that "This magazine will be sent free to any address in the United States..." , and of course, deliver a much lower economic demographic. The following ad ran repeatedly in Pacific Poultrycraft...(this from the February, 1913 issue).   There is little point in discussing the brand image this ad conveys. The only positive observation that can be made is that exposure was limited to a clutch of chicken farmers on the West Coast. Not surprising that three years later Betzler & Wilson was out of business. Dan DeMaio Dan DeMaio is currently retired from a career managing, developing and executing advertising and marketing campaigns for, among others, Procter & Gamble and American Express. Acknowledgments: I'd like to thank Giovanni Abrate and Len Provisor for planting the seed for this in a conversation we had on Pentrace and, most importantly, Paul Bloch for his interest and support in drawing this together. Source: Joseph Frederick Betzler photograph from heritagepursuit.com

Text and images © 2015 Dan DeMaio

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