The Invention and Perfection of the Gold

THE INVENTION AND PERFECTION T h e G e o r g e S h e p p a r d a n d J o h n H o l l a n d S t o r y OF THE GOLD NIB by J.G. Leone This story starts in 1840 in Detroit, Nibs” elsewhere in this issue for another view Michigan, a frontier fur-trading town on the role of Levi Brown and others in the of 5000 inhabitants. The new steel pens invention of gold nibs.) arriving from England intrigued a local The gold pen business prospered gunsmith, George W. Sheppard. (What and Sheppard soon moved it to larger we now refer to as ‘nibs’ were called quarters at Sixth and Walnut Streets. ‘pens’ at that time.) The steel pens Many needed supplies were purchased were an improvement over the quills at the nearby Armstrong’s Drug of Mother Goose, but left much to be Store. It was in this shop that our next desired. They were crudely made; they important development occurred. corroded in both ink and the open air, JOHN HOLLAND JOINS THE and they were expensive because they had COMPANY to be replaced often. In 1845, John Holland and his fam- THE FIRST GOLD PENS ily emigrated from the area known as George Sheppard decided to make a pen “Holy Ground:” County Cork, Ireland. from gold instead of steel. A Detroit jew- They settled in Cincinnati where John’s eler named Levi Brown supplied the gold, and John Holland father found work as a bricklayer. After a brief Sheppard experimented with solving two major stint in public schools, John Holland became a problems: tempering the gold for a combination of clerk at Armstrong’s Drug Store. In the summer of strength and flexibility, and tipping the point so the friction of 1853, fifteen-year-old John caught the attention of George writing would not ruin it. Sheppard. John soon was employed as an apprentice pen maker at Sheppard eventually solved both problems and crafted the first a salary of $3.00 per week. durable gold pen. He realized that his handiwork would require a Holland was a quick learner. By 1858, he had become a master larger market than Detroit. The first railroad line had just been craftsman and had acquired a one-third partnership in Sheppard’s completed between Lake Erie and Cincinnati, so Sheppard used gold pen company. it to leave Detroit and find his fortune in Cincinnati, a city of In 1859, John Holland made his first fountain pen, as he saw 50,000 and the largest city in the West. the appeal that such an instrument would have. However, the In 1841, above a barber shop on Main Street, between Seventh holders for the pens had to be made of non-corrosive materials & Eight Streets, George Sheppard founded the first gold pen fac- such as solid gold, which was cost prohibitive. tory in the world. In 1861, John’s brother, Timothy Holland, also became a master (Author’s Note: In 1916, John Holland made the claim that George pen maker at the factory. The gold pen business continued to thrive. Sheppard invented the gold nib and built the first factory for producing However, the tensions of the approaching Civil War weighed them. See L. M. Fultz’s article, “The History of Making Metal Pen heavily on George Sheppard’s mind. He was convinced that the 10 WINTER 2005 THE PENNANT Fig.1. 1883 Holland advertisement showing Extra Fine (323), Falcon and Oblique nibs. Fig. 2. Holland #8 nib with integral ferrule and holder, and a Falcon nib. Confederacy would win the war, leaving Cincinnati, now a city of more than 200,000 people, vulnerable to the victors located just across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Sheppard decided to sell his pen company, retire to a farm along Hogan’s creek in nearby Aurora, Indiana, and live in peace for the rest of his days. (His peace was short-lived – see sidebar on page 14.) In 1862, John Holland bought the business from Sheppard and made immediate innovations to the product line. Until then, the company’s gold pens had been made with nibs of long, short and stub lengths with iridium points in various widths. They expanded the product line with Bank, Extra Fine (323), Falcon, IXL, Oblique, Record, and Spade nibs (Figs. 1, 2, 3). During the Civil War, John Holland served in the Union Army. It is not known whether Timothy also served, or remained at home to run the flourishing gold pen business. However, Timothy had become a partner, and the business was known as “John Holland and Brother” (Fig. 4). INNOVATION AND GROWTH The Hollands continued to experiment with fountain pens and stylographic pens and began to sell them in small num- bers. When the company issued 60th anniversary blotters in 1901, they stated, “Gold pens since 1841—Fountain pens since 1865” (Fig. 5). Although Charles Goodyear received a patent in 1844 for vulcanized rubber, it appears that hard rubber became commercially available on a regular basis only after the Civil War. John Holland wrote, “In 1867, we began turning hard rubber parts in our nib factory. The fountain and stylographic part of the business had grown to such proportions WINTER 2005 11 THE PENNANT that we established a separate factory for turning and working hard rubber, being the pioneer in this line of business. By 1869, we began to regularly make fountain pens and stylographic pens from hard rubber.” Today, if we think of stylographic pens at all, we think of them as suitable for technical drawing. However, they were popular in the 19th century for general writing, particularly where a thin, even line was desired, as in bookkeeping. Some referred to them as ink pencils (Fig. 6). The early Holland eyedropper filling fountain pens had primitive feeds. They used a black hard rubber ‘overfeed’ on top of the nib, and a cylindrical, slitted hard rubber feed under the nib (Fig. 7). Lewis Edson Waterman’s breakthrough feed design would come about 15 years later. Fig. 3. Holland dip pen nibs with different ‘breather holes ’—crescent, oval, ‘V.’ Fig. 4. Civil war era nib with “J. Holland & Brother” nib imprint. It was about this time that the company name was changed to the John Holland Gold Pen Company. We do not know the reason for the change, but the Cincinnati city directory of the era no longer lists Timothy Holland as a gold pen maker. He is mentioned as a lithographer. John Holland continued his innovations, receiving patents for various fountain pens, feeds, mechanical pencils (added to the line in 1870), gold toothpicks, and iridium tipping (Fig. 8). JOHN HOLLAND AND IRIDIUM NIB TIPPING Perhaps John Holland’s most enduring contri- bution to the pen industry was his work with iridium for tipping pen points. 12 WINTER 2005 THE PENNANT Fig. 5: 1901 blotter stating when Holland started making nibs and fountain pens Iridium, similar to platinum and the hardest of all metals, had been known since 1803. Decades after its discovery, it still was expensive to buy and difficult to use. The processing of the ore had progressed only to the point where iridium was available as a fine powder or in small grains. It was devilishly difficult to fuse iridium to gold and shape it into pen points, as is evident in the number of old nibs with miss- ing iridium on the tips. In the late 1870s John Holland conducted experiments to create a better tipping material. His objective was to create a compound containing iridium and another more malleable, less expensive material. He discovered that if he heated iridium ore in a crucible until it turned white, then added phosphorus, he could fuse the iridium with gold and form a pen point in the desired shape. The importance of his invention was recognized in 1891 when John Holland received a medal as an honorary member of the Parisian Inventor’s Academy in France for his work with iridium and gold nibs. HOLLAND AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FOUNTAIN PEN Today, Waterman is often credited with creating the first practical fountain pen in 1884. Waterman made this claim in its advertising, and it has been widely accepted as fact. However, it is clear that Holland (and others) were making and selling ser- viceable fountain pens prior to 1884. The historical record seems to support the claim that the John Holland Company was the first U.S. manufacturer to introduce a commercially successful fountain pen in the late 1860s. There are earlier patents and earlier fountain pens that have sur- vived. However, Holland appears to have been the first to make and sell them in quantity in the USA. The next fountain pens to emerge were the stylographic pens of Alonzo T. Cross and Duncan MacKinnon. They did not become popular until the 1870s, about five years after Holland’s second factory was built. By the 1880s, Wirt, then Waterman, began to dominate the American fountain pen market. Other major players would emerge. George S. Parker moonlighted selling John Holland pens in the 1880s before he founded the Parker Pen Company in 1888. Walter Sheaffer’s pens would appear 15 years later. Fig. 6. Red hard rubber Stylographic pen or ink pencil. WINTER 2005 13 THE PENNANT HOLLAND’S DECLINE The Civil War Comes to the Midwest The John Holland Gold Pen Company entered the 20th by John G. Leone and L. Michael Fultz century as a major manufacturer, selling pens across the USA and abroad; yet, the company was beginning to fade.

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