Exquisitely Beautiful and Exceptionally Rare ** Waterman SkyWriter Art Deco Fountain Pen Desk Set, Canada 1937 **
Presently offered for your consideration is a truly exceptional Art Deco desktop fountain pen set. Its colorful striped celluloid fountain pen and identically striped celluloid-covered desk base with its gently flowing lines immediately draws the eye. It features an exclusive articulated pen holder which maintains the pen in a minutely elevated position. Together these constitute an ensemble which imparts a sense of pure elegance, aerodynamics and comfortable luxury.
Writing with this fine pen also is pure pleasure. It moves across the paper smooth as silk, and the flexible nib permits ultimate creative expression by allowing the author to easily vary their line as desired, from fine to broad.
Additionally, this Waterman SkyWriter desk set holds an honored place in fountain pen history. There were three generations of Waterman SkyWriter fountain pens, each produced in a different era, and all very different pens from one and another. The first generation – of which this desk set is a “cherry example” – consisted of flagship-model celluloid pens. They were crafted for Waterman by the renowned Aikin-Lambert Pen Company soon after Waterman had acquired ownership of this Firm… but before Aikin-Lambert had been fully absorbed into the Waterman parent-company. For information, the SkyWriter pens first appeared in a 1937 Waterman brochure. They were offered in luxury pyralin-celluloid colors of which the most sought after today are the striped examples, respectively named Brown Pearl (like the present desk set), Green Pearl and Gray Pearl.
Also, the origins of the name SkyWriter are interesting. By the mid-1930s, airplanes represented the pinnacle of engineering, and air travel the ultimate in exclusivity and individual prestige. Hence, like Watermann with the SkyWriter, several other leading pen companies also introduced flagship pen models with names evoking this theme. Examples include the Sheaffer SkyBoy and Eversharp Skyline.
- Pen length: 20 cm / 7 ¾”
- Desk base dimensions: 10 cm x 7 cm / 4″ x 2 ¾”
- Material: Celluloid
- Filling mechanism: Lever
- Nib: Original SkyWriter nib, 14 K solid gold, fine point, high-flex, signed “14KT “and “R” in a diamond frame, plus “CANADA”.
- Pen signed: “SKYWRITER MANUFACTURED IN CANADA BY ALCO DIVISION L. E. WATERMAN CO. LIMITED”; Crisp and clear imprint. No discernable wear at all.
- Condition: Excellent. No chips nor cracks. Fully serviced and tested… including a fresh factory-identical rubber sac installed
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Waterman
Lewis Edson Waterman is credited with inventing the 1st practical fountain pen in 1884.
As the story goes, Waterman, an insurance broker, was getting ready to sign an important contract. For the occasion, he purchased one of those “new” fountain pens that had recently come on the market, thinking it would be more practical and stylish than the dip pen and pocket inkwell he usually carried.
However, when the time came to sign, the pen first refused to write and then badly stained the contract. Waterman rushed back to his office to get another copy, but when he returned, the customer had signed with a rival broker.
On the spot, Waterman determined to devise a “real” fountain pen, one he could depend upon. In his brother’s workshop, he analyzed the ink to paper exchange in pens and discovered that the problem lay in the function of the feed, through which the ink first flowed to the nib. After numerous experiments, he developed the “Three Channel Feed”, a structure based on the principle of capillary attraction. On 12 February 1884, Waterman was granted a US patent for his invention. Variations of his design were adopted by all fountain pen manufacturers, so that Waterman’s slogan quickly became “the Daddy of Them All”.
In 1888, the firm was renamed L.E. Waterman Company. In the following year, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Waterman was awarded a bronze medal, the highest honour awarded to a fountain pen designer and manufacturer. From this point forward, innovation followed upon innovation and success upon success. Waterman ultimately grew to become by far the most important of the “Big Four” fountain pen manufacturers.
Already by 1903, Waterman pens were sold throughout the United States and Canada. Subsequently, Frank D. Waterman, Lewis Waterman’s nephew, led the Waterman name to cross the Atlantic and conquer Europe.
In 1926, a Waterman agent by the name of Jules Fagard established a quasi-independent French subsidiary called JiF-Waterman, to manufacture Waterman pens in France. In the following year, a JiF-Waterman researcher named Perraud achieved a major breakthrough: he invented the ink cartridge! It consisted of a small glass tube with a cork-stopper. The Pioneer Waterman “1st Ever” Cartridge Filling Fountain Pen. And since any French invention is automatically patented, this invention only obtained an international patent in 1936, but remained a JiF-Waterman exclusive for twenty years!
