IMPROVEMENT IN PENS

One nib, four writing personalities — plus a valved pneumatic pump, in 1870

PatentUS 110,342

PatentedDecember 20, 1870

InventorRichard H. Chinn

OfWashington, District of Columbia

Patent drawing showing a cylindrical fountain pen holder in longitudinal section with internal spring, valve, and piston mechanisms, alongside eight small perspective views of a four-sided pen point labeled Figures 3 through 11, each showing a different facet or angle of the nib used for varying handwriting styles. — Fig. 1 — Outside cylinder of the pen-holder; Fig. 2 — Interior devices of holder, in section; Fig. 3 — Wider side of the pen; Fig. 4 — Opposite wide side of the pen · click to zoom

Four-sided fountain pen with pneumatic ink holder

✒ How it works

The pen has four distinct sides—two stiff points and two elastic points—allowing four different writing styles from one nib. The holder consists of a cylinder with an internal flat spring, valves, and a piston that acts as a pneumatic pump to draw ink into the pen from an inkstand. Pressing a button at the top depresses the piston, opening valves to admit ink; releasing it closes the valves via a spring-loaded India-rubber valve, sealing the ink except for flow through the pen point. Rubber rings and a gum-elastic ring keep the holder airtight and prevent ink from leaking backward.

✒ What was claimed

“1. The four-sided pen, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, having two stiff points and two elastic points, to be used with or without a fountain-handle, as herein described, and for the purposes set forth.”

In plain English: A pen with four distinct writing sides—two rigid and two flexible—that can be used with or without a fountain pen holder.

✒ In the inventor’s words

“The object of my invention is to produce a pen suitable for different hands, either a light, uniform, or heavy hand, and to be used as a fountain-pen or on a plain handle.”— Richard H. Chinn, from the specification

✒ Commentary

Chinn is really patenting two inventions at once, and the nib is the stranger of the pair. Look at Figures 3 through 11: that's one pen point shown facet by facet, a four-sided nib with two stiff faces and two elastic ones. Rotate the pen in your fingers and you go from a fine copperplate point to a flat shading point to a heavy round hand. It's the interchangeable-nib idea compressed into a single piece of metal — clever on paper, but a nib's flexibility comes from its whole geometry, not just the face touching the page, so getting four genuinely distinct behaviors from one grind is a tall order.

The holder is the more historically interesting half. Fourteen years before Waterman, Chinn builds a pneumatic filler: press the button at the top, a piston drops, valves open, and ink is drawn up from the inkstand. Release, and a spring-loaded India-rubber valve seals everything except the flow to the point. Figure 2 shows the whole works — flat spring, piston, valve seats — packed into a slim cylinder. That's a self-filling pen decades before the self-filler wars of 1900-1915.

The fatal gap is the one every pre-Waterman pen shared: no controlled air exchange at the feed. Chinn seals the ink in beautifully and then trusts gravity and the point to meter it out, which is exactly the recipe for blots. A fascinating dead end, ahead of its time in filling and behind it in feeding.

Commentary by Claude, The Fountain Pen Patent Archive’s resident enthusiast

Paper patent — likely never produced

No maker or surviving specimen is associated with this design, and the valved pump plus faceted nib would have been costly to produce in 1870; a marked example would overturn this.

✒ More by Richard H. Chinn

IMPROVEMENT IN WRITING-PENS (1873)

This drawing is free. It is a work of the United States government, published December 20, 1870, and has been in the public domain since the day it was printed. The full original document is at Google Patents and USPTO Patent Public Search.