Today a device failure prompted a technology improvement.
Fountain pens were a vast improvement over nib pens, the former using a reservoir of ink in the shaft that fed the tip, while the latter could amount to a sharpened feather shaft that needed to be dipped in an inkwell every few words or so. They weren’t perfect — you had to press the pen against the paper to get the ink flowing, which meant you’d often etch instead of write, and suffer somewhat regular ink blotches — but they’d been the most efficient (and stylish) data input device for 50 years when insurance broker Lewis Waterman found himself holding one above an important client contract in New York City on this day in 1883. Shockingly, the pen splashed; Waterman quickly went to his office to get another one. When he returned, the client had let another broker sign the deal with a pen that worked.
Waterman decided to invent a better pen and, a year later, patented his self-feeding fountain pen (calling it “The Regular”) and sold handmade units from the back of a Manhattan cigar store. Not only did the improved technology write more evenly and reliably, but Waterman had the audacity to invent a better performance guarantee (5 years) and a better marketing strategy that relied on national magazines, the new media of his time, to advertise them (it’s interesting that the era marked the birth of national brands and branding; by 1899, an issue of Harpers magazine would have almost as many ad pages as editorial. Ad agencies came into their own then, too). By the early 1900s, Waterman was selling 350,000 pens a year, and his pens would continue to define writing technology until the post-WWII ballpoint pen revolution.
Nothing leads to success like failure.
