Ink Bottles and Fountain Pens

 

I attended Duff Valley District 4 in Rock County, Nebraska in the late 50s and early 60s. It was a one-room elementary school with a pitcher pump, a flagpole, a swing set, outhouses, an old barn from the days when the students rode horses to school, and of course, the schoolhouse itself.

The desks in our schoolhouse were old enough that most of them had inkwells built into the upper right corner of the desk top. An inkwell is a cup that holds a bottle of ink and keep it from spilling while a writer is using it. 

Ball point pens had been invented by then, but writing with real ink wasn't  completely obsolete. Stores still sold little bottles of ink and the necessary ink pens. One variety of pen had an inner rubber bladder that held a supply of ink.  This was an innovation that allowed the pen to write for a while before it needed refilling.  The user filled the bladder by dunking the pen in the ink bottle and operating a little lever on the side of the pen. The filling procedure made a small interesting gurgle. 

I was never able to keep my hands clean while messing around with an ink bottle and pen. Sometimes there were spills. I made a big black ink mess on a page in my Social Studies book during my ownership of one manually loaded ink pen. I accomplished this behind the privacy shield of my raised desk lid because my teacher had already told me to stop playing with my pen and ink. 

I enjoyed fountain pens, too. A fountain pen got its ink from a plastic cartridge that was a little smaller in size than a triple-A battery. An ink cartridge was installed by pressing the pointed top end of the pen's nib into one end of it and loading the cartridge-with-nib into the body of the pen. 

The ink cartridges almost always leaked at the puncture point. The ink oozed onto the grip of the pen, and soon my writing fingers had black, red, blue, or green stains, depending on the color of ink in the cartridge.  

If I accidentally let the pen rest against the paper when I wasn't writing, an ink spot quickly developed. If I shook the pen, little drops of ink flew from it.  If I thoughtlessly rested my hand or arm on the wet ink, it smeared, and if I folded the paper before the ink was dry, it made mirror images of any wet letters. These things happened with both types of ink pens.

We students made plenty of messes with ink, but Duff Valley's teachers had a long history of ink accidents that they couldn't deny. The bottoms of the wooden drawers in the teacher's desk had dozens of blots and stains from decades of leaky ink pens and tipped-over ink bottles.