History
and manufacturing
We
enjoy fountain pens for several reasons and one of them
might be the charm of the nib, its design, or the way it
glides along the paper. Glass, gold, iridium, … the list of a nib’s
potential constituents is long and to find out more about
one of them, I decided to visit (without my wife!) a Breton
Jeweller-Manufacturer-Engraver in Lorient : L’atelier
des Essarts (02 97 21 42 88 J).
  
Gold
is rather easily found on Earth (of course, it’s all a matter of scale!),
either in mines or in rivers’ alluvion. This is certainly
why gold became the first metal known on Earth (5.000 BC),
well before copper and bronze. Later on, we will approach
the difference between gold plating and gold layering through
electrolysis (as used for nibs), but we know that this technique
was mastered as early as in Egyptian times (some batteries
were found in a few tombs) in order to cover bronze surfaces.
There are several extraction methods, and gold panning (in
rivers) is one of them (using a sieve, or the noxious mercury
that will amalgamate with gold).
Once washed and cleaned, the gold is
pure and has a “greasy” aspect. The gold content
of an alloy is stated in carats and/or in thousandth. Therefore,
pure gold will titrate 24-carat or 1.000/1.000th (in actual
fact, 999/1.000th since gold is never totally pure). 24-carat
gold being very soft, the nib manufacturer will rather use
14K or 18K gold, and the alloy will then contain gold, rosette
copper and fine silver.
  
Pure
gold / Silver / Copper
How will you know that
a gold pen is a 14K or a 18K one ?
Not having any stamp, I subjected a pen dating from the beginning
of the 20th century to the “Touchstone” Test
(or Lydian Stone since this process was already used in the
days of the King of Lydia).
 
Gold
nibs :
Inks,
especially the oldest ones, were very corrosive, and in
those days without computers, most of the information was
exchanged by way of writing. Gold, not being subject to
corrosion, thus quickly stood out in nibs’ manufacture; it was blend to a material
that protected the tip from paper’s wearing (such as
iridium, but it could also be other alloys using osmium,
platinum, tungsten, ruthenium, …).
French nibs are made of 18-carat gold,
but you may encounter different types :
- Gold filled nibs : this term
indicates a laminate in which sheets of solid gold (minimum 10 carats)
are fused to a base layer through a combination of pressure
and heat. The total amount of precious metal must be equivalent
to at least 1/20th of the nib’s gross weight.
- Rolled gold nibs : same technique
as for gold filled nibs, but using a quantity of gold
that is less than 1/20th of the nib’s gross weight.
- Gold plated nibs : in this very case, gold plating
is usually done through electrolysis, with thin layers
of gold laid down on the metal. For old pens, this process
is often a sign of poorer quality.
Glass nibs :
Glass nib pens were mostly appreciated fro the making of
duplicates. But several defects quickly condemned them :
great fragility, lack of flexibility, and an ink that was
drying too fast.
Steel
nibs :
In the past, these nibs were cheap, and this explains
for instance that during World War II, a large number of
pens were equipped with steel nibs.
Today, the most famous brands use steel (now stainless steel)
and these nibs are as strong as the gold ones, without any
risk of corrosion.
Manufacturing steel nibs requires an advanced technology
and, sometimes, manual finishing touches.
Choosing between a gold nib and a steel nib must above all
remain a matter of taste.
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