As much as I like Parker pens, I’ve never been a particular advocate of the button filling system so many of them used. Sure, it works, and it’s relatively easily reparable, but it’s clunky: the button is somewhat hard to press, and it doesn’t fit cleanly and straight in the back of the barrel — and pressing too hard can damage the pressure bar.

So when I was pawing through my Duofold parts a while back, I decided to do something about it. I gathered up a set of junker parts that would build a pen (blind cap, barrel, section, feed, cap, clip, inner cap), threw a JoWo nib  into the mix, and spent some time at the lathe and at the bench. With a couple of pieces of plastic tubing, a length of brass tubing, and two O-rings, I fashioned a new filling system for the pen. You can’t see it in this picture, but it’s there.

Well, actually, it’s not a new new filling system; it’s a new old filling system. It went on the market in 1927. Perhaps this picture will help you to identify it.

Yup, it’s a pneumatic plunger, like the one Chilton put into its second-generation pens (which included the Wing-flow, the Golden Quill, and — shortly before the company went under — the Chiltonian).

The only significant difference is that Chilton couldn’t use O-rings in its design because they hadn’t been invented yet. (The patent was issued to Niels A. Christenson in 1938, just in time for the concept to be well proven before World War II, during which the U.S. government classified O-rings as critical war materials.)

The point of this little screed is pretty simple: pen inventors didn’t (and still don’t) always start out from ground zero. It’s easier to adapt and improve something that exists than it is to create something completely new out of whole cloth. And the history of technology is filled with the names of lazy people — people who tool the easier way to something better than existed before. In the case of this pen, which I call my “Pneufold,” I claim no particular ingenuity. Everything I’ve done here was somebody else’s idea. I just combined things in a new way. And the pen really is kinda cool.