(Revised May 7, 2013, based on a reader’s email. Thank you, N. K.)
Since writing my last entry, I’ve been stewing about advertisers who purport to be doing one thing but are really not quite there.
Such is the case with Seltzer Goods and its Seven Year Pen, of which I herewith present an example:
The Story Behind the Seven Year Pen
Each year, an estimated 100 million pens are discarded every day. Yikes! Is all that waste really necessary?
Maybe not, answers the the [sic] Seven Year Pen. It's not only possible to reduce waste, it's possible to look cool while doing it!
Seltzer's Seven Year Pens have totally revised people's expectations. (Maybe being disposable isn't all that exciting after all!)
At Seltzer, we're always thinking of ways to offer new and interesting items without adding to the 56 tons of trash created each year by the average American.
Well, fans, there’s a catch. What do you do with the pen seven years hence? Or, more likely, three or four years hence, as I’ve been informed by a Seven Year Pen owner. Well, although there’s nothing in the pen’s packaging that indicates it’s refillable, it is. If you have the energy to dig around on the Seltzer Web site, you’ll learn that yes, they do sell refills for it. (When the pen first appeared, I crawled around on the site and could not find this information.) I suspect that many people, not realizing this, will simply discard the pen. But let’s talk about the amazing concept of a pen you don’t throw away.
A pen you don’t throw away? What a concept! Never mind that fountain pens have worked that way for the better part of two centuries; we’re talking ballpoints here. And it turns out that early ballpoints, as exemplified by the 1940s Eversharp, Sheaffer, and Wearever pens shown here, were also intended to be reused.
Now, as it happens, these pens were all designed with screw caps, like their fountain pen contemporaries. And I must admit that having to uncap a pen isn’t as convenient as being able to click a button or twist a cap and be ready to write. Well, that problem was easy to solve, and retractable ballpoints were out there, too. Here are a couple of early retractables, one cap actuated and the other a twist-action model.
One of the best-known pens of all time is a retractable ballpoint. It made its appearance in 1954, and Parker called it the Jotter. Here are a first-year Jotter and a much more recent version (a powder-coated metal prototype that didn’t actually make it into production):
None of these pens was designed — or expected — to be pitched when its ink ran out. They were made with user-exchangeable refills. Yes, you throw away the refill, but that’s a lot better than pitching the whole pen, and if you actually figure it out, that’s what the Seven Year Pen is all about.
But this seven-year thing still gets me because all of the pens I show above were designed to be used for decades, not a piddly seven years. They all still work today despite the fact that refills are no longer available for all of them. I’ve adapted all of them, except the Parker Jotter, to take modern refills. Why haven’t I adapted the Jotter? Because you can still buy refills for the Jotter. Parker has never changed its refill design, and that 1954 Jotter up there is as good today as it was more than half a century ago. Try that on for size, you Seven Year Pen you.
So how long does a refill last? Because different pens take different refills, the lifetime of any given refill depends on who made the pen. And here’s where it gets interesting. I’m sometimes a little overly curious. I wanted to see what was inside the Seven Year Pen, so I tried taking it apart. I discovered that although it’s a twist-cap pen, the cap doesn’t seem to want to come off. But lo and behold, that big metal nozzle screws right off. And there’s the refill.
Being an observant person, you will have noticed that there are two refills in the photo above. You might also have noticed that they look very similar. The upper one, made of white plastic, came in the Seven Year pen. The other one came inside a Parker Jotter. And before you ask the obvious question, the answer is yes. The Jotter refill works perfectly in the Seven Year Pen. Because it’s metal, its walls are thinner than the walls of the Seltzer refill, and that means t’ll last longer in use as the plastic one. And once it’s in a landfill it will degrade away millennia before the plastic one will, again because it’s metal. And the Jotter is probably the most reliable ballpoint pen in existence.
Most interesting of all (as I hinted at earlier) is that Parker still makes the Jotter, and you can buy one on Amazon for $6.38 with free shipping (sold and fulfilled by TNT Deals, Inc.). This fact, even if you weren’t already thinking the way I’m thinking, is enough to make the Jotter the smarter choice. It’s a better pen, it’s a better looking pen, and it doesn’t cost more to own. Who’s your daddy, Seltzer Goods?
