Lewis Waterman

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Lewis Waterman

Born Lewis Edson Waterman

20 November 1836

Decatur, Otsego County, New York, U.S.

Died 1 May 1901 (aged 64)

Brooklyn, New York City, New York, U.S.

Burial place Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills

Ave. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Nationality American

Occupation Inventor
Lewis Edson Waterman (November 20, 1836 – May 1, 1901) was an American
inventor. He held multiple fountain pen patents and was the founder of the Waterman
Pen Company.
His entry into fountain pen manufacturing has only recently been properly researched.
Waterman was working as a pen salesman in New York for a new company founded in
the spring of 1883 by a volatile inventor named Frank Holland. Holland abandoned his
company after only six weeks; Waterman stepped in and took over, fitting the pens with
a simplified feed of his own design.[1] It was for this "three fissure feed" which his first
pen-related patent was granted in 1884.[2]

Waterman's fountain pen, patented February 12, 1884

Waterman was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.[3]

Contents

 1Early life
 2Other career paths
 3The ink blot myth
 4References
 5External links

Early life[edit]
Waterman was born in Decatur, New York on November 20, 1836. [4][5] His father was a
wagon maker who died when Lewis was three. The boy grew up on his stepfather's
farm, attending the district school until he was fifteen, then attending the seminary at
Charlottesville, New York for some three months. Still fifteen, he began teaching,
supplementing his income by carpentry work. Waterman chiefly taught Pitman
shorthand ("stenography"), which took him to Illinois and Virginia.
Other career paths[edit]
Waterman began selling insurance in 1862, starting in Michigan but relocating to Boston
in 1864. In the late 1860s Waterman and his wife Sara Ann Roberts were converted to
Spiritualism; his wife gained some fame (and income) as a medium, only to be
unmasked and publicly pilloried as a charlatan. In the wake of this and the death of an
infant daughter in the summer of 1870, Waterman left his wife and remaining children
and moved to New York. In New York, Waterman attended lectures at the American
Institute of Phrenology, from which he graduated that same year. Waterman remained
keen on phrenology until the end of his life. By 1871 he was promoting the "Reactionary
Lifter", a form of weight training machine. Waterman remarried in 1872, and was back in
the insurance business in Boston from 1875 to 1877. A few years later he was on the
move again, working as editor for railroad journals The Railroad Gazette and National
Car Builder. It appears that it was during this period that Waterman began to sell
fountain pens, not of his manufacture. Near the end of his life, Waterman started the
Waterman Condensing Company to make fruit extracts, but this venture lasted only a
few years.[6][7]
Waterman died in Brooklyn on May 1, 1901, and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery,
Jamaica Plain, MA.[4][5][8] Following his death, his nephew Frank D. Waterman took the
business overseas and increased sales to 350,000 pens per year.

The ink blot myth[edit]

There has been a great deal of mythologizing of Waterman's life and career. The tale
that he was prompted to invent a better fountain pen upon losing an insurance sale after
the contract was spoiled by an ink blot left by a balky fountain pen has been widely
repeated, but is completely unfounded. [1]

References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:    Rimakis, George; Kirchheimer, Daniel (March 30, 2017) [2014]. "Blotting Out the
a b

Truth"  (PDF). 39.3. pp. 1–12. Retrieved  January 10,  2018.

2. ^ U.S. Patent 293,545 Fountain Pen, February 12, 1884
3. ^ "Hall of Fame Inventor Profile".  National Inventors Hall of Fame. Retrieved August
27,  2018.
4. ^ Jump up to:    "Death List of a Day".  The New York Times. May 2, 1901. p. 9. Retrieved April
a b

19,  2021  – via Newspapers.com.

5. ^ Jump up to:a b "Death of Lewis E. Waterman". The Boston Globe. New York. May 2, 1901. p. 14.
Retrieved April 19, 2021 – via Newspapers.com.
6. ^ Nishimura, David (February 5, 2014).  "Lewis Edson Waterman's Long Strange
Trip".  Vintage Pen News. Retrieved January 10, 2018.
7. ^ Nishimura, David (March 18, 2014). "Lewis Edson Waterman's Unhappy Medium".  Vintage
Pen News. Retrieved January 10, 2018.
8. ^ Nishimura, David (2002).  "A Visit with L. E. Waterman". The Pennant. Retrieved January
10,  2018. Strange to say, pen collectors seem entirely unaware of where the Waterman
gravesite lies . . . Though one might expect a site in New York for a man who had lived the
 last 20-odd years of his life in Brooklyn, Waterman was in fact laid to rest just outside Boston,
in Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

External links