319 Washington St.
Boston Mass. 1894-1917
Produced high quality eyedropper fill, hump fill and lever fill
fountain pens in hard rubber. They made overlays on pens with
all 3 filling systems. The most common overlay would be lever fill
or eyedropper fill ladies pens.
The original name was the Boston Fountain Pen Co but after they came up
with an inner cap on their pens they changed the name in 1904 to The
Boston Safety Pen Co to cash in on the popularity of the "safety
pen" craze, This company may have grown out of the Colonial Fountain
Pen Co.
At some point the company was taken over by 2 young
brothers, Charles Edward and George Franklin Brandt. The Brandt
brother had been fountain pen makers before joining Boston sometime
after 1910. Although Boston was making money and selling high
quality pens they just didn't seem to have running capital. They
sold the company to Wahl in 1917 because Wahl wanted to sell
fountain pens and they had a lot of cash from selling mechanical
pencils. George Brandt went on to be a salesman for Moore and stayed
with them for over 20 years. Charles
went on to become a salesman, but I don't think it was in the pen
business.
The early Boston eyedroppers were typical of the eyedropper era and
had nothing notable about them. The Hump filler was similar to the
Welty/Evans or the Wirt and had a sliding collar on the barrel to
lock it in place.
The lever filler was the pen that really advanced them onto the
national market. That coupled with an inner cap gave them a pen
design that would be almost standard for the next 30 years for most
of the pen industry. They also had the roller clip on their
pens. When Wahl acquired them their line of lever pens became the
Tempoint pens with very little change. Wahl sold off the leftover
pens and assembled all of the leftover parts with Boston nibs and
then later Tempoint nibs.
If the Brandt brothers just had some cash on hand, they could have
made the Boston pen one of the big pen companies, but instead Wahl
cashed in on all of their effort. |
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