History Of The Fountain Pen

In our Drink Deep times for Fire & Water (to decode, our Sr. High time in our student ministry at our church) we've been talking a lot about failure, what it is, how we can learn from it, etc. This week we;re talking about learning from our failures and how bad times can be good for us.

So here's a little story that goes along with that I found cool but didn't have room for it on Sunday.

"In 1883 a New York insurance broker named Lewis Waterman handed his new fountain pen to a client who was about to sign a major contract. The pen not only didn't write, it also dumped its contents onto the paperwork, ruining it. By the time Waterman returned from his office with another contract, the client had signed with someone else. Waterman vowed never to let that happen again-to him or anyone else. It took him a year to do it, but he invented the world's first properly functioning fountain pen, which used capillary action to send a steady and reliable flow of ink from the reservoir to the "nib", or point, of the pen."

If it hadn't been for someone's failure and him not being content with the current situation, we wouldn't have pens today that click, so I can annoy people with them in meetings...

T