Your nib says "iridium." There has been none in it since 1952.
What decides how a fountain pen writes is neither the gold nor the steel, but a bead less than a millimetre across, welded to the tip of the nib. That bead has been called "iridium" for as long as anyone can remember. In the pens sold today, there is almost none left.
1834: a hard grain lands on a 16-karat nib
In 1833 the English inventor John Isaac Hawkins came across the work of Wollaston and Tennant on iridium and osmium, and it occurred to him that a metal that hard belonged on a pen. The following year he managed to weld a grain of it onto a 16-karat nib. No tool would bite into the grains, so he ground them with diamond dust and oil on a copper disc spinning in a high-speed lathe.
In 1835 Hawkins sold the business to American backers for £300 plus a share of sales. Aaron Porter Cleveland, who crossed the Atlantic to learn the craft, later recorded that even a skilled workman could finish only four pens a day. Hawkins himself died poor in New Jersey in 1855.
The last one was a 1952 Parker 51
The "iridium" of that era was not refined at all: it was a natural alloy carrying about as much osmium and ruthenium as iridium. From the 1910s onward, manufacturers began trying other recipes, some with hardly any iridium in them.
In the late 1990s John Mottishaw and Kurt Montgomery ran compositional analyses on nib tipping. The last nib in which iridium turned up came from a Parker 51 of 1952, and it measured 2.6%.
2023: the manufacturer got it wrong too
In April 2023 Pelikan described its own tipping as a "wolfram-iridium alloy." A collector wrote to ask, and the answer that came back named tungsten and ruthenium. The stamp "Iridium Point Germany" works much the same way: it does not mean the nib was made in Germany. As long as the tipping material was bought there, the nib itself can be made anywhere.
Japan reads it differently. Pilot melts metal powder in a plasma flash, lets surface tension round it into an "iridosmine ball," and electrically welds that to a 14-karat nib. Iridosmine is the name for an alloy of iridium and osmium.
Tipping is there for longevity, not smoothness
Brian Goulet of The Goulet Pen Company (237,000 subscribers) explains that the point of tipping material is wear resistance. Grind an untipped nib and it will write smoothly enough — it just will not last. On the Mohs scale stainless steel is about 5.5, iridium about 6.5, tungsten carbide 9. Polish the bead off a soft gold nib and it can wear down within a year.
World production of iridium runs to roughly three tonnes a year, and most of the iridium on Earth is thought to have arrived by meteorite. Only the name has stayed on our nibs, carried along by 190 years of momentum.