Filling without wetting the nib — the most complicated fountain pen ever built was an answer to the ballpoint
In the 1950s the enemy of the fountain pen makers was the ballpoint. What they were losing on was not the writing, but the fuss: every refill meant dipping the nib into the bottle and wiping it afterwards. To do away with that one chore, Sheaffer ran a telescoping metal tube through the inside of a fountain pen.
What the ballpoint took was not the writing
Sheaffer was itself selling ballpoint refills by the mid-1940s. Ballpoints of the day were notorious for skipping, and the company's advertising claimed its own refills held three times the ink of the average one. Customers drifted across all the same, because a ballpoint did not put ink on your fingers.
The 1949 groundwork: Touchdown
The foundation was Touchdown, the filling system of 1949. You unscrewed the blind cap at the end of the barrel, drew the plunger up, dipped the nib in ink and pushed the plunger straight back down. The air trapped inside was compressed and squeezed the rubber sac flat; at the bottom of the stroke the sac sprang back and pulled ink in. Not a screw, not a pump, but air pressure crushing the sac from the outside. In the spring of 1950 the line was slimmed down and renamed TM, for Thin Model.
A tube reaches out from under the nib
The Snorkel of 1952 was that same Touchdown with one thin metal tube added. The tube runs forward through the feed, and only its tip goes into the ink; once the pen is full, it withdraws back under the nib. Neither nib nor barrel gets wet, so there is nothing to wipe. The advertising called it dunk-free filling. The patent was filed in November 1951 and granted in 1956 (US 2,769,427, invented by Lynn P. Martin of the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Company). The earliest tubes were 14K gold; stainless steel came later.
The price was four places that had to seal
All of which made the inside crowded: the tube, a secondary feed running inside the tube, the sac, the housing around the sac, an O-ring. Four points have to seal, and if any one of them leaks the pen will not fill. Put the other way round, a healthy example builds real pressure — enough, it is said, to shoot water about six feet. There are stories of them being banned from schools.
Prices covered a wide span: the entry-level Special was $7.95 in 1956, while the top Autograph went for $35 and up. In 1959 the same mechanism went into the oversized PFM, the Pen For Men, but it was poorly received and vanished during the 1960s. Sources disagree about when the Snorkel itself ended — some say 1959, others 1963.