Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,013

This is the grave of George Safford Parker.

Born in Shullsberg, Wisconsin in 1863, Parker was well enough off to go to college at Upper Iowa University (which still exists, but I had never heard of it, which after this long in academia always surprises me when this happens) and then moved to Janesville, Wisconsin. He was mostly making money by teaching telegraphy, but that wasn’t enough money so he started selling pens on the side. But the pens were super low quality. This is just at the moment when the technology was moving from bottles of ink with a feather pen or some version of it to the modern pen. But ink links were so common and we all know how annoying it is to be wearing something and you have a pen in it and it leaks and it stains the clothes.

So Parker decided to improve the pen. He created his own company–Parker Pen–in 1888. The next year, he patented the modern fountain pen. They caught on. He built a big factory in Janesville that by 1908 was the largest employer in the city. He became the pen capitalist. Had to be someone. By 1906, he was producing extra fancy pens for collectors and the super rich, creating a luxury market for pens. I get a bit picky about pens myself–different people write differently and so requirements are different for everyone, but those who really really get off over pens, that’s a group of people I never really totally understood. But hey, whatever, there’s a lot worse things one can obsess over!

In 1914, Parker designed a special pen for trench warfare that would combine dry ink tablets with water. Let it not be said the man didn’t understand his developing markets. By 1928, his pens were beginning to be made with plastic to take advantage of new materials that would be durable and inexpensive. Parker remained the head of the company until he retired in 1933. He did have at least one hobby, which was travel. He wrote a few travel books as well, though I have no idea if they sold. I hope he wrote them with his own pens instead of using a typewriter.

There’s not a heck of a lot else to say about Parker–he’s not that exciting, his business wasn’t large enough to have any attention paid to its workers by labor historians, and most of the time he appears in books in the last several decades is just hack stuff about how he was a “self-made man” or in the kind of local history publications that just repeats most of the same stuff I’m finding and giving you here. But that’s OK, it’s not as if the development of the modern pen isn’t worth a post after years of this series. I did find one exception on the labor front–when he built a new building in 1919, he got in trouble with the building trades over wage rates. But that’s pretty common and doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the daily work inside his factory.

Parker died in 1937. He was 73 years old.

George Safford Parker is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Janesville, Wisconsin.

If you would like this series to visit other people in the world of American pens, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lewis Waterman is in Boston and Walter Sheaffer is in Fort Madison, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.