The Eclipse company is
one of those pen makers that normal people have never heard of, common
or garden pen weirdos have some vague notion of, and only really
specialized pen savants have a real grip on. Since I fall
somewhere between the latter two, I can't contribute much to the fund
of knowledge. Eclipse started in the US in the rough and tumble
pen world of the early 20th century (a different company having been
bought and re-named in 1903), and in the mid-1920s was a big enough
player to open a plant in Canada. The late 1920s were bad
economic news, and the Eclipse company, like so many other pen makers,
took it in the teeth. However, the Canadian wing, apparently
because they made really cheap pens that appealed to a broader
audience, survived the Great Depression more or less intact. It
eventually went on to buy the US parent, and is still in operation
today in the line of... I will say "inexpensive..." pens for
advertising, banks, hotels, and similar.
I am, as in the case of my button filler,
a bit up in the air over the dating of this pen. I'm going to say
1940s, as it's a bulb-filler, and that's the sort of mechanism that was
pretty much abandoned before the middle of the century, and also
because it's got that 1930s flat-top shape. It might even hail
from the '30s, given the transparent barrel (it is, trust me) and
general shape-- I say later only because the steel point hasn't
entirely dissolved.
This pen was brought to me by a friend, in a desperate state-- fill-bulb missing, barrel
packed with old ink, point somewhat bent and corroded. It wasn't
until well into the clean-up that I even realized that the dark parts
of the barrel were transparent. Once I'd monkeyed with it for a
while, it came back into function gratifyingly, although it's still far
from perfect. The bulb-filler, a poor-man's Vacumatic, gives a vast
ink supply as the breather tube runs the full length of the pen, and I
can see how someone back in the day looking for an affordable pen could
be drawn to this one.
Specifications: Medium steel
point.
Bulb filler. 12.6 cm long capped, 15.5 cm
posted.
Condition: The body plastic in is amazing shape, given the other
problems it arrived with-- smooth, hardly a peccant mark on it.
Plating is gone from the clip, and possibly from the band-- it's
possible that the band is a different metal from the clip, and shows
the loss less. The point still shows some corrosion damage around
the slit.
Repairs: Cleared out barrel and breather tube of old ink (on the
latter, one may shout, "You got lucky!). Tapped out point and
feed, cleared the feed channels, and ground away damaged portion of
tipping (I keep saying I don't do nib-work; in this case, I couldn't
really do MORE damage, and the owner was right on hand to yell at
me). Replaced bulb with rubber sac-end. Replaced decorative
black and white tassie on the blind cap with one carefully sawn from a
donor pen.
Location: Regina, Saskatchewan
Please use your browser's
BACK button to return to the page you came from.
Website
design
by Dirck de Lint, renaissance thug, with the great assistance
of 
