Originally Posted by
Deb
In that other thread – yes, that one over there – there seems to be a bit of animus developing about Chinese pens. There may be good reasons for that, I don't know. The bit that interests me is the suggestion that some of their pens are "knock-offs" and therefore ethically dubious. It's undoubtedly true that some Chinese pens are copies of others such as the Parker 51 or the Lamy Safari. We're not talking about counterfeit here, just pens that are very like others, even extremely so. Is that ethically wrong?
Perhaps it is, but if it is, so was much of the history of fountain pen production. The earliest fountain pens all looked rather alike because they were emulating dip pens but copying really got off to a good start with the Parker Duofold. Following rapidly on its success Sheaffer and Wahl Eversharp produced distinctly similar pens. Some of the smaller pen makers like Swell, for instance, produced pens that could easily be mistaken for Duofolds. Across the Atlantic Macniven and Cameron turned out a lapis lazuli pen that, though it was a lever filler with Macniven and Cameron's leaf-shaped nib, was otherwise very similar to the Duofold, even to having a dummy blind cap.
Every pen that broke new ground and was successful had copies made, sooner or later. It took a few years but Conklin pens, like the Chicago, had a clear debt to the Sheaffer Balance. Wahl Eversharp's Doric gave rise to the Omas Extra and the Parker Vacumatic to the Omas Extra Lucens and a 1930s Unic from France. The Wahl Eversharp Skyline was widely copied, including the Skoda from Czechoslovakia and the Selsdon from England.
Filling systems were copied too. Sheaffer's Vacuum-Fill is De La Rue Onoto's plunger filler reprised. The Parker 61 broke new ground with the capillary filling system except that Pilot did it first in the 1930s.
That, I promise you, is a tiny fraction of the copying that went on in the development of the fountain pen, so the Chinese are neither the first nor the worst. Of course, copying isn't restricted to fountain pens, but has applied to motor cars and motorbikes, aircraft and power tools. Emulation, where does not breach patents, is a healthy thing and it is part of the process of design development. After a century of copying, it just isn't right to suggest that it's suddenly unethical when the Chinese do it!
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