What’s in a name? In August 1932, Parker began test marketing the next generation in fountain pens, the Golden Arrow. This radical new pen featured a compact plunger-operated pump filler (described in Anatomy of a Fountain Pen II: The Parker Vacumatic) that nestled at the back end of the barrel, eliminating the space-hungry pressure bar and sac. Parker had bought the rights to this design (U.S. Patent Nº 1,904,358, applied for on September 14, 1928 and issued on April 18, 1933) from Professor Arthur O. Dahlberg, an instructor in machine design at the University of Wisconsin, and had then spent some time perfecting it. Although the pump mechanism was novel, Dahlberg’s design was not entirely original; it was an extension of Huston Taylor’s 1905 bulb-filler patent (U.S. Patent Nº 802,668), and it also used portions of Charles Dunn’s 1920 pump-filler patent (U.S. Patent Nº 1,359,880).
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