The Waterman Pen Company is a major French manufacturing company of luxury fountain pens and inks, based in Paris, France. The firm was established in 1884 in New York City by Lewis Waterman,[1] being one of the few remaining first-generation fountain pen companies, as "Waterman S.A."
Since 2000 Waterman has been owned by the American group Newell Brands, through its subsidiary, Sanford L.P.
History
Lewis Waterman, an insurance salesman in New York City, invented the first truly functional fountain pen in the early 1880s. An apocryphal story is that a typical pen of the day leaked all over a contract he had prepared for a large policy, and by the time Waterman returned with a new document, his client had signed with someone else.[2] Later, Waterman was working as a pen salesman in New York for a new company founded in the spring of 1883 by a volatile inventor named Frank Holland. Holland abandoned his company after only six weeks; Waterman stepped in and took over, fitting the pens with a simplified feed of his own design.[3]