Listening to an old radio episode of “Dragnet.” They’re investigating a murfer and one of the items found is “a ball-point fountain pen, a cheap one you can get at the drug store for 79 cents.” (Quoting from memory)
I know what a ball-point pen is (also known as a “biro” (U.K.) or “dot pen” (India))
I know what a fountain pen is.
The two terms are used to distinguish between the two kinds of pens.
What’s a “ball-point fountain pen”?
I wonder if they meant retractable fountain pen (there are such things, but I don’t know if there were ever any cheap ones).
Or possibly the actor mis-spoke his lines? So used to have the word “fountain” before the word “pen” that he slipped it in there without realizing it.
I have a retractable fountain pen. It’s a fairly sophisticated device and I don’t think it could be found for less than a dollar at a drug store in the '50s or whenever this episode was made.
It was repeated by two different characters. And the dialogue delivery on “Dragnet” is very deliberate.
I wonder if in the early days a ball-point pen was considered a type of fountain pen, because it held ink inside the barrel, in contrast with a dip pen.
It was a special type of ball-point pen. You can see it in the July 1948 Popular Mechanics. (p. 189 if it doesn’t open there.)
Now all we have to do is figure out what a “murfer” is.
Actually, in that reference, it’s not clear at all to me that “ball-point fountain pen” means anything different from just “ball-point pen.”
It even uses “ball-point pen” twice as a synonym. I suppose it could be indicating a special type of ball-point pen, but nothing in that little item seems to do so unambiguously.
It’s fat fingers on a tiny keyboard.
And, indeed, here’s Laszlo Biro’s U.S. patent on a type of “fountain pen” that seems to be nothing more than the famous Biro ball-point pen —
So, I’m now leaning towards thinking that “ball-point fountain pen” is just an older, very precise name for a ball-point pen.
Ninjaed by a second.
Well worth investigating.
The word “fountain” in “fountain pen” originally just meant that it has its own storage of ink.
A newer meaning is that it is a nib pen (a manufactured top rather than say, a quill… )
This second meaning is newer than the show you are quoting.
They might have called it a Biro, or Birome in South America, but thats a commercial name and they probably didnt want to call it by a trademark/brand name.
So… it makes sense, its a fountain pen in that it contains a storage of ink , and its a ball point rather than a nib pen.
It seems to me that before ball-points there were dip quill pens and fountain pens; so perhaps the new-fangled ball-point was additionally called “fountain” because it had an enclosed ink supply.
Has anyone mentioned yet the hypothesis that “fountain pen” may have simply meant a pen that has its own internal ink supply?
The only oddity is the 79 cents. The first ball point pen I remember cost $15 (and leaked all over the place). And that would be more like 150 of today’s shrunken, wizened dollars. Why anone would have bought one escapes me. This would have been in the late 1940s.
But yes, “fountain pen” would have meant any pen with its own ink reservoir.
Popular Science, September 1956, “Things You Never Knew About Your Fountain Pen.”
Oops. You’re remembering that there were a few more of those technical bugs.