Aikin Lambert
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Aikin Lambert was born in New York in 1864 from the union of two jewellers, James Cornelious Aikin and Henry Lambert, who joined forces to enter the then emerging market of writing instruments. Their initial production was focused on pencils and straws for nibs, made of precious metals, and companies such as Waterman and Wirt were supplied by them for the nibs. Around 1880 they began to market the first fountain pens as agents of the Wirt.
The Aikin Lambert began to produce its own line of pens in about 1890. These were good pens of conventional construction with eyedropper filler, made of chiseled hard rubber or mottled hard rubber. The models made with precious metals (silver and gold), which were undoubtedly among the highest quality pens produced in that period, were particularly valuable. In general, the products of Aikin Lambert are recognized by the presence of the initials A.L.Co.
At the beginning of the century Aikin Lambert started to produce some automatic filling models, starting from safety models, and then experimenting with various other filling systems; they produced match filler pen with equipped with a detachable clip that could be used for filling, in 1907 they introduced a pen that used a sort of pump filler, and they used, like Waterman, also the sleeve filler.
Although this advertisement is showing a significant link with the Wirt (they were dealers at least until August 1903), in the second half of the first decade of the century Aikin Lambert was influenced and maintained very close relations with its neighbour Waterman, on behalf of which it produced the mechanical pencils, and from which it was absorbed in the period between 1906 and 1911, becoming in practice a subbrand.[1] However, production continued for some years: at the beginning were produced hard rubber models that were substantially identical to the analogues of Waterman, but also models in celluloid of good quality.
In the following years the quality of the Aikin Lambert pens began to degrade progressively, and in the '30s the production was substantially limited to the production of the cheapest lines of pens; the prestige of the brand was thus progressively reduced until its definitive disappearance.