Lewis Edson Waterman was born in Decatur, Otsego County, N. Y. He traced his ancestry to Robert Waterman, who emigrated from England to Plymouth, Massachussets, about 1636 and later settled in Marshfield. Elisha Waterman was prospering at his trade of wagon-builder when Lewis was born but he died of a fever when the latter was still a small child.
The boy obtained no regular schooling until after he was ten years old, but thereafter he devoted as much time as he could to study, even attending the seminary in Charlottesville, N. Y. , for a short period when he was fifteen.
In 1853 his mother married again, and Waterman accompanied the family to Kankakee County, Ill. , where for four years he taught school in the winter and worked as a carpenter in summer. His health would not permit him to continue in manual labor, however, and between 1857 and 1861 he was variously occupied teaching school, selling books, and studying the Pitman system of shorthand. He mastered the subject so thoroughly that during the year before the Civil War he was able to give instruction in it. Through his experience as a book agent Waterman had discovered that he was an able salesman and in 1862 he gave up teaching to sell life insurance. After some two years he was made the Boston representative of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, in which capacity he continued until 1870, building up a substantial and profitable business. Poor health forced him to give up the Boston agency, and for the next thirteen years he spent much of his time in travel. In 1883 he turned his attention seriously to the perfection of the fountain pen, in which he had been passively interested for several years. A number of fountain pens had been patented previously, but to his mind none of them was satisfactory. He moved to New York City and there began a series of experiments in which he progressed so rapidly that before the year was out he applied for his first patents, which were issued on Feburary 12 and November 4, 1884. His initial improvement was in the ink-feeding device. It consisted mainly of a piece of hard rubber inserted into the open end of the pen barrel and holding the gold pen in position. On the side of this piece of rubber next to the pen was a square groove, in the bottom of which narrow fissures had been made with fine saws; extending from the ink reservior in the barrel to the nibs of the pen, these fissures automatically controlled the flow of ink. Upon obtaining his patents, Waterman established the Ideal Pen Company in New York to manufacture his pen. Three years later, in 1887, the business had grown to such an extent that it was incorporated as the L. E. Waterman Company, Waterman acting as president and manager until his death. In this capacity he not only successfully directed the manufacturing and selling branches of his business but also continued to improve the pen, obtaining patents for modifications of his feeding device as well as for improvements of the joints between the nozzle and the barrel and between the cap and the barrel, the most noted being a joint made of disparate cones. He died in Brooklyn, N. Y. , survived by his widow and by three children of his first marriage, and was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Boston, Massachussets.
Waterman was twice married: first, June 29, 1858, to Sarah Ann Roberts, in Pittsfield, Ill. , and second, October 3, 1872, to Sarah Ellen Varney, in Topsfield, Massachussets.
