The Chronoswiss Styloscope.
This was actually fun.
The people at the desk stared at me. I asked to buy a fountain pen. In Baselworld, the world’s biggest watch show. They answered me, in a somewhat haughty German-accented tone, that they were a watch company and not a pen company.
I told them that Mr. Lang, their boss and owner and founder, told me to just go to the desk and ask for a pen. So, I said, go ask him. He is over there, I pointed. And I waved at him. Oh yes, he said as he smiled. And that is how the ladies at the desk of Chronoswiss learned that there was, in fact, a whole cabinet of fountain pens at the annual Chronoswiss booth in Baselworld.
I first met with Chronoswiss watch company founder Gerd-RĂ¼diger in the early 2000s. The watchmaker was going around Asia with his distributors, and we were talking about how he chose to start a mechanical watch company in 1983, the middle of the quartz crisis.
What I noticed, though, was his fountain pen. A transparent green Pelikan? Then I noticed that the other people in his group had the same pen. If these were the collectible Green Oceans, three of them in one room was pretty much unheard of. And, let us be clear to people that aren’t fountain pen geeks, colored Pelican demonstrator fountain pens aren’t cheap and aren’t all that easy to even find. So these weren’t corporate gifts or anything.
It turns out that Mr. Lang was an avid avid fountain pen nut. Besides having one of the most complete collections of wrist timers in the world at one point, he loved the tactile feel of fountain pens. So he went to German pen company Pelikan and asked them to collaborate with him, an independent German watch brand.
The end result is the relatively unknown Chronoswiss Styloscope, a very special release that uses Mr. Lang’s favored green color. He signed all the watch (and pen) warranty cards with his green ink and using a Pelican M800 green demonstrator he loved.
Demonstrator fountain pens were actually meant to demonstrate the workings of the pens and in particular Pelikan’s special filling system. They were tools, not collector items.
The colored transparent Pelikans have their own following amongst collectors. The Green Ocean was a small run in the early 1990s. Another one, the Blue Ocean was the company’s first official limited edition released in 1993.
In celebration of his company’s twentieth anniversary, he went to Pelikan and they agreed to make him a limited edition fountain pen that had the special details he used in his watches. So in 2002 the Chronoswiss Styloscope was announced to the world. It is a deeper, almost emerald green than the Green Ocean. It uses sterling silver furniture and the details such as the onion shaped crown of the watches appear on the end of the clip and the cap top. The Chronoswiss logo appears on the cap top, the individual number of the pen (out of 999 pieces) appears at the bottom on the piston knob. This matches all the proper documentation that comes with the pen, which is signed in green ink by Mr. Lang just as he used to do for his watches. Note that we said the Chronoswiss logo appeared on the cap top. That’s the only logo that appears. Pelikan, whether logo or special clip design, appear nowhere. The pen wasn’t even sold or offered by Pelikan.
This pen resides in an unusual place. Many companies have someone make them pens, but few will have this level of actual connection to the owner and to a pen that even pen enthusiasts would treasure. It followed on the heels of two very collectible Pelikans, the Green Ocean and the Blue Ocean, though almost a decade later. Yet pen people that cover those first two often don’t know of the Styloscope. And watch people won’t pay that much attention to it.
The pen was delivered with an extra nib (you get two 19C-750 two-toned nibs, an M and an OB) in a cork-stoppered vial inside a green leather case. In a green box. It has a little booklet explaining the story of the pen and of Mr. Lang, it had a little notepad, it had the five-year warranty card and it had Mr. Lang’s signature, by his own hand. With his green fountain pen and his green ink.
