You do not have to be in this hobby for any protracted amount of time before you notice that people can be rather particular about their nibs. Once you get the itch, it isn’t long before you start to develop your own preferences. Much marketing snobbery and ballyhoo has been employed convincing folks that gold is the superior medium for a nib, the more karats the better. A nib’s base metal, aided by its size and shape, does dictate many of the nib’s characteristics (e.g., spring/flex) but that is only one variable in the equation. The two most common classes of nib materials include stainless steel and gold. Both metals are alloys, a mixture of at least two metals made with the intent to impart certain desirable characteristics such as increased strength or hardness when compared with the metals in their pure forms. I invite you to read the piece that I previously wrote about the different karat weights of gold and how Pelikan has employed them over the past 94 years. My conclusion from that work was that 14C-585 gold seemed to be the optimum material from which to derive a pleasing and durable nib. Today, I would like to focus on a different alloy, in this case the tipping that accompanies each and every one of Pelikan’s nibs. If you follow Pelikan on social media, you may have seen a post from this past April indicating that their fountain pens are tipped with a “Wolfram-Iridium alloy.” This less often discussed topic has an interesting history in the fountain pen world and some neat research has previously been done regarding the tipping of a wide variety of nibs, but little has ever been written about Pelikan’s tipping. Most fountain pen users are familiar with the terms “Iridium” or “Iridium Tipped” as they relate to nibs, a label which was once a surrogate hallmark for quality. Frequently a misnomer, “Iridium Point Germany” is another common stamp that is usually found on lower quality nibs made in the Far East and India. Iridium is an epithet that has become nearly synonymous with all fountain pen tipping, a form of genericization that has persisted much longer than the actual practice of tipping pens with iridium. Read on to learn all about this element, how it came to be associated with nibs, and how Pelikan may or may not be using it in their manufacturing process.