What titanium feels like in your hand.

At Apple, there are rooms stacked with sheets and blocks of metal: aluminum, steel, titanium. When I designed parts, I would visit that room, pick the metals up one by one, and bend them a little, just to learn how each one felt in my hands. I could read the numbers on a data sheet,

Titanium was really surprising. It's not as light as aluminum, and people expect it to be. But when I flexed a sheet of it, it just sprang back. Aluminum bends and doesn’t return to normal. Titanium just bounced back.. That's why so many small parts inside consumer products are titanium. Phones get dropped over and over for years, and the titanium inside takes each impact, flexes, and comes back without cracking.

Years later, when we started machining our own titanium pens, I learned the other side of that toughness. Titanium is really hard to cut. If you run the cutter at the wrong speed and the metal gums up on the tool instead of cutting clean, (literally like chewing gum on your drill, yuck!). It took us weeks of testing to tune the speed, and every part needs its own specific parameters.

The surface finish can't be rushed either. Our pens come in two. One is sandblasted which forms a gentle natural gray satin-like finish. The other is a mirror polish. I loved how the polished titanium looked on the Apple iPhone Air, and knew I had to do that for my pens.. There is only one way to get a good mirror polish on titanium: by hand. Someone spends hours polishing each of our pens.

One thing about the mirror finish: it scratches. Titanium is tough, but it isn't very hard, and a polished surface scratches quickly. To us that isn't a flaw. It's the same idea as our leather. The pen is beautiful in your hand on day one, then it picks up marks and grows with you, the same types of marks you earn as you become better.

What you get is a pen that never rusts, springs back from every drop, and is 24 grams, about the same as an AA battery. Our aluminum pen weighs 16 grams and the steel one weighs 38 grams, so titanium is for people who want to feel the pen in their hand without it tiring them.

It's the most difficult metal we work with, and the one I'm proudest of.

Want to see our pen collection? Made from metals carrying their own history and filled with ink made for space, noble. pens.