I’m writing this on a computer powered by electricity and connected to a laser printer. For most of the several thousand years humans have been writing things down, though, the only computer in use was the moist gray one inside our skulls and the only printers connected to it to were the penta-digital ones at the ends of our arms. They proved highly adaptable, however, and could be fitted with a variety of useful writing attachments.
One of the first was the stylus used by the ancient Sumerians to mark their “cuneiform” (wedge-shaped) script into clay tablets. Later, the Greeks used metal styli to write on waxed tablets. Chiseling on stone tablets was always popular (secretaries were a lot tougher in those days), as were charcoal sticks. So was another ancient invention: the pen, a hand-held device for applying ink to a writing surface.
The ancient Egyptians used reeds, rushes, and hollow pieces of bamboo, and starting about 1000 B.C. the Chinese wrote with camel’s- or rat’s-hair brushes. For later western civilizations, however, the preferred writing tool was something millions of birds were already rather attached to: the quill. It entered use in Europe in the sixth century A.D. and remained the instrument of choice right up until the 19th century.
The best quills were the wing feathers of geese and swans. The quills were buried in hot sand to dry and remove the membranes that surrounded the quill ends, then hardened by a dip into an acid solution. The points were shaped and sharpened by the user. Poland and Russia were big quill suppliers, raising huge numbers of geese just for that purpose.
Metal points, or nibs, while occasionally used, had to wait until an efficient machine for making them came along in the 1830s. Even then, the best pens were hand-finished.
Whether your pen-point came from a Polish goose or a Sheffield steel mine, you had to dip it in ink — until 1884, when Lewis Waterman of the U.S. invented the fountain pen.
A fountain pen has a writing point, an ink reservoir, a means of filling it, and an external shell. You filled Waterman’s pen by squeezing ink into it with an eyedropper. Later pens had levers, plungers, and squeeze devices, and the fountain pen I ruined several shirts with in Grade 3 used a disposable ink-filled plastic cartridge.
Four years after Waterman invented the fountain pen, John Loud received a patent for a ball-point pen, designed to write on rough surfaces. Hungarian Lazlo Biro used his concept, and several advances in technology, to make a ball-point pen that wrote easily on paper. The Biro appeared in England in 1944, and today the ball-point is probably the most popular pen of all. It uses a precision-ground ball tip fitted into a socket into which ink from a reservoir is channeled. As the ball rotates, ink is deposited on it.
The next pen-innovation was the soft-tip, introduced by the Japanese in 1964. It was the first in a tsunami of tip types: fiber bundles bound together by a resin; hard felt; solid nylon or steel, fed ink through a narrow hole or exterior ink channels; and new ball-points that use liquid inks rather than the thick, gelatinous inks of the original ball-points.
No matter how innovative the pen design, every pen, in my view, suffers from the same shortcoming: it requires handwriting. If you, like me, have what used to be called sloppy handwriting but is now probably called chronic legibility impairment, then maybe for you, like me, the most important writing utensil ever invented was the typewriter.
Christopher Latham Sholes patented the first practical typewriter in 1868, but the first commercial typewriter came from the famous gunsmiths Eliphalet Remington and Sons. It had many of the elements we still associate with manual typewriters: a carriage that moved after each letter was struck, line-spacing and carriage-return mechanisms, raised letters on rods arranged in a semi-circle, an inked ribbon, and a keyboard. (One reason our keyboards have QWERTYUIOP across the top is that it made it easier for non-typing salesmen to sell Remington typewriters: all the letters needed to type “typewriter” are in the top row, so the salesman wouldn’t have to “hunt-and-peck.”)
The typewriter has gone through its own mutations, first, like Bob Dylan, going electric, and then doing away with the moving carriage and adding bouncing balls, daisy wheels, and so many electronic aids it’s become just another computer in disguise. But it, the pen and the computer I’m using still all have the same goal: to get words on paper.
I just hope you’ve found these particular words worth reading.
