Pen

• 1. Introduction

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  The pen is one of the oldest tools humanity has ever put to everyday use. In 953, the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, Ma'ad al-Mu'izz, demanded a pen that would not stain his hands or his clothes. What he received was a device that held ink inside a reservoir and fed it directly to the writing tip. That single request, made over a thousand years ago, planted the seed for an object now found in nearly every pocket, desk drawer, and schoolbag on earth.

  How did humans go from slicing reeds along the Nile to rolling a tungsten carbide ball across paper at speed? What quirk of chemistry separates a ballpoint pen from a rollerball pen? And who, exactly, invented the modern ballpoint while fleeing Nazi Germany? The answers reveal a story that spans ancient Egypt, a Croatian factory that still operates today, and a student in Paris who changed the way we carry ink.

• 2. Reeds, Quills, and the Craft of Early Writing

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  Thin reed brushes and reed pens cut from Juncus maritimus, the sea rush, were the tools that ancient Egyptian scribes used to write on papyrus scrolls. Steven Roger Fischer, in his book A History of Writing, argues from finds at Saqqara that the reed pen may have been used on parchment as far back as the First Dynasty, around 3000 BC. That is a remarkable lifespan for a single tool; the reed pen stayed in use right through the Middle Ages, and it survives today in parts of Pakistan and India, where young students write on small wooden boards called Takhti.

  The shift from reed to quill happened as papyrus gave way to animal skins, vellum, and parchment. The smoother surface of skin rewarded finer writing, and the flight feather of a large bird turned out to be perfectly suited to the task. Quills were already being used at Qumran, in Judea, to write portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date to around 100 BC. St. Isidore of Seville mentions quills in the 7th century. The quill remained the dominant writing instrument in the West from that century all the way into the 19th, and it was quill pens that scribes used to write and sign the Constitution of the United States in 1787.

  To make a working quill, a feather had to be cured through aging or heat, after which a craftsman slit the shaft and carved the sides into a pointed tip. With practice and a small knife, the job could be done quickly and cheaply. That ease of preparation explains why quills outlasted so many alternatives for so long.

• 3. Metal, Patents, and Mass Production

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  Metal pens appeared long before most people assume. Specimens found at Pompeii, now held in the Naples Archaeological Museum, confirm their use before the eruption of 79 CE. A Romano-British copper-alloy pen with a conical body and a slit forming two tines is preserved in the British Museum. Samuel Pepys noted "a silver pen to carry ink in" in his diary for August 1663, suggesting that ink-holding metal pens were already circulating among the well-off in 17th-century London.

  "New invented" metal pens were advertised in The Times in 1792. A metal pen point was patented in 1803, though that patent was never commercially developed. Bryan Donkin advertised a manufacturing patent for metal pens in 1811. It was John Mitchell of Birmingham who finally cracked the production problem, beginning to mass-produce pens with metal nibs in 1822. Steel nibs improved steadily after that, until dip pens with metal nibs came into general use.

  The factory tradition that Mitchell started would eventually reach an industrial scale in a very different country. Slavoljub Eduard Penkala, a Croatian engineer, developed the first solid-ink fountain pen in 1907. Partnering with the Croatian entrepreneur Edmund Moster, he built the Penkala-Moster Company into one of the largest pen-and-pencil factories in the world. That company still operates under the name TOZ-Penkala, where TOZ stands for Tvornica olovaka Zagreb, meaning Zagreb Pencil Factory.

• 4. The Reservoir Problem

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  Ma'ad al-Mu'izz's request in 953 was an early attempt to solve what engineers call the reservoir problem: how do you store enough ink inside the pen itself so that the writer never has to stop and dip? The mechanism of the pen built for the Caliph remains unknown, and only a single record of it survives.

  The next documented attempt came in 1636. Daniel Schwenter, a German inventor, described in his book Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae a pen made from two quills: one quill rode inside the other and served as an ink reservoir, sealed with cork, with ink squeezed through a small hole to the writing tip. Bartholomew Folsch received a British patent in 1809 for a pen with an ink reservoir. Then, in May 1827, the French Government patented a design by Petrache Poenaru, a Romanian student in Paris, for a fountain pen that used a quill as its ink container. Fountain pen patents and commercial production picked up significantly in the 1850s.

  The modern fountain pen solves the delivery problem through a feed, a specially shaped solid block with channels and grooves that carry ink from the reservoir to the slit in the nib. Capillary action pulls the ink out of that slit as the nib moves across paper. A fountain pen nib has no moving parts at all, which is part of what makes it so durable.

• 5. Biro and the Ballpoint Revolution

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  John J. Loud received the first patent on a ballpoint pen on the 30th of October 1888, but it was a Hungarian newspaper editor who turned the concept into a product that changed daily life. In 1938, Laszlo Biro, working with his brother George, a chemist, designed a pen with a tiny ball in its tip, free to rotate in a socket. As the pen moved, the ball picked up ink from an internal cartridge and deposited it on the paper. Biro filed a British patent on the 15th of June 1938.

  Two years later, with Nazi Germany closing in, Laszlo and George Biro, along with their friend Juan Jorge Meyne, moved to Argentina. On the 17th of June 1943, they filed for an Argentine patent and formed Biro Pens of Argentina. Commercial models were available by the summer of 1943. The ballpoint succeeded where earlier pens struggled because its oil-based ink is viscous enough that it does not leave the tip by capillary action. That means the ink dries almost instantly and lasts longer than in other pen types.

  Ballpoint technology kept evolving. Erasable ballpoint pens entered the market in 1979 when Paper Mate introduced the Erasermate. By then, ballpoints had already replaced fountain pens as the most common everyday writing tool.

• 6. Felt Tips, Rollerballs, and Modern Variants

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  Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company invented the fiber- or felt-tipped pen in the 1960s. Paper Mate's Flair was among the first felt-tip pens to reach the U.S. market in that decade, and it has led the category ever since. Rollerball pens followed in the early 1970s, designed to blend the reliability of the ballpoint with the smoother wet-ink feel of the fountain pen. Technological advances in the late 1980s and early 1990s refined the rollerball's performance significantly.

  The gel pen pushed the color possibilities further still. Because gel ink consists of a water-based gel with pigment suspended in it, manufacturers can produce metallic, neon, pastel, glitter, and glow-in-the-dark varieties that oil-based ballpoint ink cannot match. Gel ink also appears more clearly on dark or slick surfaces because of its opacity.

  Brush pens occupy a different corner of the market. Their tips consist of a small brush fed from a liquid ink reservoir, making them a practical alternative to traditional ink brushes for Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The compliance of the brush tip lets the writer vary line width significantly with small changes in pressure, which is a quality that no ball-tipped pen can replicate.

• 7. Material, Status, and the Ink Brush Tradition

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  In East Asian calligraphy, the ink brush holds a prestige that no pen has ever displaced. The body of a calligraphy brush can be made from bamboo, or from materials as rare as ivory, silver, or gold. Its head can be formed from the hair or feathers of weasels, rabbits, deer, chickens, ducks, goats, pigs, or even tigers. Both China and Japan maintain a tradition of making a brush from the hair of a newborn child, kept as a once-in-a-lifetime souvenir. That custom traces back to a legend about an ancient Chinese scholar who placed first in the Imperial examinations using just such a personalized brush. Calligraphy brushes are widely regarded as an extension of the calligrapher's arm, and pen calligraphy, even today, does not carry the same standing.

  At the other end of the spectrum, expensive fountain pens and premium ballpoints have become status symbols in the modern world. The pen persists despite the typewriter and the personal computer keyboard because it remains the primary means of writing for most people. A paper pen invented in 2007 by Nasima Akhtar of Jashore, Bangladesh, points to one direction the object may yet travel: it is made from biodegradable paper and contains seeds at its base, so that when the ink runs out, the pen can be planted and grown.