Scripting the History of the Pen

Welcome to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary! My name is Elan Baumgarten. Most people I know love to write with pencils. You can erase it, they might say. To me, something about pencils just doesn’t feel quite right. That is why I write almost exclusively with pens. The pen or pencil stroke just feels so much cleaner when you write each character with a pen, versus a pencil. So how did the pen find its place in our world? There were two relatively simultaneous and separate inventions of the pen’s most distant ancestors. These were in Ancient Egypt, and Ancient China. In Egypt they discovered that a reed could be dipped in ink, and used to write on papyrus. China on the other hand used brushes to write on paper, which they had invented, if you recall last week’s episode. They had to invent paper as they lacked the access to papyrus which other early civilizations used to write. Otherwise they would have had to carve stone tablets like the Sumerians. The first version of the pen that most people are familiar with due to popularization in the media and television is the quill. There have been references to the quill’s use around the 7th Century, but it is believed that their use could go back much farther. The quill was so revolutionary that it was used until the 19th Century because of the ease that they allowed writers, and their reliability. These quills were so popular, that the different social and economic classes even used different kinds. The lower and middle class might use the more affordable quills, made out of geese or other wild fowl. The upper class however, preferred to use swan feathers, as they viewed them as being more regal and elegant. We will talk about the new type of pen that would soon make the quill obsolete, but first, make sure to download this episode so that you can listen to it from anywhere, and follow us to be notified the next time we push out an episode where you can hear the ordinary become extraordinary. Now, back to the device that replaced the quill. The nib pen. The one thing that made the quill so inferior to the devices that we have today, is the access to an ink reservoir. In a nib pen, the metal tip allows the re-dipping of the pen into ink to be much easier and faster. This allowed for its other commonplace name, the dip pen. These pens were being mass produced in Europe, namely England. Bermingham was actually the place where John Mitchell invented a machine that could mass-produce the metal tips in 1828. He is the reason that England became the location of the largest pen-manufacturing operation in the world during the 19th Century. It is important to mention that these nib pens have been found throughout history, such as one being found in the ruins of Pompei, but they were not widely used. The pen at Pompeii was made of bronze. Around the mid-19th Century the fountain pen was patented. The fountain pen also happens to be the first ancestor of the pen that is still widely used. You might ask what made the fountain pen so much better than all of the other versions. The answer is that it contained an inner vestibule which brought on a flow of ink when the tip was pressed on paper. Suddenly, there was no need to have a jar of ink. There were attempts to make something similar to the fountain pen previously, and some even believe that Leonardo Da Vinci had a prototype for a similar invention, but none of them were proven to work, and had many construction errors. In 1888 the ballpoint pen was invented, this is the same pen that most people use today. There is a rolling ball at the tip of the pen that prevents the ink from drying out, and helps to distribute the ink evenly across the paper. During the time following their invention, you could replace the ink in almost every ball-point pen, but today they are designed to be thrown away once they dry out. During WW2 the ballpoint pen was popular because they did not leak at high altitudes. Today we have just about every kind of pen you can think about, from the felt pen, to the erasable pen, and there are even pens that have been designed for astronauts to use in zero-gravity. Just in the United States alone, over two billion pens are produced each year. China, on the other hand, produces 38 billion pens a year. Despite being the manufacturer of around 80% of the world’s pens, they are still unable to produce quality products, with many of their pens having faulty tips. Next time you go out to buy a pen, try and find a nicer refillable one, to avoid the pens that you buy adding to the 1.6 billion pens that Americans throw out every year. Thank you for listening to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. My name is Elan Baumgarten. Make sure to download our episodes to listen from anywhere in the world, and follow to be notified the next time we push out a new episode. Tell your friends and family about Becoming Sage, where they too can listen to the ordinary become extraordinary!