A Brief History of Writing Instruments

Part 1: From cave paintings to the quill pen -- how ink, paper and pens were all
were invented.

Ancient writing instruments - From left to right: quills, bamboo, pen

sharpeners, fountain pens, pencils, brushes.

A Brief History of Writing

Instruments
Part 1: Introduction A Brief
History of Writing Instruments
Part 2: The History of the
Fountain Pen
Part 3: The Battle of the
Ballpoint Pens

By Mary Bellis

The history of writing instruments by which humans have

recorded and conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery lists, is the
history of civilization itself. This is how we know the story of us,
by the drawings, signs and words we have recorded.
The cave man's first inventions were the hunting club (not the auto security device) and the
handy sharpened-stone, the all-purpose skinning and killing tool. The latter was adapted
into the first writing instrument. The cave man scratched pictures with the sharpened-stone
tool onto the walls of his cave dwelling. The cave drawings represented events in daily life
such as the planting of crops or hunting victories.
With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These
symbols represented words and sentences, but were easier and faster to draw and
universally recognized for meaning. The discovery of clay made portable records possible
(you can't carry a cave wall around with you). Early merchants used clay tokens with
pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back
to about 8,500 B.C. With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping,
pictographs evolved and slowly lost their picture detail. They became abstract-figures
representing sounds in spoken communication. The alphabetreplaced pictographs between
1700 and 1500 B.C. in the Sinaitic world. The current Hebrew alphabet and writing became
popular around 600 B.C. About 400 B.C. the Greek alphabet was developed. Greek was the
first script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and the Roman
(later Latin) writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, when

the writing instruments were refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well
(around 600 A.D.)
The earliest means of writing that approached pen and paper as we know them today was
developed by the Greeks. They employed a writing stylus, made of metal, bone or ivory, to
place marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets made in hinged pairs, closed to protect
the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting (purely text messages made by hand)
originated in Greece. The Grecian scholar, Cadmus invented the written letter - text
messages on paper sent from one individual to another.
Writing was advancing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet
clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the
surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine
smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by
the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C.
Other cultures developed inks using the natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants
and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to each
color.
The invention of inks paralleled the introduction of paper. The early Egyptians, Romans,
Greeks and Hebrews, used papyrus and parchment papers. One of the oldest pieces of
writing on papyrus known to us today is the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" which dates back to
2000 B.C. The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink, from the hollow
tubular-stems of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted
bamboo stems into a primitive form of fountain pen. They cut one end into the form of a
pen nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the stem, squeezing the reed forced fluid to the
nib.
By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink developed, a composite of
iron-salts, nutgalls and gum, the basic formula, which was to
remain in use for centuries. Its color when first applied to
paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black
and then over the years fading to the familiar dull brown color
commonly seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was
invented in China in 105 A.D. but it only became known about
(due to Chinese secrecy) in Japan around 700 A.D. and
brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. Paper was not
widely used throughout Europe until paper mills were built in
the late 14th century.
The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history (over one-thousand
years) was the quill pen. Introduced around 700 A.D., the quill is a pen made from a bird
feather. The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five
outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the feathers curved outward and
away when used by a right-handed writer. Goose feathers were most common; swan
feathers were of a premium grade being scarcer and more expensive. For making fine lines,

crow feathers were the best, and then came the feathers of the eagle, owl, hawk and
turkey.
Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to replace them. There were other
disadvantages associated with their use, including a lengthy preparation time. The early
European writing parchments made from animal skins, required much scraping and
cleaning. A lead and a ruler made margins. To sharpen the quill, the writer needed a special
knife (origins of the term "pen-knife".) Beneath the writer's high-top desk was a coal stove,
used to dry the ink as fast as possible.
Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after another dramatic invention
took place: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or
metal letters in 1436. Simpler kinds of printing e.g. stamps with names, used much earlier
in China, did not find their way to Europe. During the centuries, many newer printing
technologies were developed based on Gutenberg's printing machine e.g. offset printing.
Articles written by hand had resembled printed letters until scholars began to change the
form of writing, using capitals and small letters, writing with more of a slant and connecting
letters. Gradually writing became more suitable to the speed the new writing instruments
permitted. The credit of inventing Italian 'running hand' or cursive handwriting with its
Roman capitals and small letters, goes to Aldus Manutius of Venice, who departed from the
old set forms in 1495 A.D. By the end of the 16th century, the old Roman capitals and Greek
letterforms transformed into the twenty-six alphabet letters we know today, both for upper
and lower-case letters.
When writers had both better inks and paper, and handwriting had developed into both an
art form and an everyday occurrence, man's inventive nature once again turned to
improving the writing instrument, leading to the development of the modern fountain pen.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100197.htm

Part 2: The History of the Fountain Pen

Illustration: Lewis Waterman Pens

By Mary Bellis

Lewis Waterman patented the first practical fountain pen in 1884.

Writing instruments designed to carry their own supply of ink had
existed in principle for over one hundred years before Waterman's
patent. For example, the oldest known fountain pen that has survived today was designed
by a Frenchmen named M. Bion and dated 1702. Peregrin Williamson, a Baltimore
shoemaker, received the first American patent for a pen in 1809. John Scheffer received a
British patent in 1819 for his half quill, half metal pen that he attempted to mass
manufacture. John Jacob Parker patented the first self-filling fountain pen in 1831. However,
early fountain pen models were plagued by ink spills and other failures that left them
impractical and hard to sell.
The fountain pen's design came after a thousand years of using quill-pens. Early inventors
observed the apparent natural ink reserve found in the hollow channel of a bird's feather
and tried to produce a similar effect, with a man-made pen that would hold more ink and
not require constant dipping into the ink well. However, a feather is not a pen, only a natural
object modified to suit man's needs. Filling a long thin reservoir made of hard rubber with
ink and sticking a metal 'nib' at the bottom was not enough to produce a smooth writing
instrument. Lewis Waterman, an insurance salesman, was inspired to improve the early
fountain pen designs after destroying a valuable sales contract with leaky-pen ink. Lewis

Waterman's idea was to add an air hole in the nib and three grooves inside the feed
mechanism.
A mechanism is composed of three main parts. The nib, which has the contact with the
paper. The feed or black part under the nib controls the ink flow from the reservoir to the
nib. The round barrel that holds the nib and feed on the writing end protects the ink
reservoir internally (this is the part that you grip while writing).
All pens contain an internal reservoir for ink. The different ways that reservoirs filled
proved to be one of the most competitive areas in the pen industry. The earliest 19th
century pens used an eyedropper; by 1915, most pens had switched to having a selffilling soft and flexible rubber sac as an ink reservoir. To refill these pens, the
reservoirs were squeezed flat by an internal plate, then the pen's nib was inserted into
a bottle of ink and the pressure on the internal plate was released so that the ink sac
would fill up drawing in a fresh supply of ink.
Several different patents issued for the self-filling fountain pen design:
The Button Filler: Patented in 1905 and first offered by the Parker Pen Co. in 1913
as an alternative to the eyedropper method. An external button connected to the internal
pressure plate that flattened the ink sac when pressed.

Lever Filler: Walter Sheaffer patented the lever filler in 1908. The W.A. Sheaffer Pen
Company of Fort Madison, Iowa introduced it in 1912. An external lever depressed the
flexible ink sac. The lever fitted flush with the barrel of the pen when it was not in use.
The lever filler became the winning design for the next forty years, the button filler
coming in second.

Click Filler: First called the crescent filler, Roy Conklin of Toledo commercially
produced the first one. A later design by Parker Pen Co. used the name click filler. When
two protruding tabs on the outside of the pen pressed, the ink sac deflated. The tabs
would make a clicking sound when the sac was full.

Matchstick Filler: Introduced around 1910 by the Weidlich Company. A small rod
mounted on the pen or a common matchstick depressed the internal pressure plate
through a hole in the side of the barrel.

Coin Filler: Developed by Lewis Waterman in an attempt to compete with the

winning lever filler patent belonging to Sheaffer. A slot in the barrel of the pen enabled a
coin to deflate the internal pressure plate, a similar idea to the matchstick filler.
There are nine standard nib-sizes, with three different nib-tip cuts: straight, oblique and
italic. The early inks caused steel nibs to quickly corrode and gold nibs held up to the
corrosion. Iridium used on the very tip of the nib replaced gold because gold was too soft.
Most owners had their initials engraved on the clip. It took about four months to break in a
new writing instrument since the nib was designed to flex as pressure was put on it
(allowing the writer to vary the width of the writing lines) each nib wore down
accommodating to each owner's own writing style. People did not tend to loan their fountain
pens to anyone for that reason.

The ink cartridge introduced around 1950 was a disposable, pre-filled plastic or glass
cartridges designed for clean and easy insertion. They were an immediate success. The
introduction of the ballpoints, however, overshadowed the invention of the cartridge and
dried up business for the fountain pen industry. Fountain pens sell today as a classic writing
instrument and the original pens have become very hot collectibles.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100897.htm
Part 3: The Battle of the Ballpoint Pens

By Mary Bellis

A Brief History of Writing

Instruments
Part 1: Introduction A Brief
History of Writing Instruments
Part 2: The History of the
Fountain Pen
Part 3: The Battle of the
Ballpoint Pens

"No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his
hand, or more wise when he had" - Samuel Johnson.
A Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro invented the first
ballpoint pen in 1938. Biro had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried
quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He decided to create a pen using the same
type of ink. The thicker ink would not flow from a regular pen nib and Biro had to devise a
new type of point. He did so by fitting his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its tip. As the pen
moved along the paper, the ball rotated picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it
on the paper. This principle of the ballpoint pen actually dates back to an 1888 patent
owned by John J. Loud for a product to mark leather. However, this patent was commercially
unexploited. Laszlo Biro first patented his pen in 1938, and applied for a fresh patent in
Argentina on June 10, 1943. (Laszlo Biro and his brother Georg Biro emigrated to Argentina
in 1940.) The British Government bought the licensing rights to this patent for the war
effort. The British Royal Air Force needed a new type of pen, one that would not leak at
higher altitudes in fighter planes as the fountain pen did. Their successful performance for
the Air Force brought the Biro pens into the limelight. Laszlo Biro had neglected to get a

U.S. patent for his pen and so even with the ending of World War II, another battle was just
beginning..
Historical Outline - The Battle of Ballpoint Pens
The first pen-writing instrument was the quill pen dipped into dark paint. There became a
need to lengthen the time between dips, eliminate splatter, eliminate smearing and improve
pen handling.
Early 1800s: The first designs for pens that could hold their own ink patented.
1884: L.E. Waterman, a New York City insurance salesman, designed the first
workable fountain pen, the fountain pen becomes the predominant writing instrument for
the next sixty years. Four fountain pen manufactures dominate the market: Parker,
Sheaffer, Waterman and Wahl-Eversharp.

1938: Invention of a ballpoint pen by two Hungarian inventors, Laszlo Biro and
George Biro. The brothers both worked on the pen and applied for patents in 1938 and
1940. The new-formed Eterpen Company in Argentina commercialized the Biro pen. The
press hailed the success of this writing tool because it could write for a year without
refilling.

May 1945: Eversharp Co. teams up with Eberhard-Faber to acquire the exclusive
rights to Biro Pens of Argentina. The pen re-branded the Eversharp CA which stood for
Capillary Action. Released to the press months in advance of public sales.

June, 1945: Less than a month after Eversharp/Eberhard close the deal with
Eterpen, Chicago businessman, Milton Reynolds visits Buenos Aires. While in a store, he
sees the Biro pen and recognizes the pens sales potential. He buys a few pens as
samples. Reynolds returns to America and starts the Reynolds International Pen
Company, ignoring Eversharps patent rights.

October 29, 1945: Reynolds copies the product in four months and sells his
productReynold's Rocket at Gimbels department store in New York City. Reynolds
imitation beats Eversharp to market. Reynolds pen is immediately successful: Priced at
$12.50, $100,000 worth sold the first day on the market.

December, 1945: Britain was not far behind with the first ballpoint pens available
to the public sold at Christmas by the Miles-Martin Pen Company.
The Ballpoint Pen Becomes a Fad

Ballpoint pens guaranteed to write for two years without refilling, claimed to be smear proof.
Reynolds advertised it as the pen "to write under water." Eversharp sued Reynolds for
copying the design it had acquired legally. The previous 1888 patent by John Loud would
have invalidated everyone's claims. However, no one knew that at the time. Sales
skyrocketed for both competitors. Nevertheless, the Reynolds pen leaked, skipped and
often failed to write. Eversharps pen did not live up to its own advertisements. A very high
volume of pen returns occurred for both Eversharp and Reynolds. The ballpoint pen fad
ended - due to consumer unhappiness.

1948: Frequent price wars, poor quality products, and heavy advertising costs hurt
each side. Sales did a nosedive. The original asking price of $12.50 dropped to less than
50 cents per pen.

1950: The French Baron called Bich, drops the h and starts BIC and starts selling
pens.

1951: The ballpoint pen dies a consumer death. Fountain pens are number one
again. Reynolds folds.

January, 1954: Parker Pens introduces its first ballpoint pen, the Jotter. The Jotter
wrote five times longer than the Eversharp or Reynolds pens. It had a variety of point
sizes, a rotating cartridge and large-capacity ink refills. Best of all, it worked. Parker sold
3.5 million Jotters @ $2.95 to $8.75 in less then one year.
The Ballpoint Pen Battle is Won

1957: Parker introduces the tungsten carbide textured ball bearing in their ballpoint
pens. Eversharp was in deep financial trouble and tried to switch back to selling fountain
pens. Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker Pens and Eversharp's assets finally
liquidated in the 1960s.

Late 1950's: BIC held 70 percent of European market.

1958: BIC buys 60 percent of the New York based Waterman Pens.

1960: BIC owns 100 percent of Waterman Pens. BIC sells ballpoint pens in U.S. for
29 - 69 cents.
The Ballpoint Pen War is Won

BIC dominates the market. Parker, Sheaffer and Waterman, capture the smaller upscale
markets of fountain pens and expensive ballpoints.

Today: The highly popular modern version of Laszlo Biro's pen, the BIC Crystal, has
a daily world wide sales figure of 14,000,000 pieces. Biro is still the generic name used
for the ballpoint pen in most of the world. The Biro pens used by the British Air Force in
W.W.II worked. Parker black ballpoint pens will produce more than 28,000 linear feet of
writing -- more than five miles, before running out of ink.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa101697.htm

Pencil and Eraser Trivia

Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite Valley on the side of the
mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown
person. Shortly after this the first pencils were made in the same area.
The breakthrough in pencil technology came when French chemist Nicolas Conte developed
and patented the process used to make pencils in 1795. He used a mixture of clay and

graphite that was fired before it was put in a wooden case. The pencils he made were
cylindrical with a slot. The square lead was glued into the slot and a thin strip of wood was
used to fill the rest of the slot. Pencils got their name from the old English word meaning
'brush'. Conte's method of kiln firing powdered graphite and clay allowed pencils to be made
to any hardness or softness - very important to artists and draftsmen.
Charles Marie de la Condamine, a French scientist and explorer, was the first European to
bring back the natural substance called "India" rubber. He brought a sample to the Institute
de France in Paris in 1736. South American Indian tribes used rubber to making bouncing
playing balls and as an adhesive for attaching feathers and other objects to their bodies.
In 1770, the noted scientist Sir Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen) recorded the
following, "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper
the mark of black lead pencil." Europeans were rubbing out pencil marks with the small
cubes of rubber, the substance that Condamine had brought to Europe from South America.
They called their erasers "peaux de negres". However, rubber was not an easy substance to
work with because it went bad very easily -- just like food, rubber would rot. English
engineer, Edward Naime is also credited with the creation of the first eraser in 1770. Before
rubber, breadcrumbs had been used to erase pencil marks. Naime claims he accidentally
picked up a piece of rubber instead of his lump of bread and discovered the possibilities, he
went on to sell the new rubbing out devices or rubbers.
In 1839, Charles Goodyear discovered a way to cure rubber and make it a lasting and
useable material. He called his process vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. In
1844, Goodyear patented his process. With the better rubber available, erasers became
quite common.
The first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil was issued in 1858 to a man from
Philadelphia named Hyman Lipman. This patent was later held to be invalid because it was
merely the combination of two things, without a new use.
At first penknives were used to sharpen pencils. They got their name from the fact that they
were first used to shape feather quills used as early pens. In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a
French mathematician applied for a patent (French patent #2444) on an invention to
sharpen pencils. However, it was not until 1847 that Therry des Estwaux first invented the
manual pencil sharpener, as we know it.
John Lee Love of Fall River, MA designed the "Love Sharpener." Love's invention was the very
simple, portable pencil sharpener that many artists use. The pencil is put into the opening of
the sharpener and rotated by hand, and the shavings stay inside the sharpener. Love's
sharpener was patented on November 23, 1897 (U.S. Patent # 594,114). Four years earlier,
Love created and patented his first invention, the "Plasterer's Hawk." This device, which is
still used today, is a flat square piece of board made of wood or metal, upon which plaster
or mortar was placed and then spread by plasterers or masons. This was patented on July
9, 1895.
One source claims that the Hammacher Schlemmer Company of New York offered the
world's first electric pencil sharpener designed by Raymond Loewy, sometime in the early
1940s.

In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first pencil factory in the United States in New York City.

Research Material

Bic

Fountain Pens

How A Bic Is Made

Penopy Fountain Pen History

Who was Mr. Bic? History

Vintage Pen Advertisements

Bic Pens Headquarters

Lewis Edson Waterman

History and Technology

William Purvis

How A Ballpoint Pen Works II

Pencils

Hand Writing

Pencil History
More Pencil History & FAQ

Pencil Erasers

Pencil History

Pencil Erasers Facts & First Patent

Pencil History

How erasers are made

Faber-Castell History of Pencil

Pencil Sharpeners

How Pencils are Made

The Mechanical Pencil Sharpener

Old Pencil Photo Gallery

Office Museum Pencil Sharpeners

Inventing a New Kind of Pencil

Alphabets

Hardness Designations

Evolution of Alphabets

How do they get lead in a wooden pencil?

The History of Cumberland Graphite

The Beginnings of Alphabets

Modern Pens
The first marker was probablythe felt tip marker, created in the 1940's. It was mainly used
for labeling and artistic applications. In 1952, Sidney Rosenthal began marketing his "Magic
Marker" which consisted of a glass bottle that held ink and a wool felt wick. By 1958,
marker use was becoming common, and people used it for lettering, labelling, marking
packages, and creating posters.
According to the now defunct Magic Marker website:
" In 1952, inventor Sidney Rosenthal developed and began marketing the first felt tip
marking device. A chubby, squat glass bottle to hold ink with a wool felt wick and writing tip
[this describes the unusual appearance of the first magic markers], Rosenthal named his
new marking device Magic Marker because of its ability to mark on almost every surface...
In 1989, Binney & Smith, best known for its Crayola products, and the leading children's
marker manufacturer, enters into a licensing agreement for exclusive rights to the Magic

Marker brand name... In 1991, after three years of product development, Binney & Smith
introduces a revamped, redesigned and improved Magic Marker line that includes
highlighters and permanent markers [magic markers become thinner]... !n 1996, fine point
Magic Marker II DryErase markers are introduced for detailed writing and drawing on white
boards, dry erase boards and glass surfaces."
Highlighters and fine-line markers were first seen in the 1970's. Permanent markers also
became available around this time. Superfine-points and dry erase markers gained
popularity in the 1990's.
The modern fiber tip pen was invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company,
Japan in 1962. The Avery Dennison Corporation trademarked Hi-Liter and Marks-A-Lot
in the early '90s. The Hi-Liter pen, commonly known as a highlighter, is a marking pen
which overlays a printed word with a transparent color leaving it legible and emphasized.
Gel Pens were invented by the Sakura Color Products Corp. (Osaka, Japan), who makeGelly
Roll pens and was the company that invented gel ink in 1984.
According to Sakura, "Years of research resulted in the 1982 introduction of Pigma, the
first water-based pigment ink... Sakura's revolutionary Pigma inks evolved to become the
first Gel Ink Rollerball launched as the Gelly Roll pen in 1984."
Sakura also invented a new drawing material which combined oil and pigment. CRAY-PAS,
the first oil pastel was introduced in 1925.
According to "Just for the Gel of it" written by Debra A. Schwartz:
"The colors in gel inks typically come from copper phthalocyanine pigments and iron oxides.
Additives to gel inks are mostly biopolymers, such as xanthan and tragacanth gums, and
some types of polyacrylate thickeners... The sparkles in gel pens typically are powdered
aluminum... Despite their high water content, gels are not transparent like conventional
inks. Gel inks use pigments suspended in a water-soluble polymer matrix, which makes
them opaque."

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpen.htm

http://fillthecartridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The-History-of-Ink.pdf