How Writing Utensils Have Evolved Over Time
For many of us, writing is becoming a bit of a lost art. Most of our communication is now digital, either on a handheld device or, for the less technologically savvy, on a desktop computer. But for millennia, man has used paper and some form of writing tool. In our consumer society, pens are very much an afterthought, but for most of the history of writing, the process was much more involved.
When Did Man First Use Something Like a Pen?
Historians tell us that the earliest prototypes for permanent handwriting tools were most likely found in China in the first millennium before the common era. The Chinese used a brush, typically made from bundles of animal hair—yellow weasel, white goat and black rabbit hairs were the most common. The bundle of hair was usually pushed through a wooden tube, but more elaborate brushes also used jade and porcelain. Archaeological digs have also produced reed-like tools used by the Egyptians around 300 BCE. These writing tools were used almost exclusively on papyrus.
Around the 6th century CE, animal skin began to replace papyrus, which also led to changes in the writing tool. It is believed that the first quill pens, which used feathers from swans (the expensive ones) or geese (the more pedestrian devices), were develop in Seville, Spain, as there is a reference to them in the writings of St. Isidore of Sevilla. The quill pen represented a significant advancement, as it afforded much more control and ease of use.
The Development of the Modern Pen
Goose and swan quills were the primary tool for handwriting until the early 1800s, when, as a consequence of the industrial revolution, metal pen nibs (the writing point) could be manufactured by machines. The first steel nib pen is believed to have been produced in Birmingham, England in 1828.
The earliest metal nib pens still required the writer to constantly dip the pen in an inkwell, a significant inconvenience. That led to the development of the fountain pen, the first such writing tool to have a built-in reservoir for ink. The first commercially viable fountain pen was introduced by American L.E. Waterman in 1884.
In 1895, the first “ballpoint” pen was patented in Argentina. The new device, which offered a small metal ball at the tip that rolled ink from a reservoir, didn’t catch on with public until the 1930s, but became the standard writing implement by the mid-1940s. With the advent of the ballpoint pen, fountain pens almost became extinct. They are now, however, a luxury item, with some commanding prices in the thousands of dollars.
