The journey of the mighty pen

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Not many would be unaware of this quotation by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But one, somehow, gets the feeling that this statement is too mild to emphasize the importance of pen in our lives. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that we live because somebody wrote.

Pen is one of the many articles, which evolved with the evolution of man. As the man progressed, his need to communicate increased. Language was hardly into being, so he started off by making symbols on the cave walls. He used his sharpened tools – meant for skinning and killing - for scratching the walls. These symbols used to depict his daily activities like planting and/or his encounters with the beasts.

Symbols as language

Over a period of time, the instrument and the base for writing changed but the language remained the same. Pictographs - as these symbols are now known as - held their prominence for centuries before they were replaced by alphabets somewhere between 1700 and 1500 BC. The base changed to portable clay-made tablets to thin sheets of wax (which could be melted and re-used), while the crude tools gave way to the instruments made from the reed.

It took alphabets quite sometime to become popular. Where pictographs couldn’t suffice, a combination of pictographs was used. The method of combining pictographs to represent words for ideas, today, is referred to as the ideographic system.

Ink – The fuel for writing

Writing took another step forward. It went well beyond the chiseled pictures or cuneiform (the wedge shaped marks produced by reed). 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.

Though ink became popular in 1200 BC, it was into existence much before. In fact, it is believed that invention of ink paralleled the introduction of paper. Annals suggest that the ancient Egyptians created pictographic system in about 3100 BC by drawing on Papyrus – a paper like material made from papyrus plant. Moreover, one of the oldest pieces of papyrus known to us today - the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" - was also written in ink. It dates back to 2000 BC.

The plant juices and animal blood were used as ink before “ink” could become popular. Various values and symbols were attached to various colored inks. For example, green denoted freshness; blue denoted revelation and purple denoted royalty.

Writing Systems

History clearly awards the credit of early writing systems to the Greeks. Even the earliest examples of handwriting are attributed to Greece. The Greek alphabet was developed in around 500 BC. Before that, the Greek script was just an adoption of right-to-left Phoenician writing, (Cadmus, the son of the king of Phoenicia, is believed to have brought alphabet to Greece).

Greek documents of that era show one line written from right to left and the next line from left to right. This method is called boustrophedon, from the Greek words meaning, “ox-plow turning”. It is believed that Greek was the first script to be written from left to right.

The striking fact is that all the writing systems had only uppercase letters in the beginning. No clear reason is known, but it is believed that the instruments were not refined enough to draft the nuances.

From reed-pens to quills
If the Greeks clinch the honor of being the forerunners in writing systems, Romans can boast of creating a reed pen, which stands closest to what we use today. The reed-pen was made from the hollow, tubular stems of marshy grasses, especially jointed bamboo plant. One end of the stem was cut so that it took the shape of a pen nib. When in use, ink was poured into the stem. This ink was held through adhesion to slow down the extreme free flow.

The  reed-pen was used extensively for centuries and then the quills came into picture. Quills are said to have dominated the writing systems for more than a thousand years. Made of bird feathers, they were introduced somewhere in 700 AD. It is, obviously, much after the tanno-gallate of iron ink made its appearance. Created in 400 AD, this ink - a composite of iron salts, nutgalls and gum - remained in use for centuries.

Quill selection was not a leisure activity. It was done with utmost care. The strongest quills were chosen from living birds in the spring from the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favoured because the feathers curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer.

Goose feathers were the 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.

Despite being the most dominant writing instrument, the quill also had its share of disadvantages. The first problem was its short life. It could be used only for a week or so before it was necessary to replace it. The other disadvantages included high preparation time and the necessity of a stove-with-coal, which was kept beneath the writer’s high-top desk so that the ink dried early.

Quills to Fountain pens

While the quill-pens were being used heavily, attempts for designing a reliable reservoir pen were also going on.

Various kinds of reservoir pen made appearances before the mid-19th century when, fountain pen became popular.The earliest historical record of a reservoir pen dates to the 10th century. The sultan of Egypt in 953 demanded a pen which would not stain his hands, and was provided with a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib via gravity and capillary action.

References to reservoir pens can also be found in Daniel Schwenter’s famous work Delicia Physic-Mathematicae (1636). The German Orientalist and inventor of scioptric ball talks about a pen made from two quills. One quill served as a reservoir for ink inside the other quill.

Though 1850s witnessed a stream of fountain pen patents and pens in production, the oldest known fountain pen that has survived today was designed by a Frenchmen named M. Bion and dated 1702.

Between 1702 and 1884 – when Lewis Waterman patented the first practical fountain pen – a number of pens were developed. But these models were plagued by ink spills and other failures that left them impractical and hard to sell. The failure can be attributed to an imperfect understanding of the role that air pressure played in the operation of the pens. Also, most inks were highly corrosive and full of sedimentary inclusions.

Incidentally, the invention of the practical fountain pen, like many other inventions, was also the result of man’s reply to the frustration caused by a mischance. Lewis Waterman - an insurance salesman - after destroying a valuable sales contract with leaky-pen ink, thought of adding an air hole in the nib and three grooves inside the feed mechanism.

Fountain Pens to Ballpoint pens

The invention of ballpoint pen is yet another example of man's answer to disappointment. The Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro, frustrated by the amount of time wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning smudged pages, decided to make a pen that worked with the ink used in the newspaper printing.

The ink was thicker and, hence, dried quickly. When tried, this viscous ink wouldn't flow out of the regular nib of the fountain pen. Laszlo, along with his brother George (a chemist), devised a new type of point. He fitted this point with a tiny ball bearing that was free to turn in a socket. As the point moved along, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on paper.

Like fountain pens, early ballpoint pens also met failures. Biro's was not the first attempt to create a ballpoint pen. It is argued that a design by Galileo (during the 17th Century), was that of a ballpoint pen. A patent dated 1888 on the same basic idea, was unused and expired.

These earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Dependence on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and and required that the pen be held nearly vertically.

The Biro pen, which used capillary action for ink delivery and solved the flow problem, became so popular that it is a generic name for ballpoint pens in many parts of the world.

Today, pens have all sorts of designs and working mechanisms. There is no count of the kinds of points, nibs and inks being used. Science and technology are being spoken about at every nook and corner. But as the Vietnamese saying goes, “When eating a fruit, thank the person who planted the tree”, we must be thankful to the inventors of this instrument, which has recorded and conveyed feelings, thoughts and what not.

In fact, there can’t be an invention more important than this, for where is science without any records and where are records without a writing instrument?