In all likelihood, the great-great-grandfathers of modern pens were small brushes that the Chinese used to write around 1000 BC After them, various objects coexisted in the hands of different peoples of antiquity. Around 300 BC, bamboo sticks were popular among the Egyptians. In the ruins of Pompeii (Italian city destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius in the year 79), a kind of pen with a bronze tip was found. But those who really lived long, unfortunately for the geese, were the models made with bird feathers. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the first encyclopedia in the world, organized by Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636), already taught the curious on duty that this was the type of pen in fashion.
Geese suffered until the end of the 19th century, when the first fountain pens were manufactured in the United States. The popular ballpoint pen would only appear on the scene in the 20th century. The mechanism was patented in 1938 by the Hungarian Lazlo Biro. It took him six years to perfect an object that now looks so simple. At the time of the first models, however, the technology was so complex that a Biro pen cost almost $100! Who knew, the disposable ballpoint pen had its Mont Blanc days…
1 – Feathers
Made from feathers of birds, mainly geese, they appeared at the beginning of the Christian era. They were widely used until the 19th century, generating a rich trade in feathers around the world. Between 1800 and 1830, the city of St. Petersburg, Russia, sent over 27 million feathers a year to England.
2 – Fountain pen
The first commercial model was created by the American Lewis Edson Waterman in 1884. But, in the memoirs of the Russian Tsarina Catherine, written in 1748, there is a mention of a similar instrument. In Waterman’s model, ink was injected into the reservoir with a type of syringe. Disposable cartridges only started to be sold in 1927.
3 – Ballpoint pen
The idea of using a small metal sphere at the end of the pen, wet with ink coming from a tube, emerged at the end of the 19th century. The Hungarian Lazlo Josef Biro perfected the idea and popularized the ballpoint pen from 1938 onwards. In the mid-1940s, Biro passed the patent on to the Frenchman Marcel Bich, creator of Bic, which today sells 10 million pens a day in the whole planet.
4 – Porous tip
A primitive model was already used in the 1940s. The current system, with a porous tip made of synthetic fiber, was presented by the Japanese Yukio Horie, in 1962. The product was perfected and, in 1973, the Roller Ball appeared, which united the system of Horie’s pen with the ballpoint pen. In the Roller Ball, the ink is absorbed by a porous tip, which wets the back of a small metal ball.