But eventually, as the nouveau riche supplanted old money, an excellent and readable script, the mark of a shrewd businessman, became the indicator of worth—much as an artfully designed and easily navigable computer setup might be today.
METAL PENS
When quills began, finally, to be superseded by metal pens and pen-points in the nineteenth century, there must have been some rejoicing, and not only in the bird world. I imagine that many writers must have felt the way they did when the “word processor” came along: life suddenly got easier. In his humorous poem “Ode to Perry” (a pen manufacturer), Thomas Hood wrote in 1825 about “times begone, when each man cut his quill”:
What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade
Appeared the writing instrument, home-made!
The metal nib was patented in 1803. The summer before that, the poet Coleridge took off on a nine-day walking/writing tour among the peaks of the Lake District, carrying six quills and a portable inkwell. Four years later, his friend Wordsworth wrote an eighteen-page letter to a friend—a feat he claimed was possible because he’d received a steel pen as a gift. By that date Jefferson, who loved gadgets, was beginning to phase out the quill pen and had become deeply attached to what was called a “polygraph machine,” which automatically made copies of what he wrote using a second metal pen attached to the pen he was using, like a phantom second arm. The copies it made were amazingly accurate: Jefferson called it “the finest invention of the present age.” Metal pen variations soon included the oblique penholder, which facilitates the arcs and shading of ornamental penmanship.
Oblique penholder
But metal pens, which had to be imported from England, were difficult to manufacture, and expensive. They were made laboriously by hand until the screw-press was perfected, which enabled them to be stamped out by machine, rounded—and split. That was the tricky part: the nib had to approximate the flexibility of the quill, yet be durable and also hold the ink properly. In addition, new inks had to be developed—the acid-based inks then in existence corroded the metal points.
Gradually, manufacturers worked out the glitches. But metal pens were slow to be accepted by the American public. No doubt there were writers who clung to their quills. Dickens was one: according to an early biographer, he “invariably wrote with a quill pen and blue ink”—blue because it dried faster. One can imagine people complaining that the new invention was cold, unnatural, newfangled, and gimmicky, with a tendency to tear the paper if you weren’t careful—just as, a bit later, some writers resisted first the typewriter and then the computer. But in fact metal pens were infinitely sturdier and easier to use, and could perform more tricks on the page—this was the heyday of copperplate and then Spencerian15 script. They also required virtually no upkeep: pen knives could now be used for carving your initials into desk tops. The new pens gradually became indispensable.
Metal pens arrived in America in 1856 when Richard Esterbrook set up a factory in New Jersey. By the end of that century, only fuddy-duddy Luddites were still using quills.16
FOUNTAIN PENS
As the twentieth century turned, script remained fairly static. The written forms of the letters of the alphabet were essentially those we’re familiar with today. But pen history suddenly speeded up. After long, leisurely centuries of inkwells and dip pens in various forms, a truly innovative writing implement was introduced: the fountain pen.
(image credits 1.26)
The so-called “reservoir pen” had probably been around, in a half-hearted way, for a thousand years or so, lingering tantalizingly on the fringes of pen history but never quite surfacing as a viable writing method. But in the full flower of the industrial age, such pen giants as Waterman, Parker, Sheaffer, and Cross figured out how to make a pen that was easy to fill and that worked on the principle of what Donald Jackson in The Story of Writing calls “the controllable leak.” (The crucial word was controllable: early fountain pens tended to leak not neatly onto the page when called upon, but messily into the pocket at odd moments.) The path to perfection was littered with disasters. An eyedropper was used at first to dribble the ink into the reservoir, with predictable results. It was followed by the click filler (it clicked when the pen was full), the matchstick filler (stick a matchstick through a hole to depress a rubber ink sac), and the coin filler (depress the sac with a coin).
The first successful fountain pen appeared in 1897, Conklin’s rather bulky Crescent-Filler, which required the user to depress, then release, a raised half-moon to begin the ink flow. That was followed in 1906 by a Waterman version that concealed the filling mechanism with a sliding sleeve. But with the development in 1908 of Sheaffer’s enduring lever-filler—the pen of my youth, with its internal rubber ink sac depressed by a metal lever—the fountain pen era had truly arrived.
Pen manufacturers, like the scribes before them, didn’t stop tinkering with the design. The innovative piston-filler came along in the 1920s, activated with wonderful ease by the turning of a knob at the end of the pen to push down the piston, then pull it up again to draw in the ink. The Mont Blanc “Le Grand,” unchanged for sixty years and still one of the company’s most expensive pens, is a piston-filler.
Mont Blanc “Le Grand”
A variation was the Parker Vacumatic, introduced in 1933, which sucked a large supply of ink swiftly into the pen’s barrel by creating a vacuum with several strokes of a tiny spring-loaded pump at the back end. The Parker “51,”17 the most popular fountain pen ever made, used a Vacumatic filler, but by 1948 it was passé: the new, highly alkaline inks, fast-drying but caustic, tended to corrode the Vacumatic’s rubber diaphragm. The company replaced it with a very simple system that filled the pen when the user pushed and released a spring bar that depressed a clear plastic sac—an updated version of Waterman’s forty-year-old sleeve filler.
Then there was the Snorkel, launched by Sheaffer in 1952. The Snorkel pen, which used a pneumatic mechanism called the Touchdown to draw in the ink like a tiny soda straw, got a huge boost in the 1950s when the actress Vivian Vance, famous as Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, appeared in a commercial. Yakking on the phone with Lucy, Ethel says she bought her husband, Fred, one of the pens for Christmas—he has a ballpoint but he needs a fountain pen for “important stuff.” We cut from Ethel’s blonde ditziness to a shot of her hands twisting the pen: “A special filling tube comes out and it drinks up the ink. Not even Fred could get his hands messy with this pen!”
Sheaffer Snorkel (image credits 1.28)
A Fred-and-Ethel-vintage mint-condition “White Dot” Snorkel pen can now be found for between $100 and $150—a small price to pay for a sublime slice of nostalgia—and, as I recall, a very good pen.
Today, fountain pens are a marginal market, but they haven’t entirely disappeared. The Levenger (“Tools for Serious Readers”) catalog has a good line of not-too-expensive ones—along with cunning little doodads for carrying them, storing them, filling them, and displaying them. Even my neighborhood Staples sells not only the disposable Pilot Varsity fountain pen, but a deluxe Cross pen (not as pretty as you’d think), a Waterman Philéas (nicer), and a truly splendid black lacquer Waterman Expert II that I would love to own.
New fountain pens now run the price gamut from $2.20 for the Pilot disposable to $9,349 for the Waterman Sérénité line: solid silver body and 18k gold nib, with trim in your choice of crocodile skin, quail shell, mother of pearl, or gold dust. I’d like to pit the Varsity against the Sérénité in a write-off to see how much difference $9,346.80 makes in my handwriting, but that is probably not going to happen in this life.
BALLPOINTS
In 1938, a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro invented the ballpoint pen.
Laszlo Biro (image credits 1.29)
Biro was a journalist who noticed that the ink being used to print newspapers dried instantly and didn’t smudge, and he set out to devise a pen that would perform equally well. He soon discovered that he’d have to invent a new kin
d of pen point to handle the thick, sludgy ink. With the help of his brother George, a chemist, he fitted a tiny rolling metal ball to the tip, and the ballpoint was born. In 1940, the Biro brothers fled the Nazis and relocated to Argentina, where they patented the pen in 1943 and began manufacturing it. Biro is so highly respected in Argentina that their Inventor’s Day is celebrated on his birthday, September 29.
His invention was adopted by the Royal Air Force in England,18 which commissioned the pens for use during World War II because they didn’t leak (or explode) at high altitudes, as fountain pens did.
However, the ballpoint pen was not perfect. Despite its contribution to the war effort, it failed to capture the public imagination because early versions did, in fact, leak, whatever your altitude. The nuns at my school scorned ballpoints as sloppy, unnecessary, and probably sinful. They also tended to skip. And they were dreadfully expensive: a decent fountain pen could be had for a dollar, a ballpoint cost $3.95 and up.
But pen makers persevered and, as we all know, the ballpoint won the pen wars. In 1950, Michel Bich, a French baron, came up with the idea for a completely disposable pen that was cheap to produce. Today, Bic sells fifty-seven of them with every tick of the clock. Rollerball pens use the same principle as the ballpoint: a ball bearing, ceramic rather than metal, dispenses ink as it rolls across the page—but the ink involved is a water-based liquid, like the ink in a fountain pen, rather than the oily, viscous ink of a ballpoint. Gel pens, another ballpoint-esque implement, use the same mechanism but the ink is much thicker and more vibrant.
There’s a popular myth that NASA spent “millions” of dollars developing a pen for astronauts to use in the weightless environment of a space ship—while their sensible Russian counterparts were happly to use the low-tech pencil. Alas, for all its appeal and plausibility, this is not true. Initially, astronauts and cosmonauts were both equipped with pencils, but there were problems: if a piece of lead broke off, for example, it could float into someone’s eye or nose. A pen was needed, one that would defy gravity, write in extreme heat or cold, and be leakproof: blobs of ink floating around the cabin would be more perilous than a stray pencil lead. A long-time pen maker named Paul C. Fisher patented the “space pen” in 1965 (which he had developed at the cost of a million dollars, at the request of but not under the auspices of NASA). NASA bought four hundred of them at $6 each and, after a couple of years of testing, the pens were put into space.
Fisher “Space Pen”
They worked just fine, occasionally in unexpected roles. On the Apollo 11 flight in 1969, as the astronauts were about to blast off in their lunar lander to head home from the moon, they inadvertently damaged the starter switch. Their tool kit was part of the gear they’d left behind on the lunar surface; the crew was already sealed in and couldn’t get out to go back for it. What to do? Somebody back at Mission Control thought that maybe the casing of a space pen would do in a pinch. It did. Mission accomplished.
The famous smeariness of ballpoint has acquired an un-usual modern use: fund-raisers and telemarketers are beginning to phase out those phony-looking computer fonts that address envelopes in what is supposed to look like script. Everybody’s on to them. Instead, they’ve begun hiring actual humans to write the addresses in ballpoint, whose crude authenticity can’t be faked by a machine:
Expert penmanship is not called for, apparently—only legibility; the clumsier and more earnest the handwriting, the more convincing it is. As the head of a telemarketing firm puts it, “We realized the degree of personalization corresponded to fulfillment and response rates”—which presumably means that the scheme is working.
INK
The ink that has been used over the centuries to power all these writing implements would fill a small ocean. From its murky depths has emerged everything from the Bible to yesterday’s spelling test.
Ink has been made from soot mixed with gelatin, soot mixed with vinegar, soot mixed with glue, the secretions of squid, the secretions of cuttlefish, crushed flowers, dried beetles, walnuts, iron salts, copper salts, tannin, oak galls, hawthorn bark mixed with wine, elderberries, pokeberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, indigo, pomegranate seeds, blood, and (for that delight of nine-year-olds, invisible ink) lemon juice.
The Chinese, for whom good ink was one of the “four precious things of the study” (along with pen, paper, and inkstone), came up with a solid ink made of soot and gelatin (made from boiled animal skins) dried into a cake: a writer would grind a small piece on an inkstone and mix it with water to the preferred consistency. The Romans made a purple encaustum (from which we get the word ink) from iron salts and oak galls, and a pound of it cost the equivalent of five cents—about the same as a quart of sheep’s milk or half a dozen artichokes. A Roman barber made a penny per haircut, a stonemason took home about twenty-two cents a month, and a scribe was paid not quite eleven cents for a hundred lines of his best writing. At that price, encaustum wasn’t available to most Romans. But of course most Romans couldn’t write, anyway.
For use with his printing press, the inventive Gutenberg devised a mixture of soot and linseed oil that was thick enough to adhere to the type and black enough not to fade; similar oil-based inks are still used today for printing presses and in print cartridges. The ink recipe devised by Isaac Newton (scientist, mathematician, natural philosopher, and alchemist, 1643–1727) involved soaking tannin and gum Arabic19 in beer, fermenting it for a month, then adding ferrous sulfate, letting it stand in the sun, and voilà: a lovely black ink that tended to age to a warm brown. To combat the ink shortage during the Civil War, Confederate soldiers made their own by boiling rusty nails in vinegar. Modern do-it-yourselfers prefer either strong tea mixed with gum Arabic, or a mix of walnuts, salt, and vinegar, boiled and strained. When I mistakenly steamed a batch of cranberry shell beans in their pods instead of shelling them first, I was left with a pan of rosy-red juice, and I boiled it down to make a very credible ink.
By the time Waterman put ink into handy plastic cartridges in the mid-’50s—another substantial leap forward—ink in bottles became increasingly hard to find. (Not that it mattered: by then, fountain pens were on their way out.) At Staples, a clerk and I searched in vain for a bottle of ink (“Jeez, I thought we had some in aisle five.…”). Ink is readily available in art supply stores—artists and calligraphers are the main customers. But for the average person, ink is now an artifact of another world.
PENCILS
Pencils haven’t scratched out much of a role in the world of penmanship. It’s hard to produce truly memorable script with a pencil. Maybe it’s psychological: the humble work of the pencil seems ephemeral, easily destroyed by a mere eraser. And yet there’s no question that much handwriting—the utilitarian, list-making kind—is done with a pencil. What, after all, would we do without them? For a true handwriting nut, they have their place in the pantheon of writing implements, even if it is way down at the end past the cheap, smeary ballpoint and just this side of the wax crayon.
The history of pencil making has been documented by Henry Petroski in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. It’s a brain-crushingly exhaustive but surprisingly absorbing book, and I recommend it highly. But for our present purposes, I will attempt to present the pencil’s impressive lineage in a quick sketch.
Pencils date back to the Middle Ages, when they were made of soft lead wrapped with twine or wool. Then, in the sixteenth century, in the town of Borrowdale, near Keswick in northern England, a tree blew down in a storm and unearthed a cache of what was thought at first to be lead but was actually graphite—a form of carbon20—by a group of shepherds. Legend has it that they used it to mark their sheep until someone (either an Italian or a German, depending on which history you read) got the hang of encasing graphite in strips of wood, and the modern pencil was born.
For a long time pencils were a steady cottage industry in Keswick, first made entirely by hand by the villagers, then in small factories, and exported a
ll over the world.
The Derwent Pencil Factory in Keswick (image credits 1.33)
But over the centuries the Borrowdale mine’s pure graphite—the only source known—began to be exhausted, and as the substance became rare, England lost its monopoly on pencil making. In 1795 France, Nicolas Jacques Conté, whose well-known Conté crayons are still prized by artists, added clay to graphite to create a new writing substance that was not only cheap but, according to how much graphite it contained, either hard or soft. Shortly after, in Germany, Lothar von Faber, manufacturer of the first brand-name pencil (and still a famous name in the pencil world), standardized the now-ubiquitous hexagonal pencil—i.e., a pencil that would not roll off the desk but still was comfortable to hold. And in 1847, a French adventurer named Jean Pierre Alibert, panning for gold in Siberia, happened upon unpromising black chunks of stuff that turned out to be graphite as pure as that from Borrowdale. The mine he eventually built on the Chinese-Siberian border became as profitable as gold, which is why pencils started being painted the golden yellow we’re familiar with today.
Sometime around 1800, an enterprising American schoolgirl—whose name, unfortunately, has not survived—apparently began making pencils for herself and her friends by hollowing out an elder twig with a knitting needle and stuffing it with graphite from pencil stubs that she pounded to a pulp and mixed with glue. But it wasn’t until the War of 1812, when trade with England ceased, that Americans entered in earnest upon the manufacture of pencils. The first American pencil was sold just before the fourth of July in that year. It was made in Concord, Massachusetts, which became a thriving pencil-making center when a lode of impure but serviceable graphite was found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar, who was the brother of Henry David Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia. Charles Dunbar and John Thoreau, Henry’s father, started manufacturing pencils in a shed behind the Thoreau house.
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