How we wrote for last 5,000 years
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” is a familiar adage! Writing is an ancient form of expression intrinsic to human communication. We wrote, we read, we learnt, we preserved! It was 5,000 years ago, when early humans first came to write. Clay tablets unearthed in the Arabian desert throw light on that timestamp when mankind put their thoughts out in the form of the written word, and etched them in their own invented script for posterity. The tools used in this endeavour were fashioned from bronze and bone. Archaeologists have discovered engraved and painted marks on the walls of dwellings and objects.
The kingdoms that sprang up in Mesopotamia adopted ‘Cuneiform’ writing. Simply defined as ‘wedge-shaped’, it was written using a reed stylus cut to make a wedge-shaped mark on a clay tablet. Around 3100 BCE, the Egyptians developed hieroglyphics, a script involving writing with pictures, inscribed on papyrus scrolls using thin reed brushes or reed pens.
The Romans adopted a classical Latin alphabet, that they scribed into thin sheets of wax, using a metal stylus, while in Asia, writing was accomplished with a bronze stylus.
When people developed writing for communication, it was as a record of trade, migration, travel, and conquest. From its earliest uses, humans have altered and enriched writing to reflect their times and learnings, while writing instrument technology improved overtime. Between 600 and 1800 CE, quill pens were the writing instrument of choice, across the civilised world. In the 1790s, pencil lead was invented.
The pen age
In 1884, Frenchman Lewis Edson Waterman invented the fountain pen, a revolutionary innovation. Simply put, this is a pen containing an ink reservoir that automatically feeds a metal writing point. A fountain pen has four key parts: Reservoir (ink tube in the pen’s handle), nib (pointed metal end that is dragged over paper), feed (plastic tube connecting nib and reservoir), and collector (set of grooves beneath the nib that stops ink flooding). Ink is filled into the reservoir, which flows through the feed, and gathers at the nib that makes contact with the paper. The ink absorbs into the paper and the capillary action of this whole process allows it to flow continually as you write.
Meanwhile, the first patent for a ballpoint pen was issued on October 30, 1888, to John J Loud. However, even as ink pens held writers’ imagination for six decades, the modern version of ballpoint pens was introduced by Hungarian brothers László József and Georg Bíró in 1931, and became the writing instrument of choice.
The components of a ballpoint tip are a freely rotating ball (distributing the ink on the writing surface), a socket holding the ball in place, small ink channels that provide ink to the ball through the socket, and a self-contained ink cartridge (refill) supplying ink to the ball. This pen works as per surface tension, of the ink that decides how effectively it spreads itself over the ball. When one holds this pen on paper and begins writing, the ball rolls over it, with ink flowing to the paper due to friction. The pen has come of age, ensuring that our written history is ageless.