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Pens and Writing Supplies

Writing is something that most of us do every day, and we simply take for granted that if we need to write something down then we can pick up a pen and do so, without even giving a second thought to the technology that goes into making this possible.

The development of pens and other writing instruments has been incremental throughout the years, since the earliest discovery of how to produce inks and using quills to apply the ink in a controlled manner to today’s gel based pens that are capable of writing on a range of surfaces. Two of the most successful pen types that have endured over time are fountain pens and ballpoint pens.

Fountain pens have been around since the 17th century in primitive forms with cut quills for nibs, as things developed the pens got nibs made from gold with iridium tips which is a very strong metal that resists bending and gives a smooth movement across the paper, and ink developments led to more refined ink that has less sediments and so is less prone to clogging. All modern fountain pens work on the principle of capillary action to feed the ink to the nib, a process that the pens are carefully designed to use in order to provide the correct flow of ink.

Ballpoint pens came to the scene much later, and brought about a large change in the technology used to get the ink from the pen to the paper. The inventor of the ballpoint pen was Ladislas Biro from Hungary who came up with the design in 1935, although the basis of all ballpoint pens is still the same, using a roller-ball to transfer the ink from the reservoir to the paper, there have been many improvements made over the years.

Early ballpoint pens were known for being leaky, difficult to write with, as the pen would often skip and the ink would smudge easily. One of the main players in the improvements of the pens was Patrick J. Frawley Jr who used a new ink formula developed by Fran Seech for use in his pens, within a year of this the Frawley pen company released a retractable ballpoint pen called the ‘Papermate’ which was a huge success.

At around the same time as these developments were being made, a French manufacturer of pen holders and pen cases, Marcel Bich, began developing his own version of the ballpoint pen. This was released in 1952 in a clear pen barrel and was an inexpensive item, which was called the Ballpoint Bic.