It is through writing that we have been able to create, share, and learn. Pens have made it possible to retain and communicate knowledge and information and create works of art. But how did it all start? There are several different answers to this question because of the varying types of pens there are available in the 21st century.
However, the first people to invent the pen as a basic tool to write were the ancient Egyptians. The oldest piece of writing on papyrus dates back to BC. This evidence suggests that they were the first to create a tool that allowed them to make their language tangible and permanent.
To write upon parchment and papyrus, the Egyptians created a reed pen. These early pens were fashioned from the hollow, tubular stems of marsh grasses - especially bamboo plant. Of all the writing instruments, the quill pen was in use for the longest period of history - from 7th to the 19th century. Europeans used bird feathers to produce this tool; the best feathers were those taken from living swans, turkeys and geese.
These feathers were then dried with a gentle heat to remove any oils that may interfere with the ink. Next, the end of the feather must be shaped and sharpened with a knife. This was then dipped into an inkwell to fill the hollow shaft of the feather that acts as a reservoir. These ink pens were durable, but had to be sharpened often.
To do this, the writer needed a specific knife, which is where the term "pen-knife" originated. Writing developed very early in Asia, too by B. The first Chinese writing was painted with a brush or inscribed with a knife on wood, bamboo and even flat animal bone. Inscribed writing was often filled in with ink afterwards, to make it more visible. In Southeast Asia and India, the most common writing surface was palm leaves, which were in widespread use by the seventh century A.
To write on these leaves, scribes used a stylus quite similar to the ones by the Romans see below. It was bronze, with a sharp point on one end for inscribing the letters and a flat blade on the other end for scraping the surface of the leaf smooth. As with Chinese writing, the inscribed letters would be filled with ink after writing, to make it more legible.
For many centuries, Roman scribes used wooden tablets filled with wax for taking temporary notes, and even though writing technology had vastly improved in other ways see the sections below for some examples , the Romans were faced with the same difficulties with curves as the Sumerians had.
The Roman alphabet, also used extensively for inscriptions in stone, was made entirely of straight lines. To write in the wax, Roman scribes used a stylus that was long and thin like a pen, but had a point on one end for writing, and a broad, flat area on the other end for erasing by smoothing the wax out.
The ancient Egyptians invented a writing surface called papyrus sometime in the third millennium B. Once the pen was cleaned, dried and de-barbed, you buried it in sand and put it over a fire.
Heating it up like this in the sand caused the pen to dry out and become nice and stiff and hard. Once the pen was removed from the sand and the fire and was cleaned properly, you took out a knife and started cutting the tip into the feather much like with a reed pen. Because the quill was stronger and stiffer, it could write significantly better than the reed pen. Different ways of cutting the pen-point allowed for different styles of writing. By cutting the quill-point a certain way, you could create text with wide up-down strokes, and thin horizontal strokes.
It was during this period, that the writing-surface changed from papyrus to vellum dried animal hides and eventually to paper. The quill lasted for several hundred years.
Several great documents such as the Bible, the American Declaration of Independence and many classic works of literature from the 18th century, were written with quills. The diary of Samuel Pepys, the famous English naval administrator of the s, would have been written entirely with a quill. William Shakespeare wrote all his plays with a quill.
Even though the quill had to be sharpened and reshaped every so-often, much like the reed pen before it, for centuries, it was the only pen that people had. Your pen-knife was the tool which you used to cut the tip of your pen with. No pen-knife, no quill, no writing. Quills remained the mainstay of writing for several centuries.
The flexible nature of the pen-points, after they had become softened somewhat, with ink, allowed people to create even more styles of writing. The expressive, decorative, loopy, thick-thin styles of handwriting that came about during the 17th and 18th centuries, such as roundhand, Copperplate and Spencerian, were the direct, natural result of the writing properties of the quill. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a little something called the Industrial Revolution swept through Europe.
With the power of wind, water, fire and steam, machines began to be manufactured which could produce all kinds of things. All these new inventions naturally created a lot of paperwork. Mankind needed a better kind of writing instrument to put all the wages and salaries and information down on paper. Then one day, an intelligent man thought to himself that if pen-points were made of something tougher, stronger and which would last longer, he could make a fortune.
What if pen-points, instead of being the easily-worn-out tips of feathers, were actually made of something tough and durable…like…metal? Using steam-powered presses, special moulds and sheets of metal, the first mass-production of metal pens were created, at the end of the 18th century.
The invention of a simple, cheap, durable pen-point which could be made in its thousands, revolutionised the writing world. Quills were the most sophisticated writing instruments for a long time some 15 centuries. Many large birds gave their contribution to the spreading of knowledge until metal pens replaced feathers in writing. Read more about history of quill pens.
Fountain pens replaced standard metal pens because they were easier to use and were less messy. After years of improvements and after appearance of ballpoint pens which are even easier to use they became a sort of status symbol.
Read more about history of fountain pen. Beginning of use of pen and ink marked the start of new era of easier recording of information. Without them, early scientific discoveries would be forgotten and development of humanity would be much slower. At the first glance, who could tell that the first ballpoint pens appeared some years ago?
But they did and were intended for writing on leather. Today, billions are made and sold every year and we almost cannot imagine our day-today life without them. Read more about ballpoint pen history. Mechanical pencils are also old invention dating even from 16th century.
First ones were relatively simple mechanisms, only to become more complicated with time. Today we have mechanical pencils which can write and draw very precisely. Compared with other art mediums, colored pencil is relatively new. It appeared at the beginning of the 20th century.
Here you can read more about colored pencil history. It is easy to write something. But what to do when you make a mistake?
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