Pen & Pencil
Since prehistoric times, humans have tried to mark their stories and presence with the help of some tools. In ancient times, people used the techniques of engraving or etching their writings on hard surfaces like smooth stones, suitable flat wood, and some metallic surfaces. Many such tablets from the Indus valley civilisation have been found. One such tablet, written in the "Indus Script", which has not yet been deciphered (that is, cannot be read), frm Khirasara, Gujarat, around 2500 BC. After that, materials like papyrus were also used as writing surfaces by using some hard and pointed stick or stylus. A section of the Egyptian "Book of the Dead", written on parchment in 1275 BC, is shown in the figure.
Examples of writing are found from caves, pyramids of Egypt to later stages during Chinese Dynasties, Eastern Asia, Greeks, and the Roman Empire. The famous Bhimbetka caves near Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh are thought to have been inhabited more than 100,000 years ago, perhaps even from the Stone age. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site with many beautiful paintings of animals, people dancing and hunting, and the colours (made from powdering coloured rocks) are still deep and vibrant (see an example of Bhimbetka rock painting in the picture).
Papyrus is stiff and cracks easily. It was replaced in Europe by the cheaper parchment, made of animal skin, which was also more durable. See the picture of a parchment and quill to write with.
Quill writing
When liquid ink was invented, people developed tiny brushes made from camel hair for writing and painting. Moreover, quills were also used for writing by dipping them into inkpot to suck ink and then writing on a surface.
Around 2,000 BCE ago, Egyptians were making writing tools from reeds (taller and slimmer family of plants). They carefully cut the tip of a reed to form a nib and filled the hollow portion of the reed with some liquid that acted as ink.
Around 600 AD, the quill pens came into vogue (fashion) and it remained so from the 7th to 19th century. The people of Europe used feathers of birds whose feathers were large such as swans. The feathers obtained from birds were properly dried to remove any leftover oil. After that, their tip was shaped like a nib with the help of a knife. These quill pens have to be frequently dipped in ink since the feather does not hold much ink.
BOX How is paper made?
Papermaking using wood-pulp was known in China since the 6th century. But a wood-pulp paper machine was invented only in the late 18th and early 19th century. Here the pulp (essentially cellulose) is combined with water, flattened, dried, and cut into sheets and rolls. This made paper relatively cheap so that everyone could use it. At this time, it became important to manufacture pens with machines rather than by hand. Even today, this is how the paper you write on is made. In India, apart from wood fibre, natural fibre such as cotton as well as recycled paper goes into making your notebooks.
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Machined pens
In 1822, John Mitchel started making machine-produced steel pens. By 1850, Birmingham became a large center that produced such pens. However, these pens worked like quill pens as they had to be dipped into an inkpot frequently to enable them to write.
In 1827, a Romanian inventor, Petrache Poenaru, got his first-ever fountain pen patented. With this discovery, there was no need for frequent dipping of the pen in ink. For some unknown reasons he could not develop them to a greater extent and such pens remained defective.
Fountain pen
In 1884, Lewis Edson Waterman developed a successful fountain pen and got it patented. His invented fountain pen, in the forthcoming years, went through many valuable developments and also become commercially successful.
Ballpoint pen
A ballpoint pen has a small rotating steel ball at its tip, held in place by a socket (see picture). The ink is viscous (thick) and coats the inner surface of the ball. As the pen moves on paper, the ball rotates freely, so that the inked side comes in contact with the paper. In the meanwhile, the other side of the ball gets inked as well, and so there is a continuous smooth flow of ink. The ink is specially quick-drying so it doesn't smudge. While John Loud invented it during the 1880s, it was the Hungarian Biro who refined the product in the 1930s. So many people call ballpoint pens as Biros.
The pen can write on a variety of materials other than paper, such, wood, plastics, cardboards, or even underwater. Its ink doesn’t freeze in low-temperature zones. Due to this reason, it reduced the use of fountain pens. It is much cheaper than a fountain pen, although the modern use-and-throw ballpoint pens are a horror story of wasted and accumulated plastic.
Invention of the Pencil
The Latin word “Pencillus” means a small tail, from which the present-day word “Pencil” is derived. Modern pencils were developed through various stages, starting from the first inventor Nicholas-Jacques Conte in 1795. He was one of the scientists who were serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte – the famous ruler of France. He used graphite as the core component of a pencil that writes.
Graphites are suited as a writing material due to their softness and dark gray color. Graphite is a form (allotrope) of pure carbon and was officially found in Bavaria, Germany, around the 15th century. However, its uses were recorded in history a few centuries earlier. In earlier days, a misnomer prevailed that graphite is a form of elemental lead, so they talked about pencil as “lead”. In 1832, the first factory of pencils, “Cumberland Pencil Factory” was built in Keswick, England.
BOX How are pencils manufactured
In the original process of pencil-making, water, clay, and graphite were combined and then roasted to a temperature of 1038 C. The extent of hardness or softness of the writing component of a pencil is determined by a suitable combination of its materials and the extent of the roasting temperature.
The letter H indicates the hardness; and the letter ‘B’ indicates blackness. Thus, the softest pencil is marked with 9B and the hardest one is marked with 9H. Popular pencils bear the mark HB. The letter ‘F’ indicates fineness. The ‘pencil-lead’ is surrounded by rounded or angular wooden casings appropriately painted with different colors.
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Adapted from Abdul Wahab's article, "Pen & Pencil," in Science4Fun, September 10, 2020, https://science4fun.info/pen-pencil/