A tenth-century caliph asked for a pen that would not stain
In 953, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Mu'izz, demanded a pen that would not dirty his hands or clothes. His craftsmen delivered one that stored ink inside and fed it to the nib, possibly the first fountain pen. Nobody knows how it worked, and just one account of it survives, but his wish would take centuries to become ordinary.
For thousands of years, writing meant dipping. Egyptian scribes wrote on papyrus with pens cut from sea rush, and finds at Saqqara hint that reed pens may go back to the First Dynasty, around 3000 BC. When smoother animal skins replaced papyrus, the quill, cut from a bird's flight feather, allowed finer, smaller script. Quills wrote some of the Dead Sea Scrolls around 100 BC and were still in use to sign the United States Constitution in 1787. Reed pens have not vanished entirely: in parts of Pakistan young students still use them on small wooden boards.
Metal pens are older than you might expect. Romans made them, and examples found at Pompeii predate the eruption of 79 CE. Samuel Pepys mentions a silver pen that carried ink in 1663, but steel nibs only took over after John Mitchell of Birmingham began mass-producing them in 1822. Reservoir pens also developed slowly. Daniel Schwenter described a pen made of one quill inside another in 1636, and Petrache Poenaru, a Romanian student in Paris, won a French patent in 1827 for a fountain pen with a quill reservoir.
The ballpoint had a false start. John J. Loud patented one in 1888, but the version that caught on came from László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, working with his chemist brother George. Their pen used a tiny ball that turned in a socket, picking up ink as it rolled. After fleeing Nazi Germany for Argentina in 1940, they filed a fresh patent and had commercial pens on sale by 1943. In Croatia, Slavoljub Penkala created the first solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, and Yukio Horie of Tokyo invented the felt-tip pen in the 1960s.
Despite keyboards, the pen is still the main way most people write by hand.
Source: Pen
