by Jan Sterrett

Created on: July 02, 2007

Before computers and word processors were invented people wrote their Articles, Stories and Poems, as well as their grocery lists, to-do lists, and love letters by hand, using a pen. I recall using a #2 pencil for doing my math calculations when I was in school. Pencils of many varieties are still used today for jotting things down, as well as for sketching and drawing. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the history of the pen that is still being widely used today.

The cave dwellers first used a hunting club and a sharpened stone to scratch the pictures of their daily lives into the walls of the caves they lived in. While some people might not consider this to be an actual pen, as we know it today, it was the first form of a permanent means of communicating the events of their lives back then. But cave walls were not easily transported from one place to another.

Pictographs were used as far back as 8,500 B.C. when merchants used clay to record the amounts of items that were being shipped and traded. From there the Hebrews, Greeks, Byzantines and Romans developed various alphabets.

The Greeks used writing instruments that were made up of metal, bone or ivory with the writing being placed on wax-coated tablets. That is how the first written letter was developed, with written words communicated from one individual to another in this way.

Then the Chinese developed Indian ink. Other cultures used berries, plants and minerals, which produced natural inks of different colors. There were different ritual meanings assigned to the different color inks being used.

The quill pen was invented in 700 A.D. This pen was used for over 1000 years. The feathers that were used to make these pens were primarily taken from the outer left wings of living birds. More people tended to be right handed, then left handed, and the feathers from the left wings of our fine feathered friends, curved in a direction better suited for right-handed writers. The goose, crow, eagle, owl, hawk and turkey all sacrificed their wing feathers for the quill pens that humans used to write with, during this time.

Quill pens had their own sets of problems in being used as writing instruments. They did not last very long, and they needed to be sharpened. There was a long preparation time before the quill pens could be used for our human writing purposes.

In 1884, the first fountain pen was developed by L.E. Waterman, of New York. Four companies, Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman and Wahl-Eversharp soon

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