I'm old enough to have learned how to write using pencils and fountain pens. Our desks in grade school had inkwells. And we used blotting paper - look it up.
Ballpoint pens were available then, but too expensive for school kids. I still used a cartridge-based fountain pen when I was in university for formal work, although by that point cheap Bic pens were ubiquitous. And I lusted after the silver Parker pen that was featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I have on now, and it's my favourite pen still).
The BBC has an article about the history of ballpoint pens that I found quite interesting. I hadn't realized that they go all the way back to World War 2, for example. According to the author they changed writing much the way smartphones have done in our time.
The new pen had an equally dramatic effect on the act of writing itself, says David Sax, the Canadian journalist who wrote the book The Revenge of Analog. “The ballpoint pen was the equivalent of today’s smartphone. Before then, writing was a stationary act that had to be done in a certain environment, on a certain kind of desk, with all these other things to hand that allowed you to write.
“What the ballpoint pen did was to make writing something that could happen anywhere. I’ve written in snow and rain, on the back of an ATV and in a boat at sea and in the middle of the night,” says Sax. Biros don’t drain batteries, they don’t require plugging in in the middle of nowhere, and even the tightest pocket can accommodate them. “It only fails if it runs out of ink,” Sax adds.
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