December 12, 2024 • 35 mins
People have been writing by hand for thousands of years—ever since the Mesopotamians started doodling in cuneiform. That means there’s a vast, inky world for Will and Mango to explore, from the difference between scribes and scriveners to the best feathers for quill pens. They also reveal a shocking truth about fountain pens, and discover all the ways handwriting benefits our brains. (Yes, we recognize the irony of typing that.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what, Mango, what's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All right, I hate to start an episode this way,
but I gotta be honest with you. I'm a little
bit disappointed you. You actually never answered my letter.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
The one you slid under my door that just said, hey, Mango,
I'm looking forward to recording later. I mean, you could
have texted me that.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, no, that's the one. I'm actually I'm making an
effort to try to write by hand more. And you know,
while I was researching this episode, I actually discovered that
there are some real benefits to writing the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah, Like what so if you write handwritten notes
in a meeting or a lecture, we actually understand the
material better than if we type them. And part of
(00:48):
the reason for this is that it slows us down.
We have to process what's being said, and then we
decide which words to write from that. And that's different
than when we type, because when we're at our computers,
we can trans describe things we hear without really thinking
about what those words mean or whether they're important or not.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's really interesting, you know, I feel like, I'm such
a bad note taker because often I start writing, but
then my pages just descend into doodles. It's like I
have no concentration for any.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I can remember from as far back as our college
years when you would be doing exactly that, and I
remember those those doodles that were quite impressive. But the
handwriting actually takes concentration, and your brain has to actually
visualize the shapes that you're putting on the page and
create them individually. So you're activating both the part of
the brain responsible for fine motor skills and the part
(01:39):
that does visual information processing. But the way the brain
operates as it syncs up these processes is it's associated
with forming memories and actually learning better.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So, in other words, by not texting me this morning,
you gave your friend a little workout.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah yeah, I mean it feels so strong right now,
and you know so out of the two of us,
I guess, yes, I'm slightly in better shape for an
episode about handwriting and the tools we used to do it.
But I have faith in you, Mango. You're going to
catch up. I think we're going to be good. So
let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners Welcome to Part
(02:32):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm here
with my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and on the
other side of that booth as our pal Dylan. Now
sometimes he challenges us more than others to figure out
what exactly he's doing behind the booth there. It took
me a minute because Dylan is wearing a lab coat,
which at first glance doesn't seem to have anything to
do with this topic. But then I saw the prescription
(02:54):
pad that he's holding. Did you notice this, Mango, I
did notice it. It's pretty it's pretty awesome, and I
think the idea is the old cliche about doctors having
bad handwriting. That's our good pal Dylan fing and that's
a good one, Dylan.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I mean he also wheeled in that exam tables. You
put so much effort into these things, but will before
we go too much further, I am curious if handwriting
has so many benefits for our brains. I've actually been
wondering if my kids should be doing it more, because like,
I don't think my kids even know how to write cursive,
(03:28):
Like everything's on laptops these days.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean they're such digital creatures.
But kids' brains definitely benefit from handwriting, and it starts
when they're really young, like when they're learning the ABC's
tracing letters, you know, that actually helps them recognize and
understand letters better than when they type them, and this
develops the areas of the brain that they'll use for
reading throughout their life. Of course, they should probably learn
(03:51):
how to use modern technology too, so you know, maybe
keep the laptops around as well, But there's really benefits
to both.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So it's funny. I actually read this story this week
about a Scottish school where they're forcing kids to learn
how to use fountain pens as seven year olds. Wow,
And it's because apparently you can get away with worse
handwriting with a pencil or ballpoint pen, but you really
have to write more neatly and legibly with the fountain pen.
And the headmaster there says that slowing kids down, like
(04:20):
you said, makes the kids understand more and really makes
them comprehend more, but also it apparently raises their self esteem,
which is really interesting, Like these kids feel really special
because they're using these fountain pens, so I know, we've
got a little bit of pen history to get into.
But before that, I thought, maybe we should do a
little bit on the history of writing and where it
really began.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Let's do it, I said, we go back to the beginning.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that writing
originated in ancient Mesopotamia and it's around thirty five hundred
BCE when the Cuneiform script was invented. And apparently cuneiform
actually means wedge shaped, which is why I guess it
helps you know what to picture.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, I mean those are the chunky triangular symbols, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And honestly, learning the script was not easy, so back
then most people only had a very basic grasp of
writing events. Literacy was in common, which is how scribes
came about, and scribes were responsible for writing stuff down,
particularly about financial transactions and trade. But over time they
started being involved with more fields and it was required
(05:24):
for scribes to know about everything they wrote about, so
they were kind of these scholars. They had to learn
about everything from mathematics to agriculture, to religion, to politics
and even more. And they also had to learn six
hundred characters of cuneiform.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Wow, six hundred characters, I mean that's a lot harder
than our twenty six So how did they learn all this?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah, so scribe school. Apparently they went to something called
an Eduba or the House of Tablets, which sounds straight
out of National Treasure, but definitely serious business. Classes were
in session from sunrise till sunset, and most students started
around eight years old, and then they didn't graduate until
their early twenties. I mean, it actually kind of makes
(06:05):
sense considering how much they had to learn. I do
wonder though, like, do you think there was more or
less note passing in scribal school than when we were
in school? I take a lot less because of the
carving and all. Probably, so, you know, staying focused was
definitely a big thing for these kids, because you were
plucked to be scribes, and you kind of knew you
(06:26):
had a good life waiting ahead of you. Scribes were
sometimes referred to as those who never go hungry because
they had this crucial skill in a population of mostly
illiterate people, and so they actually had a lot of
power and a lot of the benefits that come with up.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, that's super interesting. It actually reminds me of a
word I heard from Herman Melville. It's the word scrivener,
as in Bartleby the Scrivener. He's a character whose job
is copying documents for a lawyer and he writes everything
by hand, not because the lawyer is illiterate, he just
has lots of documents to deal with. And this is
pre zero obviously.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
You know, I have never read Melville. I feel a
little embarrassed to be admitting that on this show. But
that term scrivener that you mentioned is often used interchangeably
with scribe because their jobs were the same at various
points in history. But there's actually a huge distinction between
the two. So over time, as business and legal transactions
(07:21):
began to use written instead of oral communication, scriveners were
kind of more like everyday copyists who wrote out civil
documents and correspondence. Will scribes were definitely more errordyed and educated.
They were associated with scholarship and art and scientific and
religious thinking. And part of this distinction comes about in
(07:41):
the thirteenth century. This is when the courts, at least
in Europe began requiring written instead of oral records, which
meant that plaintiffs needed the documents to be perfect, otherwise
the courts could throw their case out. So Europe started
differentiating between document scriveners who wrote things like legal documents
and deeds, and book scriveners or scribe vibes who worked
in book production.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I mean, what about like notaries. I feel like they're
kind of kind of in the same field in a
way at least.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, So Meredith and Gabe actually had a note on
these two. Apparently they were around in ancient Egypt, but
only really became established during the Roman Empire. The first
notary was an enslaved person named Tierro, and he worked
for the great orator and statesman Cicero. So Tiro wrote
down all of Cicero's speeches, which is actually how we
have them, and he's credited with developing a form of
(08:30):
shorthand called note. But he also helped with official political
and financial matters. Anyway, as the legal system was evolving
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, notaries started catching on
in England. Then they became essential to global exploration in
the Renaissance. So this hadn't even occurred to me, But
apparently on all of Columbus's voyages he had notaries, and
(08:52):
this was because King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela wanted to
make sure someone was keeping crack of all the treasure
he found and that it was all still there when
Columbus traveled back. But the job has actually evolved over
time to where notaries take fewer notes and basically authenticate
documents and witness signature is the way you think of
them today, all.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Right, So he had notaries on all of these voyages.
It is sort of a funny picture. And I know
a lot of these images come from pop culture and
movies and things like that, but you picture these voyages
as filled with I don't know, I guess unsavory sailors,
But I love that there was just an official in
the corner like taking notes on everything.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I'm sure that person was super, super popular and included
in all the pirate games, and ivity is exactly so.
Colonial America also took their notary game seriously because they
were so important to keeping documents safe and accurately reporting
facts about, you know, all the trends Atlantic commerce. So
Thomas Bugle was appointed in sixteen thirty nine as the
(09:54):
colony's first notary, but he kind of has a black
mark against his name. He got busted for false defying documents,
and he was kicked out of office, he was excommunicated
from the church, and then he was sent back to
England in disgrace.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And so what happened to him after that?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
You know, because notaries do all the writing, it's weirdly
not clear what happened to him because no one bothered
to write it down. But anyway, now that we know
who he was doing, was the note taking in early history,
I really want to switch gears to talk about pens
and the pens that have made all this history possible.
So let's do that right after this break. Welcome back
(10:46):
to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about handwriting, and
we're about to switch gears to pens, which will I
know you looked into Let's dig into it all right.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
So I wanted to know what the first pen actually was,
and so that brought me all the way back to
the first millennium BCE. Back then the Chinese used a
brush dipped in ink to write, and that's the earliest
known ancestor of the pen. You then fast forward to
three hundred BCE and you have the Egyptians who started
using these thick reeds as sort.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Of like pen like instruments, and I'm guessing this is
sort of like the same principle as the quill pen.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, it's pretty much exactly the same thing. And quill
pins are super important in pen history. Actually, the word
pen comes from the Latin word pinna, meaning wing, And
so we know quills were in use by the seventh
century because the theologian and archbishop Isidor of Seville mentioned
them in his writing, but they were probably around even
(11:41):
earlier than that.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
You know, I've always wondered how people ended on which
birds feathers to use their quill pens, like, it just
seems curious to me.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, and well, apparently any large bird would do so.
They would use feathers from eagles, peacocks, turkeys. When they
needed to do things like fine detailed work, maybe like accounting,
they would use crow quills. It was just interesting to
think about the different types of feathers that could be used.
But the top bird for a quill pen was said
to be a domesticated white goose. Its five biggest wing
(12:12):
feathers are considered perfect for quill pens. Thomas Jefferson even
kept a flock of geese at Monticello to supply him
with quills, which is not something I'd ever thought about before.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
That's really fascinating. It is crazy though, right, like you
think about like the difference between eel's feather, a peacock feather,
and a crow's feather, right, like one is magnificent and
the others just kind of.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Like around right right, such an insult.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
It's funny. Aja Jacobs was on this show talking about
the Constitution earlier this year, and he let me write
with one of his quill pens, and I think he
was using a turkey feather and it was the worst sound.
It's like high pitched and scratchy, and you can't imagine
like trying to write out the Constitution with one of
these things. Yeah, and Aj said when he'd write his
(12:58):
manuscript with us at home, the sound was so bad
that his wife made him do it from another groom
and close the doors.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
So funny, only an Aja problem.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But the other thing you said, which I found really fascinating,
was kind of like with the fountain pins, that you
write so slowly that you really have a lot of
time to process your thoughts and also be very judicious
and selective with your vocabularies, so you're you know, the
way you write is almost more thoughtful because it's not
just like banging out keys on a keyboard or something.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, yeah, no, that's super interesting. Actually, one question I
had was why did quills last for such a long time.
I mean, obviously it was cheaper to go pluck birds
feathers than to make a metal implement, but it feels
like someone would have produced a fake quill by this point.
And it turns out the answer has to do with
the ink itself. So seventeenth century ink was made of
(13:53):
iron salts and oak galls and gum arabic and it
made it very acidic, and so when people did try
to use steel quills, it ate away at these new
fangled pins they were trying to make. It actually wasn't
until the mid eighteen hundreds that you get these stronger,
more acid resistant steel that was being invented at the time,
(14:13):
and that's when steel pen nibs started being mass produced
and steel pens overtook the quills.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
That's so crazy, Like you don't even think about the
way the ink might have affected the mechanics of the pen.
That's really really amazing. So tell me about fountain pens
and I'm prettily interested in these, you know we mentioned
at the top. Also, these were an instrument that made
no sense to me as a kid. I remember like
playing with my grandfather's fun pen and either ink would
(14:41):
get all over the place or it was that scratchy sound,
which I hated. But I've recently started playing with fun
pens and I like the experience so much that I've
been giving them out as gifts. I'm curious, how did
this pen come to be?
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, So the fountain pen is an evolution on the
dipping your quill and ink method because it has this
ink reservoir. It has a nib like I mentioned in
the first reference we have to fountain pins. It's in
a tenth century manuscript from Arab Egypt. Now in it
and a mom commissions a pin with ink stored inside
so he doesn't need to keep dipping his quill. Plus
(15:15):
he requests that a writer could store it in their
sleeve without staining their.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Shirt, which feels like very specific requests.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Totally, but it took a long time for those problems
to get worked out. The first practical version of the
fountain pen wasn't produced until centuries later. This was in
eighteen eighty three, when an American named Lewis Edson Waterman
patented the modern fountain pin. Waterman had invented a new
system to move ink smoothly down the pen nib without
leaking or making blobs all over the paper, and he
(15:45):
sold his what he called ideal fountain pen from a
cigar shop in Lower Manhattan, and people loved it, so
he started advertising it, and eventually he created the Waterman
Pen Company, which is of course still in business today.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
How is it that Waterman ends up coming up with
this idea?
Speaker 2 (16:02):
You know, as with many things that were invented some
time ago, the stories can vary, but if you look
at the Waterman Pen Company's ads through the nineteen hundreds,
here's what they say happened. They say Lewis Waterman was
an insurance salesman on the brink of closing this big contract,
and he offered his client a fountain pen to sign
the contract. But then the pen leaked all over the paper,
(16:24):
and so Waterman ran out to get another pin. But somehow,
while he was gone, a rival broker swooped in and
closed the deal. I just love the imagery of this.
But according to legend, Waterman decided then and there that
he would invent a more reliable fountain pin. So he
started tinkering in his brother's workshop, and the rest is,
of course history.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I love this idea of like rivals just lurking in
the back of d Yeah, ready to go wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So it sounds like maybe you're a little skeptical about
the story.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I mean, you do find this story with slight
variations in almost every hitory of the fountain pen. But
I'm sad to say it's most likely not at all true,
and a vintage pen expert and historian Daniel Kersheimer debunked
the myth in one of the most enjoyable research papers
I have ever read. So Kersheimer discovered that the earliest
(17:16):
mention of the fountain pen creation story comes from nineteen twelve,
and interestingly, it contains some details that only appear there
and in no future version of the tale. Like it
includes Waterman tinkering with a pre existing pin rather than
making one from scratch in his brother's workshop. Now that clue,
and that there was a pre existing pen that pointed
the way to an earlier article from nineteen ten that
(17:40):
tells an entirely different story. It's about three people in Connecticut.
You've got Frank Hollind, Aaron Cook, and Aaron's sister Mabel.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
So I don't Jerr Lewis Waterman in that mix.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
He is not part of this story. And it seems
this guy Holland was talking about how whoever could combine
the best inc and the best pen to create a
fountain pen that didn't leak would get rich. So he
and his friends talked through this idea, and Holland was
actually a skilled engineer and created this prototype of the
improved fountain pen the following day after this conversation. Now,
(18:13):
eventually this group formed the Holland Stylographic Pen Company. The
founding members applied for and got this patent for their
fountain pens, but they still had one major issue. After
writing for a few hours, a giant ink blot would
flow down.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
That seemed like a problem.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
It's a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
So they move on from there.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Well, eventually the Holland Company made its way to New
York where they linked up with Waterman, who figured out
that if you added two indents inside the pen, they
stopped the blotting issue. I love invention stories like this,
especially the real ones where like that was such a
creative way to solve this problem. So Waterman immediately filed
for his own patent and ended up earning six thousand
(18:53):
dollars in the first year of his pen sales, which
would have been a lot of money at that point.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I imagine, so that whole thing about the client
with the ruined contractors is totally bunk.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Then, it seems. Unfortunately that's the case, and the story
was probably just invented by the marketing department after Waterman
died in nineteen oh one, and over time it kind
of became the only story that people know.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, people do love inventor hero stories. And I've actually
got another one that I want to tell, which is true.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
All right, let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
So this one's about the ballpoint pen, which has a
complicated origin as well, and the first one was patented
in eighteen eighty eight by an American named John Loud
who wanted a pen that would write on a variety
of materials. Right, so, of course he wanted it to
be able to write on paper, but also wood and leather.
He added this rotating steel ball inside his pen to
(19:44):
control the ink flow, but he never got the paper
part down, it could only write on those rough surfaces,
and his patent lapsed before you could improve it. And
it wasn't until the nineteen thirties that a Hungarian Argentinian
inventor made this whole contraption work. He's the one who
tends to get the credit for inventing the ballpoint pen.
His name is laslow Biro a bureau.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I've actually heard that word so in ingland's what they
call ballpoint pins, right.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That's exactly right. So Iero was a journalist and he
used fountain pens all the time and knew there had
to be a better way to write in a blotless,
mudchless manner. So he realized that adding a ball inside
a pen was a good start, but really it wasn't
good enough. He needed a new type of ink, one
that would dry quicker like newspaper ink. And his brother,
(20:31):
who was a dentist, and also somehow a knowledgeable chemist,
decided to help him out.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So I feel like a lot of times when we're
telling these stories from history, there's so many multi hyphenates
in the history stories, Like here we've got an inventor
slash journalist and a Dennis slash chemist. I don't think
you see many of those these days.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I mean, I could really do one thing. These
people ever liked it, like masters of several things. But
Laslow's brother actually did come through. He creates this fast
drying with high viscosity and it was kind of a
bonus like the resulting pen used way less ink than
fountain pens as a result of this, and Laslow got
a patent for the pen in nineteen thirty eight. The
(21:11):
pen was officially released in nineteen forty three, and one
of his first big customers was the British Royal Air Force,
who ordered thirty thousand of the pens. Because I don't
know if you've ever tried to write with pens an
airplane or something, but these pens could actually withstand the
changes in pressure, so they wouldn't sort of spill all
over the place like fountain pens.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah. Actually, I didn't think about that that fountain pens
would malfunction in the air. And obviously this was during
World War Two, so I'm guessing the Air Force was
crazy busy at this point.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah. So at the time Laslow was living in South America.
But what's interesting is that besides the Royal Air Force,
the pen really didn't make that much of a global impact. Eventually,
after the war, there was this American businessman, his name
was Milton Reynolds, and he comes across bureaus pens. He
kind of tweaks the designs to make the ink flow
by gravity, not a capillary action, and this version of
(22:04):
the ballpoint becomes huge in the US. In nineteen forty five,
Time magazine reported quote, thousands of people all but trampled
one another last week to spend twelve dollars of fifty
cents each for a new style fountain pen, which was
these ballpoint pens. And within six months, the department store
Gimbals had made five point six million dollars in ballpoint
(22:25):
pen sales, which is around eighty one million dollars today.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Wow, and that's just Gimbals. That is wild. So people
must have been making a fortune on these things. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
But what's interesting is that the ballpoint was marketed kind
of like a fountain pen of the time, right. It
still need to be refilled every two years, so customers
bought a lot of refills, but not as many new pens.
And obviously that's a problem for a company that wants
to maximize profits. So it was actually a guy named
Michelle Bick who addressed that issue in the nineteen fifties.
(22:56):
He was an Italian born French industrialist and he came
up with idea to make the pens disposable. In fact,
his obituary read quote he added the magic catalyst of disposability.
He invented nothing, but understood the mass market almost perfectly.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
He invented nothing at such a great phrase for an obituary.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, it's really amazing. But Bick, whose name was spelled Bich,
was advised by an ad exec to shorten his name
to Bic. And obviously we all know the bigpen Tony.
So it's estimated that fifteen million ballpoint pens are sold
every single day and Bick is the leading manufacturer.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's about two million
in every pack that you buy of those big pins.
But it's so wild that he basically made it okay
for us to be more forgetful. Like before Bick, you
actually had to keep track of these expensive pins. And actually,
one major drawback to the disposable pin is the environmental impact.
Because I was thinking about this, I have to admit
(23:56):
I'm really bad about this if you have a cheap
pin of somehow misplacing it. And then in the United
States alone, it's estimated that over one point six billion
pins are thrown away every single year. That's not to
mention the impact of pen production, which applies to all pins.
And you know that's the fancy ones with the gold
nibs to the cheap disposable ones.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You know, there are not a lot of things that
I am proud of or brag about, but holding on
to pens is one of the few things I am
really good at.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
There you go, You should brag about that. You should
use that as a lead whenever you meet everyone, Mango.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It's at the top of my resume. Hey, but there
was a kid in elementary school, this kid named Tim,
and for some reason, his mom was very strict with him,
and she gave him like seven pencils at the beginning
of the year or whatever and showed him not to
lose him. And at the end of the year he
actually had like four or five of these pencils, and
I just remember being so impressed, and I kind of
(24:51):
made it a challenge for myself to like hold on
to pens.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, that's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
But I don't know if you have this relationship. But
the thing I was going to say, get back on track.
But my grandfather, what are the few like pieces of
advice he instilled in me was to always carry a
pen with me. And that's because he was a multi hyphene, right,
he was a you know, a chemist and an engineer
and like a writer and all these other things. And
his point was like, you never know when you're going
(25:17):
to want to write down a note or an idea.
It's just useful to have a pen. And it's like
my dad always carried a pen for the same reason.
And I still like, I feel like I'm not fully
dressed if I go out for the world and don't
have a pen in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I completely agree, I always have a pen in my pocket.
I may be a different pin because, like I said,
I'm really bad at keeping up with him, but I
always managed to find a pen. And apparently you're not
the only one who values pins, because there's a growing
community of pen enthusiasts and they're keeping the classic ways alive.
Fountain pen collecting has become a pretty big thing, and
for some collectors it's not just about the craftsmanship of
(25:52):
the pen or the value that they hold, although that's
of course important, a lot of people just love writing
with them. In fact, people spend a whopping three hundred
and forty one million dollars on fountain pens in twenty
twenty one. That was a seven percent increase from just
a few years before that. There are indie fountain pen
companies popping up, constructing new pins and kind of blending
(26:13):
these niche inks, and there's some really cool online communities
where fountain pen enthusiast talk shop, like the Fountain pens
subreddit which has over three hundred thousand members, and all
the content on pen talk and Instagram, so like the
list just goes on. There's a lot of enthusiasm for them.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, it's funny. I gotten to fun pens recently because
my cousin took me to a shop and we just
started playing, and I really liked Invite. I had no
idea that this thing was so trendy.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, it's it's a huge thing. So there's this guy,
Aiden Bernal, and he reviews fountain pens and inks and
he has more than six hundred thousand subscribers. They're also tutorials,
reports from pen shows, which are apparently a pretty big thing.
It's kind of like Comic Con for pins.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I feel like someone should invite us to the Comic
Con for pens because it's the type of thing I
would happily go to.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Well, I mean, I think there's a decent chance there's
an overlap between pen enthusiast and some of the listeners
of Part Time Genius, So keep that in mind. Guys,
if you're ready, invite Mango to your next pen gathering.
But apparently these take place all around the world, but
one place that's become a real hotbed of fountain pen
collecting is the Philippines. The Manila Pen Show is actually
(27:27):
the biggest in Southeast Asia, and one of the country's
most renowned authors, jose Dellaside Junior, has helped spread the
love of pins through his blog it's called Pinoy Penmen,
and in twenty eighteen, a company called Kosama created the
first ever Filipino made fountain pin.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
That's so fascinating. I wonder why fountain pins have caught
on there, of all places. You know, like many things,
there's probably a lot of reasons, including a cultural interest
in handicraft and proximity to pen manufacturers and specialty shops
in Japan, but also younger Philippine those have gotten into
the hobby and given this local pen community a boost
of energy at a time when some European pen communities
(28:07):
are starting to trend older and older. That's really cool.
I love that pens are young person's game. Now, that's right.
But before I go off and dive into this internet
pen culture, which I'm absolutely gonna do, now, oh, why
don't we do a little fact off?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
So we were talking earlier about scribes and scriptners, and
apparently they used different types of handwriting script depending on
the purpose. This was true in every society that began
to privilege literacy over the oral records. So, for example,
at various times in China, scribes used what's known as
the seal script for commemorative inscriptions. They also had a
(28:49):
clerical script for documents and correspondence, a cursive script for
esthetic appeal, and a semi cursive script known as the
running script for convenience.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That we talked about Big being the leading manufacturer of
ballpoint pins, and since nineteen fifty they have sold over
one hundred billion ballpoint pens worldwide, and as we know,
there is no way to really measure the scale of
something without seeing how many times you can go to
the moon and back. That's really like our standard measurement
(29:21):
for big numbers, so we had to look into it.
That is so many pins that a stack of them
could go to the moon and back more than three
hundred and twenty thousand times. Now that makes it a
lot of pins.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That is insane. Speaking of the moon, you may have
heard the story that during the Space Race, NASA spent
millions trying to figure out how to make a pen
work in space where there is obviously no gravity. Meanwhile,
the Soviets at the time just use pencils. Part of
that is a bit of a myth. NASA actually used
pencils as well, but in nineteen sixty five they did
(29:56):
get into hot water with taxpayers for buying thirty four
mechanical pencils at one hundred and twenty eight dollars and
eighty nine cents a piece. It was the Fisher Pen
company that finally developed a pen that could write in space,
and NASA started using it in nineteen sixty seven for
a much more reasonable cost of two dollars and thirty
nine cents per pen. And this was the pen that
(30:16):
the astronauts on the Apollo eleven mission used to fix
a broken arming switch, which allowed them to return to Earth.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Wow, so pens really do save lives. But I'm curious
how did they use the pen by like doing a
calculation or something.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
No, apparently a switch broke and they used the pen
to push in a circuit breaker. Oh okay, I guess
they could have used a pencil in that case too.
But obviously pencils are a serious hazard in space, with
little bits of debris that can fly around the shuttles.
So like if you think about pencil shavings or little
pieces of lead that could break off, all of that
ends up being a hazard for astronauts. But what's funny
(30:53):
is that the pens were so good at writing in
microgravity that cosmonauts actually began using them too, So this
is one technology that we actually shared.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Huh, that's interesting. All right, Well, if you've ever wondered
what the ball and the ballpoint pin is made of,
it's a tungsten carbide pellet. Now to make it its
ground between plates until it becomes a sphere, and this
is a process that can take up to sixty hours.
Sixty hours, it's a long time to do this, but
that extra effort is worth it. When the ball is complete,
(31:22):
it's actually as hard as a diamond. You know.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It's one of those things that I almost forget that
there's a ball in ballpoint pens most of the time.
But it's also funny that these pens are so disposable
and yet we're spending sixty hours perfecting the sphere inside them.
That's amazing. It is so speaking of pen parts, did
you know there are people known as nidmeisters who repair pendants.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
I did not know this, Mango, and I personally am
not a nibmeister, but now I have a new goal
in life.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So appairly you learn this craft through mentorship and practice.
And it said that each nymmeister's work has a unique personality.
You can actually tell people nibs apart.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
God, nib meister. It's like it's a new scrabble word.
It's also just it feels like something you want to
call somebody when they've just been amazing, like they're just
a total nibmeister, you know, Or maybe it's an insult.
I can't decide. We'll have to work shop it a
little bit of all right. Well, for a number of decades,
the government has relied on the exact same pin. It's
a Black skill Craft ballpoint pin, and according to an
(32:22):
article in the Washington Post, the specifications for the pen
come from a nineteen thirty eight mandate. In fact, the
government had sixteen pages for specifications for their pen, including
that quote, it must be able to write continuously for
a mile and in temperatures up to one hundred and
sixty degrees and down to forty degrees below zero. I
don't know what's happening at those temperatures. But according to
(32:45):
the article, it's been used in war zones and gas stations.
It was designed to fit undetected into US military uniforms,
and according to company lore, the pen can stand in
for a two inch fuse and comes in handy during
emergency trade giotomies. The pins are ubiquitous and still used
in government offices today, and as one government official referred
(33:07):
to them, they're the Coca Cola of pins.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Who is the person who has to right in one
hundred and sixty degrees or heard negative forty degrees.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
That's what I want to know. Write this for a mile.
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I really thought I had you with my Nibmeister in fact,
but I think the government penn story really is hard
to be So why why don't you take today's trophy.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I'll take it, but I have to be honest. I
know we hear from our listeners sometimes when they disagree
with who wins the trophy. I think this is going
to be one of those. Nibmeister was pretty good, but
you're kind to do that. I will accept the trophy. Well,
that wraps up today's episode from Dylan, Gabe, Mary Mango
and me. And actually I want to give a shout
out to Meredith who made some amazing contributions with today's research. Now,
(33:52):
remember you can always find us on Instagram at part
Time Genius and if you're someone who posts pictures of
your fountain pins, please tag it. We'd love to see them.
Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongagetikler
and research by our good pal Mary, Philip Sandy Today's
episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan
with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced
for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social
(34:38):
media support from Sasha Gay trustee Dara Potts and buy
Any Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what, Mango, what's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All right, I hate to start an episode this way,
but I gotta be honest with you. I'm a little
bit disappointed you. You actually never answered my letter.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
The one you slid under my door that just said, hey, Mango,
I'm looking forward to recording later. I mean, you could
have texted me that.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, no, that's the one. I'm actually I'm making an
effort to try to write by hand more. And you know,
while I was researching this episode, I actually discovered that
there are some real benefits to writing the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah, Like what so if you write handwritten notes
in a meeting or a lecture, we actually understand the
material better than if we type them. And part of
(00:48):
the reason for this is that it slows us down.
We have to process what's being said, and then we
decide which words to write from that. And that's different
than when we type, because when we're at our computers,
we can trans describe things we hear without really thinking
about what those words mean or whether they're important or not.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's really interesting, you know, I feel like, I'm such
a bad note taker because often I start writing, but
then my pages just descend into doodles. It's like I
have no concentration for any.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I can remember from as far back as our college
years when you would be doing exactly that, and I
remember those those doodles that were quite impressive. But the
handwriting actually takes concentration, and your brain has to actually
visualize the shapes that you're putting on the page and
create them individually. So you're activating both the part of
the brain responsible for fine motor skills and the part
(01:39):
that does visual information processing. But the way the brain
operates as it syncs up these processes is it's associated
with forming memories and actually learning better.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So, in other words, by not texting me this morning,
you gave your friend a little workout.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah yeah, I mean it feels so strong right now,
and you know so out of the two of us,
I guess, yes, I'm slightly in better shape for an
episode about handwriting and the tools we used to do it.
But I have faith in you, Mango. You're going to
catch up. I think we're going to be good. So
let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners Welcome to Part
(02:32):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm here
with my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and on the
other side of that booth as our pal Dylan. Now
sometimes he challenges us more than others to figure out
what exactly he's doing behind the booth there. It took
me a minute because Dylan is wearing a lab coat,
which at first glance doesn't seem to have anything to
do with this topic. But then I saw the prescription
(02:54):
pad that he's holding. Did you notice this, Mango, I
did notice it. It's pretty it's pretty awesome, and I
think the idea is the old cliche about doctors having
bad handwriting. That's our good pal Dylan fing and that's
a good one, Dylan.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I mean he also wheeled in that exam tables. You
put so much effort into these things, but will before
we go too much further, I am curious if handwriting
has so many benefits for our brains. I've actually been
wondering if my kids should be doing it more, because like,
I don't think my kids even know how to write cursive,
(03:28):
Like everything's on laptops these days.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean they're such digital creatures.
But kids' brains definitely benefit from handwriting, and it starts
when they're really young, like when they're learning the ABC's
tracing letters, you know, that actually helps them recognize and
understand letters better than when they type them, and this
develops the areas of the brain that they'll use for
reading throughout their life. Of course, they should probably learn
(03:51):
how to use modern technology too, so you know, maybe
keep the laptops around as well, But there's really benefits
to both.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So it's funny. I actually read this story this week
about a Scottish school where they're forcing kids to learn
how to use fountain pens as seven year olds. Wow,
And it's because apparently you can get away with worse
handwriting with a pencil or ballpoint pen, but you really
have to write more neatly and legibly with the fountain pen.
And the headmaster there says that slowing kids down, like
(04:20):
you said, makes the kids understand more and really makes
them comprehend more, but also it apparently raises their self esteem,
which is really interesting, Like these kids feel really special
because they're using these fountain pens, so I know, we've
got a little bit of pen history to get into.
But before that, I thought, maybe we should do a
little bit on the history of writing and where it
really began.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Let's do it, I said, we go back to the beginning.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that writing
originated in ancient Mesopotamia and it's around thirty five hundred
BCE when the Cuneiform script was invented. And apparently cuneiform
actually means wedge shaped, which is why I guess it
helps you know what to picture.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, I mean those are the chunky triangular symbols, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And honestly, learning the script was not easy, so back
then most people only had a very basic grasp of
writing events. Literacy was in common, which is how scribes
came about, and scribes were responsible for writing stuff down,
particularly about financial transactions and trade. But over time they
started being involved with more fields and it was required
(05:24):
for scribes to know about everything they wrote about, so
they were kind of these scholars. They had to learn
about everything from mathematics to agriculture, to religion, to politics
and even more. And they also had to learn six
hundred characters of cuneiform.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Wow, six hundred characters, I mean that's a lot harder
than our twenty six So how did they learn all this?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah, so scribe school. Apparently they went to something called
an Eduba or the House of Tablets, which sounds straight
out of National Treasure, but definitely serious business. Classes were
in session from sunrise till sunset, and most students started
around eight years old, and then they didn't graduate until
their early twenties. I mean, it actually kind of makes
(06:05):
sense considering how much they had to learn. I do
wonder though, like, do you think there was more or
less note passing in scribal school than when we were
in school? I take a lot less because of the
carving and all. Probably, so, you know, staying focused was
definitely a big thing for these kids, because you were
plucked to be scribes, and you kind of knew you
(06:26):
had a good life waiting ahead of you. Scribes were
sometimes referred to as those who never go hungry because
they had this crucial skill in a population of mostly
illiterate people, and so they actually had a lot of
power and a lot of the benefits that come with up.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, that's super interesting. It actually reminds me of a
word I heard from Herman Melville. It's the word scrivener,
as in Bartleby the Scrivener. He's a character whose job
is copying documents for a lawyer and he writes everything
by hand, not because the lawyer is illiterate, he just
has lots of documents to deal with. And this is
pre zero obviously.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
You know, I have never read Melville. I feel a
little embarrassed to be admitting that on this show. But
that term scrivener that you mentioned is often used interchangeably
with scribe because their jobs were the same at various
points in history. But there's actually a huge distinction between
the two. So over time, as business and legal transactions
(07:21):
began to use written instead of oral communication, scriveners were
kind of more like everyday copyists who wrote out civil
documents and correspondence. Will scribes were definitely more errordyed and educated.
They were associated with scholarship and art and scientific and
religious thinking. And part of this distinction comes about in
(07:41):
the thirteenth century. This is when the courts, at least
in Europe began requiring written instead of oral records, which
meant that plaintiffs needed the documents to be perfect, otherwise
the courts could throw their case out. So Europe started
differentiating between document scriveners who wrote things like legal documents
and deeds, and book scriveners or scribe vibes who worked
in book production.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I mean, what about like notaries. I feel like they're
kind of kind of in the same field in a
way at least.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, So Meredith and Gabe actually had a note on
these two. Apparently they were around in ancient Egypt, but
only really became established during the Roman Empire. The first
notary was an enslaved person named Tierro, and he worked
for the great orator and statesman Cicero. So Tiro wrote
down all of Cicero's speeches, which is actually how we
have them, and he's credited with developing a form of
(08:30):
shorthand called note. But he also helped with official political
and financial matters. Anyway, as the legal system was evolving
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, notaries started catching on
in England. Then they became essential to global exploration in
the Renaissance. So this hadn't even occurred to me, But
apparently on all of Columbus's voyages he had notaries, and
(08:52):
this was because King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela wanted to
make sure someone was keeping crack of all the treasure
he found and that it was all still there when
Columbus traveled back. But the job has actually evolved over
time to where notaries take fewer notes and basically authenticate
documents and witness signature is the way you think of
them today, all.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Right, So he had notaries on all of these voyages.
It is sort of a funny picture. And I know
a lot of these images come from pop culture and
movies and things like that, but you picture these voyages
as filled with I don't know, I guess unsavory sailors,
But I love that there was just an official in
the corner like taking notes on everything.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I'm sure that person was super, super popular and included
in all the pirate games, and ivity is exactly so.
Colonial America also took their notary game seriously because they
were so important to keeping documents safe and accurately reporting
facts about, you know, all the trends Atlantic commerce. So
Thomas Bugle was appointed in sixteen thirty nine as the
(09:54):
colony's first notary, but he kind of has a black
mark against his name. He got busted for false defying documents,
and he was kicked out of office, he was excommunicated
from the church, and then he was sent back to
England in disgrace.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And so what happened to him after that?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
You know, because notaries do all the writing, it's weirdly
not clear what happened to him because no one bothered
to write it down. But anyway, now that we know
who he was doing, was the note taking in early history,
I really want to switch gears to talk about pens
and the pens that have made all this history possible.
So let's do that right after this break. Welcome back
(10:46):
to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about handwriting, and
we're about to switch gears to pens, which will I
know you looked into Let's dig into it all right.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
So I wanted to know what the first pen actually was,
and so that brought me all the way back to
the first millennium BCE. Back then the Chinese used a
brush dipped in ink to write, and that's the earliest
known ancestor of the pen. You then fast forward to
three hundred BCE and you have the Egyptians who started
using these thick reeds as sort.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Of like pen like instruments, and I'm guessing this is
sort of like the same principle as the quill pen.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, it's pretty much exactly the same thing. And quill
pins are super important in pen history. Actually, the word
pen comes from the Latin word pinna, meaning wing, And
so we know quills were in use by the seventh
century because the theologian and archbishop Isidor of Seville mentioned
them in his writing, but they were probably around even
(11:41):
earlier than that.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
You know, I've always wondered how people ended on which
birds feathers to use their quill pens, like, it just
seems curious to me.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, and well, apparently any large bird would do so.
They would use feathers from eagles, peacocks, turkeys. When they
needed to do things like fine detailed work, maybe like accounting,
they would use crow quills. It was just interesting to
think about the different types of feathers that could be used.
But the top bird for a quill pen was said
to be a domesticated white goose. Its five biggest wing
(12:12):
feathers are considered perfect for quill pens. Thomas Jefferson even
kept a flock of geese at Monticello to supply him
with quills, which is not something I'd ever thought about before.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
That's really fascinating. It is crazy though, right, like you
think about like the difference between eel's feather, a peacock feather,
and a crow's feather, right, like one is magnificent and
the others just kind of.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Like around right right, such an insult.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
It's funny. Aja Jacobs was on this show talking about
the Constitution earlier this year, and he let me write
with one of his quill pens, and I think he
was using a turkey feather and it was the worst sound.
It's like high pitched and scratchy, and you can't imagine
like trying to write out the Constitution with one of
these things. Yeah, and Aj said when he'd write his
(12:58):
manuscript with us at home, the sound was so bad
that his wife made him do it from another groom
and close the doors.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
So funny, only an Aja problem.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But the other thing you said, which I found really fascinating,
was kind of like with the fountain pins, that you
write so slowly that you really have a lot of
time to process your thoughts and also be very judicious
and selective with your vocabularies, so you're you know, the
way you write is almost more thoughtful because it's not
just like banging out keys on a keyboard or something.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, yeah, no, that's super interesting. Actually, one question I
had was why did quills last for such a long time.
I mean, obviously it was cheaper to go pluck birds
feathers than to make a metal implement, but it feels
like someone would have produced a fake quill by this point.
And it turns out the answer has to do with
the ink itself. So seventeenth century ink was made of
(13:53):
iron salts and oak galls and gum arabic and it
made it very acidic, and so when people did try
to use steel quills, it ate away at these new
fangled pins they were trying to make. It actually wasn't
until the mid eighteen hundreds that you get these stronger,
more acid resistant steel that was being invented at the time,
(14:13):
and that's when steel pen nibs started being mass produced
and steel pens overtook the quills.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
That's so crazy, Like you don't even think about the
way the ink might have affected the mechanics of the pen.
That's really really amazing. So tell me about fountain pens
and I'm prettily interested in these, you know we mentioned
at the top. Also, these were an instrument that made
no sense to me as a kid. I remember like
playing with my grandfather's fun pen and either ink would
(14:41):
get all over the place or it was that scratchy sound,
which I hated. But I've recently started playing with fun
pens and I like the experience so much that I've
been giving them out as gifts. I'm curious, how did
this pen come to be?
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, So the fountain pen is an evolution on the
dipping your quill and ink method because it has this
ink reservoir. It has a nib like I mentioned in
the first reference we have to fountain pins. It's in
a tenth century manuscript from Arab Egypt. Now in it
and a mom commissions a pin with ink stored inside
so he doesn't need to keep dipping his quill. Plus
(15:15):
he requests that a writer could store it in their
sleeve without staining their.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Shirt, which feels like very specific requests.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Totally, but it took a long time for those problems
to get worked out. The first practical version of the
fountain pen wasn't produced until centuries later. This was in
eighteen eighty three, when an American named Lewis Edson Waterman
patented the modern fountain pin. Waterman had invented a new
system to move ink smoothly down the pen nib without
leaking or making blobs all over the paper, and he
(15:45):
sold his what he called ideal fountain pen from a
cigar shop in Lower Manhattan, and people loved it, so
he started advertising it, and eventually he created the Waterman
Pen Company, which is of course still in business today.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
How is it that Waterman ends up coming up with
this idea?
Speaker 2 (16:02):
You know, as with many things that were invented some
time ago, the stories can vary, but if you look
at the Waterman Pen Company's ads through the nineteen hundreds,
here's what they say happened. They say Lewis Waterman was
an insurance salesman on the brink of closing this big contract,
and he offered his client a fountain pen to sign
the contract. But then the pen leaked all over the paper,
(16:24):
and so Waterman ran out to get another pin. But somehow,
while he was gone, a rival broker swooped in and
closed the deal. I just love the imagery of this.
But according to legend, Waterman decided then and there that
he would invent a more reliable fountain pin. So he
started tinkering in his brother's workshop, and the rest is,
of course history.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I love this idea of like rivals just lurking in
the back of d Yeah, ready to go wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So it sounds like maybe you're a little skeptical about
the story.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I mean, you do find this story with slight
variations in almost every hitory of the fountain pen. But
I'm sad to say it's most likely not at all true,
and a vintage pen expert and historian Daniel Kersheimer debunked
the myth in one of the most enjoyable research papers
I have ever read. So Kersheimer discovered that the earliest
(17:16):
mention of the fountain pen creation story comes from nineteen twelve,
and interestingly, it contains some details that only appear there
and in no future version of the tale. Like it
includes Waterman tinkering with a pre existing pin rather than
making one from scratch in his brother's workshop. Now that clue,
and that there was a pre existing pen that pointed
the way to an earlier article from nineteen ten that
(17:40):
tells an entirely different story. It's about three people in Connecticut.
You've got Frank Hollind, Aaron Cook, and Aaron's sister Mabel.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
So I don't Jerr Lewis Waterman in that mix.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
He is not part of this story. And it seems
this guy Holland was talking about how whoever could combine
the best inc and the best pen to create a
fountain pen that didn't leak would get rich. So he
and his friends talked through this idea, and Holland was
actually a skilled engineer and created this prototype of the
improved fountain pen the following day after this conversation. Now,
(18:13):
eventually this group formed the Holland Stylographic Pen Company. The
founding members applied for and got this patent for their
fountain pens, but they still had one major issue. After
writing for a few hours, a giant ink blot would
flow down.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
That seemed like a problem.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
It's a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
So they move on from there.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Well, eventually the Holland Company made its way to New
York where they linked up with Waterman, who figured out
that if you added two indents inside the pen, they
stopped the blotting issue. I love invention stories like this,
especially the real ones where like that was such a
creative way to solve this problem. So Waterman immediately filed
for his own patent and ended up earning six thousand
(18:53):
dollars in the first year of his pen sales, which
would have been a lot of money at that point.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I imagine, so that whole thing about the client
with the ruined contractors is totally bunk.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Then, it seems. Unfortunately that's the case, and the story
was probably just invented by the marketing department after Waterman
died in nineteen oh one, and over time it kind
of became the only story that people know.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, people do love inventor hero stories. And I've actually
got another one that I want to tell, which is true.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
All right, let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
So this one's about the ballpoint pen, which has a
complicated origin as well, and the first one was patented
in eighteen eighty eight by an American named John Loud
who wanted a pen that would write on a variety
of materials. Right, so, of course he wanted it to
be able to write on paper, but also wood and leather.
He added this rotating steel ball inside his pen to
(19:44):
control the ink flow, but he never got the paper
part down, it could only write on those rough surfaces,
and his patent lapsed before you could improve it. And
it wasn't until the nineteen thirties that a Hungarian Argentinian
inventor made this whole contraption work. He's the one who
tends to get the credit for inventing the ballpoint pen.
His name is laslow Biro a bureau.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I've actually heard that word so in ingland's what they
call ballpoint pins, right.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That's exactly right. So Iero was a journalist and he
used fountain pens all the time and knew there had
to be a better way to write in a blotless,
mudchless manner. So he realized that adding a ball inside
a pen was a good start, but really it wasn't
good enough. He needed a new type of ink, one
that would dry quicker like newspaper ink. And his brother,
(20:31):
who was a dentist, and also somehow a knowledgeable chemist,
decided to help him out.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So I feel like a lot of times when we're
telling these stories from history, there's so many multi hyphenates
in the history stories, Like here we've got an inventor
slash journalist and a Dennis slash chemist. I don't think
you see many of those these days.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I mean, I could really do one thing. These
people ever liked it, like masters of several things. But
Laslow's brother actually did come through. He creates this fast
drying with high viscosity and it was kind of a
bonus like the resulting pen used way less ink than
fountain pens as a result of this, and Laslow got
a patent for the pen in nineteen thirty eight. The
(21:11):
pen was officially released in nineteen forty three, and one
of his first big customers was the British Royal Air Force,
who ordered thirty thousand of the pens. Because I don't
know if you've ever tried to write with pens an
airplane or something, but these pens could actually withstand the
changes in pressure, so they wouldn't sort of spill all
over the place like fountain pens.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah. Actually, I didn't think about that that fountain pens
would malfunction in the air. And obviously this was during
World War Two, so I'm guessing the Air Force was
crazy busy at this point.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah. So at the time Laslow was living in South America.
But what's interesting is that besides the Royal Air Force,
the pen really didn't make that much of a global impact. Eventually,
after the war, there was this American businessman, his name
was Milton Reynolds, and he comes across bureaus pens. He
kind of tweaks the designs to make the ink flow
by gravity, not a capillary action, and this version of
(22:04):
the ballpoint becomes huge in the US. In nineteen forty five,
Time magazine reported quote, thousands of people all but trampled
one another last week to spend twelve dollars of fifty
cents each for a new style fountain pen, which was
these ballpoint pens. And within six months, the department store
Gimbals had made five point six million dollars in ballpoint
(22:25):
pen sales, which is around eighty one million dollars today.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Wow, and that's just Gimbals. That is wild. So people
must have been making a fortune on these things. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
But what's interesting is that the ballpoint was marketed kind
of like a fountain pen of the time, right. It
still need to be refilled every two years, so customers
bought a lot of refills, but not as many new pens.
And obviously that's a problem for a company that wants
to maximize profits. So it was actually a guy named
Michelle Bick who addressed that issue in the nineteen fifties.
(22:56):
He was an Italian born French industrialist and he came
up with idea to make the pens disposable. In fact,
his obituary read quote he added the magic catalyst of disposability.
He invented nothing, but understood the mass market almost perfectly.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
He invented nothing at such a great phrase for an obituary.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, it's really amazing. But Bick, whose name was spelled Bich,
was advised by an ad exec to shorten his name
to Bic. And obviously we all know the bigpen Tony.
So it's estimated that fifteen million ballpoint pens are sold
every single day and Bick is the leading manufacturer.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's about two million
in every pack that you buy of those big pins.
But it's so wild that he basically made it okay
for us to be more forgetful. Like before Bick, you
actually had to keep track of these expensive pins. And actually,
one major drawback to the disposable pin is the environmental impact.
Because I was thinking about this, I have to admit
(23:56):
I'm really bad about this if you have a cheap
pin of somehow misplacing it. And then in the United
States alone, it's estimated that over one point six billion
pins are thrown away every single year. That's not to
mention the impact of pen production, which applies to all pins.
And you know that's the fancy ones with the gold
nibs to the cheap disposable ones.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You know, there are not a lot of things that
I am proud of or brag about, but holding on
to pens is one of the few things I am
really good at.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
There you go, You should brag about that. You should
use that as a lead whenever you meet everyone, Mango.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It's at the top of my resume. Hey, but there
was a kid in elementary school, this kid named Tim,
and for some reason, his mom was very strict with him,
and she gave him like seven pencils at the beginning
of the year or whatever and showed him not to
lose him. And at the end of the year he
actually had like four or five of these pencils, and
I just remember being so impressed, and I kind of
(24:51):
made it a challenge for myself to like hold on
to pens.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, that's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
But I don't know if you have this relationship. But
the thing I was going to say, get back on track.
But my grandfather, what are the few like pieces of
advice he instilled in me was to always carry a
pen with me. And that's because he was a multi hyphene, right,
he was a you know, a chemist and an engineer
and like a writer and all these other things. And
his point was like, you never know when you're going
(25:17):
to want to write down a note or an idea.
It's just useful to have a pen. And it's like
my dad always carried a pen for the same reason.
And I still like, I feel like I'm not fully
dressed if I go out for the world and don't
have a pen in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I completely agree, I always have a pen in my pocket.
I may be a different pin because, like I said,
I'm really bad at keeping up with him, but I
always managed to find a pen. And apparently you're not
the only one who values pins, because there's a growing
community of pen enthusiasts and they're keeping the classic ways alive.
Fountain pen collecting has become a pretty big thing, and
for some collectors it's not just about the craftsmanship of
(25:52):
the pen or the value that they hold, although that's
of course important, a lot of people just love writing
with them. In fact, people spend a whopping three hundred
and forty one million dollars on fountain pens in twenty
twenty one. That was a seven percent increase from just
a few years before that. There are indie fountain pen
companies popping up, constructing new pins and kind of blending
(26:13):
these niche inks, and there's some really cool online communities
where fountain pen enthusiast talk shop, like the Fountain pens
subreddit which has over three hundred thousand members, and all
the content on pen talk and Instagram, so like the
list just goes on. There's a lot of enthusiasm for them.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, it's funny. I gotten to fun pens recently because
my cousin took me to a shop and we just
started playing, and I really liked Invite. I had no
idea that this thing was so trendy.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, it's it's a huge thing. So there's this guy,
Aiden Bernal, and he reviews fountain pens and inks and
he has more than six hundred thousand subscribers. They're also tutorials,
reports from pen shows, which are apparently a pretty big thing.
It's kind of like Comic Con for pins.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I feel like someone should invite us to the Comic
Con for pens because it's the type of thing I
would happily go to.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Well, I mean, I think there's a decent chance there's
an overlap between pen enthusiast and some of the listeners
of Part Time Genius, So keep that in mind. Guys,
if you're ready, invite Mango to your next pen gathering.
But apparently these take place all around the world, but
one place that's become a real hotbed of fountain pen
collecting is the Philippines. The Manila Pen Show is actually
(27:27):
the biggest in Southeast Asia, and one of the country's
most renowned authors, jose Dellaside Junior, has helped spread the
love of pins through his blog it's called Pinoy Penmen,
and in twenty eighteen, a company called Kosama created the
first ever Filipino made fountain pin.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
That's so fascinating. I wonder why fountain pins have caught
on there, of all places. You know, like many things,
there's probably a lot of reasons, including a cultural interest
in handicraft and proximity to pen manufacturers and specialty shops
in Japan, but also younger Philippine those have gotten into
the hobby and given this local pen community a boost
of energy at a time when some European pen communities
(28:07):
are starting to trend older and older. That's really cool.
I love that pens are young person's game. Now, that's right.
But before I go off and dive into this internet
pen culture, which I'm absolutely gonna do, now, oh, why
don't we do a little fact off?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
So we were talking earlier about scribes and scriptners, and
apparently they used different types of handwriting script depending on
the purpose. This was true in every society that began
to privilege literacy over the oral records. So, for example,
at various times in China, scribes used what's known as
the seal script for commemorative inscriptions. They also had a
(28:49):
clerical script for documents and correspondence, a cursive script for
esthetic appeal, and a semi cursive script known as the
running script for convenience.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That we talked about Big being the leading manufacturer of
ballpoint pins, and since nineteen fifty they have sold over
one hundred billion ballpoint pens worldwide, and as we know,
there is no way to really measure the scale of
something without seeing how many times you can go to
the moon and back. That's really like our standard measurement
(29:21):
for big numbers, so we had to look into it.
That is so many pins that a stack of them
could go to the moon and back more than three
hundred and twenty thousand times. Now that makes it a
lot of pins.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That is insane. Speaking of the moon, you may have
heard the story that during the Space Race, NASA spent
millions trying to figure out how to make a pen
work in space where there is obviously no gravity. Meanwhile,
the Soviets at the time just use pencils. Part of
that is a bit of a myth. NASA actually used
pencils as well, but in nineteen sixty five they did
(29:56):
get into hot water with taxpayers for buying thirty four
mechanical pencils at one hundred and twenty eight dollars and
eighty nine cents a piece. It was the Fisher Pen
company that finally developed a pen that could write in space,
and NASA started using it in nineteen sixty seven for
a much more reasonable cost of two dollars and thirty
nine cents per pen. And this was the pen that
(30:16):
the astronauts on the Apollo eleven mission used to fix
a broken arming switch, which allowed them to return to Earth.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Wow, so pens really do save lives. But I'm curious
how did they use the pen by like doing a
calculation or something.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
No, apparently a switch broke and they used the pen
to push in a circuit breaker. Oh okay, I guess
they could have used a pencil in that case too.
But obviously pencils are a serious hazard in space, with
little bits of debris that can fly around the shuttles.
So like if you think about pencil shavings or little
pieces of lead that could break off, all of that
ends up being a hazard for astronauts. But what's funny
(30:53):
is that the pens were so good at writing in
microgravity that cosmonauts actually began using them too, So this
is one technology that we actually shared.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Huh, that's interesting. All right, Well, if you've ever wondered
what the ball and the ballpoint pin is made of,
it's a tungsten carbide pellet. Now to make it its
ground between plates until it becomes a sphere, and this
is a process that can take up to sixty hours.
Sixty hours, it's a long time to do this, but
that extra effort is worth it. When the ball is complete,
(31:22):
it's actually as hard as a diamond. You know.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It's one of those things that I almost forget that
there's a ball in ballpoint pens most of the time.
But it's also funny that these pens are so disposable
and yet we're spending sixty hours perfecting the sphere inside them.
That's amazing. It is so speaking of pen parts, did
you know there are people known as nidmeisters who repair pendants.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
I did not know this, Mango, and I personally am
not a nibmeister, but now I have a new goal
in life.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So appairly you learn this craft through mentorship and practice.
And it said that each nymmeister's work has a unique personality.
You can actually tell people nibs apart.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
God, nib meister. It's like it's a new scrabble word.
It's also just it feels like something you want to
call somebody when they've just been amazing, like they're just
a total nibmeister, you know, Or maybe it's an insult.
I can't decide. We'll have to work shop it a
little bit of all right. Well, for a number of decades,
the government has relied on the exact same pin. It's
a Black skill Craft ballpoint pin, and according to an
(32:22):
article in the Washington Post, the specifications for the pen
come from a nineteen thirty eight mandate. In fact, the
government had sixteen pages for specifications for their pen, including
that quote, it must be able to write continuously for
a mile and in temperatures up to one hundred and
sixty degrees and down to forty degrees below zero. I
don't know what's happening at those temperatures. But according to
(32:45):
the article, it's been used in war zones and gas stations.
It was designed to fit undetected into US military uniforms,
and according to company lore, the pen can stand in
for a two inch fuse and comes in handy during
emergency trade giotomies. The pins are ubiquitous and still used
in government offices today, and as one government official referred
(33:07):
to them, they're the Coca Cola of pins.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Who is the person who has to right in one
hundred and sixty degrees or heard negative forty degrees.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
That's what I want to know. Write this for a mile.
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
I really thought I had you with my Nibmeister in fact,
but I think the government penn story really is hard
to be So why why don't you take today's trophy.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I'll take it, but I have to be honest. I
know we hear from our listeners sometimes when they disagree
with who wins the trophy. I think this is going
to be one of those. Nibmeister was pretty good, but
you're kind to do that. I will accept the trophy. Well,
that wraps up today's episode from Dylan, Gabe, Mary Mango
and me. And actually I want to give a shout
out to Meredith who made some amazing contributions with today's research. Now,
(33:52):
remember you can always find us on Instagram at part
Time Genius and if you're someone who posts pictures of
your fountain pins, please tag it. We'd love to see them.
Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongagetikler
and research by our good pal Mary, Philip Sandy Today's
episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan
with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced
for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social
(34:38):
media support from Sasha Gay trustee Dara Potts and buy
Any Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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