August 21, 2018 • 48 mins
Get ready, folks. The ballpoint pen is far more interesting than you could ever imagine. For real. Brilliant in its simplicity. Took the world by storm. We love our ballpoint pens and you should too. Listen in today!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryan. It's just the two of
us today, and both of us are totally astounded that
you pressed play on an episode called how ballpoint pens
(00:23):
work or something to that effect. Yeah, And when I
found this, I was like no, But then I started
reading it and it was far more interesting than I thought.
I love ones like this where you just like, this
sounds so dull that I want to actually pop my
eyes out with it by a ballpoint pen, not listen
to anything, But now it turns out to be interesting.
(00:46):
Like Grass. Remember our episode on Grass you could forget
the great debate over whether you should flood your lawn
with a quarter inch of water or not? Yeah? Answer,
you should not? Uh so, Chuck? Yes, to begin, I
have a question for you. Have you ever seen a
(01:07):
ballpoint pen? They have them? That's become one of your great,
long time running jokes. I don't know what you mean, Chuck.
Have you ever breathed air? Ah? Yeah? I mean I
was using my black Bick ballpoint pen. Yeah, I remember today.
(01:30):
I even remember because blue pins are for dopes. You,
my friend, are out of your mind. You like blue pins.
Blue pen is the only way to go, my friends.
And as a matter of fact, the pilot G two
point seven millimeter pen ink gel pen in blue is
(01:51):
the only way to go. That's my favorite pen on
the entire planet. Well, I will say today I'm using
the standard Bick black. Uh, like the one that in
elementary school you could take a part and make into
a great spitball shooter. Oh yeah, that was. It was
an off off label prescription for that. Yeah, it's the
(02:11):
clear one, not the white plastic case, but the clear
case or the you know clear pinbody. But h and
I do love that pen. But I know the pin
that you speak of, and I do love it because
I love there's nothing like a pen that just takes
to the paper perfectly. Yeah, it's immagical. That's what gel
(02:32):
ink pens do their beautiful things. And the thing I
like the reason I like blue and it comes in black.
If that's your thing, you know, I'm not gonna hate
on it. But if when you underline something printed out
like our notes, um, and then you go back over
it with highlighter, like I do, the blue really stands out.
The black just kind of like blends in with the
(02:52):
printed out words. All right, Well, here's what I used
to do is and you probably remember the days when
I would be looking at my highlighted text with red
ink things written down because the red really popped. But
then I just sort of got tired of it, and
I'm just a black ink guy. You're you're sticking and picking.
(03:13):
I'm sticking and picking. You're picking and sticking. That's what
I mean. Uh So, should we talk about writing over
the years. We should, as anyone listening still if you are,
we're going to continue on just in case. So let's
let's start about writing over there, because this is pretty interesting, right, yeah,
tuk tuk. That's where we should start, tuk took. And
(03:34):
we should shout out to Mary Bellis, who wrote a
thought co little um brief thing called A Brief History
of Writing that kind of ran down some points that
will cover. But she points out the tuk Tuk. She
doesn't call him tuk took, but that's really what she means.
That's because I've trademarked it. Sure, um tuk Tuk started
writing with basically sharpened stones by carving things on the
(03:54):
size of cave walls. Easy PC. That was probably our
first writing in pliment. Yeah, like no ink by this point.
Um as with the Greeks when they started writing, they
had a little stylus made of bone or metal or
something and they would mark things on wax coated tablets
and it would take always. It seems like it's the
(04:16):
Chinese who come up with the great innovations in ancient
times and still who knows. We're not allowed to read
Chinese websites though, No, but they invented and really crafted
Indian ink, Yes, which is pretty clever little mixture its
(04:36):
soot um, specifically from pine smoke. Vellas says, it's pretty
pretty on the nose if you ask me. And then
some oil, lamp oil, and then you take a donkey
and squeeze gelatine from it, which I'm wondering, like, does
that mean that you have to kill the poor donkey
or can you just come up and milk of gelatine?
(04:58):
I think the donkey loves that well, I wonder because
I think gelatine is actually made from hooves. I think
you're right, And usually if you start making things from hooves,
the animal, the hoof used to be attached to is
no longer with us. So it's a sad way to
make ink. But that's how they made ink for thousands
of years. Actually, yeah, there was a philosopher, Chinese philosopher
(05:20):
name Tien Chew and his inc. Was the one that
that really sort of became the go to inc for
for many, many many years. Yes, he called it chewink.
We called it what chewink? Really? No, No, I'm making
(05:42):
stuff up at this point. I can't tell he had
the he had the idea. This was I think back
around BC that he started mixing natural dyes and um
things from berries, different kinds of plants um to make
different colored ink. So ink went from just black two colored,
and as a result, um they started attaching different meanings
(06:04):
to these different colored inks. He admitted the four color pin.
But oh yeah, I remember that. Oh I forgot all
about us. Didn't they go up to like eight colors too? Yeah,
they got They got pretty out of hand. And the
thing that stunk about those is they never wrote really well, no,
they definitely didn't. There. The gimmick was more that you
could write at all in different colors in the same pin.
(06:26):
You know, they were for elementary school kids. So one
of the things that um that happened as the writing implements.
And I hadn't really realized this, but as our writing
implements became more and more refined, just better and better.
And part of that was not just like the implement
but also the types of ink way were using and
how they were delivered, and then the paper whatever substance
(06:48):
we were putting them onto. These the original things which
started out is basically drawings on cave walls, got more
and more um refined, and actually it grew more and
more abstract, and they became our system of alphabets, letters
and at first the so from what we from what
we know, the first alphabet ever created was created in
(07:11):
ancient Greece, classical Grease, by a scholar named Cadmus. And
all of the um the original written alphabets that were invented,
we're all upper case. Nothing about upper case. Everybody's just
shouting to one another constantly. Right, And I didn't know this,
but there's another word for upper case and lower case.
(07:32):
It's magiscule and minuscule, or the actual technical terms for
upper case and lower case. And the story goes that
the reason they're called upper case and lower case. Is
that in the days of um UH type set printing,
you would keep your your magiscule letters in a different drawer,
(07:53):
usually higher up out of reach, because you didn't use
them as often than you would the minuscule letters. You
keep those in the lower case. And that's where the
term comes from from what I understand. Very interesting. I
thought so too. Maybe the fact of the podcast, I
don't know, we'll have to just keep going and find out,
has nothing to do with pens. The Romans actually created
(08:13):
a reed pen, and this makes a lot of sense.
It would use stems from marsh grasses, like bamboo type
of stuff, which made perfect sense because it's hollowed out already.
All you do is sharpened the end of it, uh,
you know, to come to a point like a little nib.
Then put the ink in there, and you've got a
very rudimentary pen, which you know worked pretty well for them. Yeah,
(08:37):
apparently these things were so tight that you had to
like squeeze them to squeeze the ink out of the end,
so it wouldn't just like dribble out constantly, although I'm
sure it's still would. It's not a perfect system. It
isn't a perfect system, and there's there's still room for improvement. Um.
And that came in seven hundred CE, right about or
(08:59):
so years go, when somebody thought to use a quill
from a bird feathered animal. Yeah, and that was a
big one. It says in here that the longest period
in history as far as writing implements goes, was the
quill pen. Yeah, pretty amazing a thousand years. Yeah, I
hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, it was the best
(09:20):
They basically got to the quill pen, or like until
some somebody invince a ballpoint pin. This bird feather is
about the best thing going. Yeah, And I mean they
used so you could use a bird feather as a
quill pen for about a week before it would get
gummed up and you'd have to have another one. And
they actually um figured out that the bird from a
(09:44):
or the feather from a living bird plucked in the
spring provided the optimal quills. And even more than that,
depending on whether you're right handed or left handed, you
wanted to pluck the feather from the left or the
right wing. Yeah, Because if you're right handed and you're
writing with a quill from a right wing, then that
(10:07):
that guy's gonna be tickling your nose every time. And
it may be fun for a little while, but what
you really want is a feather from the left wing
and that way, if you're right handed in that way,
that feather swoops to the outside of your face. Yes,
it would have having the wrong the wrong feather quill
would have like just been another excuse not to balance
(10:29):
your checkbook, you know. Yeah, and these things lasted for
about a week. Um, you needed a special knife to
sharpen them. Uh, took a long time to to get
it kind of prepared. And they were, you know, like
I said, about a week old and they were done,
so they were fairly disposable, but they still held down
the fort until early fountain pins for over a thousand years. Yeah,
(10:52):
and fountain pens are their own thing. They are, um,
surely you know or remember from time to time, I'm
will get like a letter from somebody who's like a
fountain pen enthusiast. It's like a whole thing. You remember that, Yeah,
Or you get a graduation gift that's like a nice
fountain pen and you're like, jeez, really, but I'm saying
you and I have gotten like letters from face to
(11:15):
like write these beautiful letters out and fountain pens. I
think at least one of one person has sent us
an actual, like really good fountain pen um. And I've
never caught the bug, but there there is, like there's
a subculture people out there are so into fountain pens
that they expressed that by writing letters to one another
using fountain pens. Obviously it's really cool. I mean I
(11:38):
have never like you've never taken to it. I'm a
ballpoint man through and through, but I get it. You know, sure,
it's it's cool, it's classy. You're not gonna yuck their yum.
In other words, no, And I don't have very nice
penmanship anymore either, so it would just, you know, I
kind of tie those things together, Like if you're writing
a letter in a fountain pen, you don't write like
(12:00):
I do because that would just be dumb. Right, I
write like a serial killer in an insane asylum holding
a cran with a fist. That's how I write. Uh.
Should we take a break and jump over to the
ball point Yeah, let's all right. So a ballpoint pen.
(12:38):
You say that word over and over and it's you
never really stopped to think about what that means. But
in the end of that little pen and it's impossible
to not just sort of obsess over this after you've
maybe listened to this episode or or researched it like
we did. But when I was writing today, I was
just constantly thinking about that little ball. You know, it
(13:00):
haunted you. How undersung it is? Okay, I see, I
thought you were just like you. You felt like it
was eavesdropping on you. You could feel it like king
at the atoms in your hand or something weird like that. No,
just thinking of the simple genius of this invention. It's
you know, at the end of that pin is a little, small,
tiny rotating ball A lot of times just steel or brass,
(13:22):
maybe tungsten carbide. And it was revolutionary and completely different
than anything that came before it. Yeah, and and to
go back to the fountain pen to kind of put
a button on that, Like, Yes, fountain pens are pretty awesome,
and when you master using a fountain pen um you
probably do like it. But if you're just an average
(13:44):
mom who's like, look, just give me a writing implement.
I want to write something down and not getting any
jollies from this looking at it. From that perspective, the
ballpoint pen is an improvement in a number of ways
over the fountain pen, and specifically, one of the ways
that it's an improved it is that you can use
it up in an airplane much more easily. Yeah, the ink,
(14:07):
there were problems with the ink at high altitudes and
fountain pens, yeah, and just problems with the ink at
any altitude. You know, it doesn't flow super evenly. I
mean if you have a really nice pin and know
how to use it, but like a cheap fountain pen,
it was no good. The ink is very slow to
dry and smudgy. It uh would clogg a lot. And
(14:28):
once it's kind of clogged and gummy, then either have
to be really good at cleaning it or it's just junk. Yes,
so um. One of the ways that the ink comes
out of a fountain pen is through air, through capillary
action and air. And so since you have air in
a fountain pen, that means that since ink dries in
the presence of air, which is what you want when
(14:49):
it touches the paper, it will also dry inside the pen,
which is how it gets gunked up like you were
talking about. But in an airplane too. When you take
a fountain pen that's been down on on planet Earth
for a while, that air that's in the fountain pen
gets trapped in the air. So when you take it
up in an airplane in a pressurized cabin, it's still
(15:11):
like the cabin's pressurized, but it's still much less pressure
than it is at sea level, which is where the
pen just was. And because of this, the higher pressure
air inside the pen wants to move to where it's
lower pressure. Higher pressure always moves to lower pressure, I think,
unless there's some Rando exception. I'm not thinking of that
we're going to get a thousand emails about. But like
(15:35):
high pressure stuff wants to move to low pressure stuff,
So that high pressure air tries to move out of
the fountain pen, and as it does, it pushes the
ink out. So fountain pens tend to flood on planes,
which again is not that big of a problem these days,
but if this was the nineteen forties and you were
a pilot for the Royal Air Force or a navigator
or something, it was a big problem. Yeah, for sure,
(15:55):
which is one of the reasons why ball points came along. Yeah,
and the the ballpoint idea had been around since the
eighteen hundreds, but it never really took like, they can
never figure out how to make a good working pen
that actually was able to go to market. It was
I didn't see that. It was it's been around since
the eight hundred times that the original idea for the
(16:18):
ballpoint pin. Yeah, but they could never fashion a pin
that really worked well. Yeah. I would think also it
would really depend on the technology of the ink, for sure.
I think that was a big part of it. But
it would take a journalist to Hungarian journalists named Laslow
b r Oh to take a tour of a newspaper
facility when he was like, wait a minute, these newspapers
(16:41):
are coming out and they're being stacked on each other
right after printing, and it's not smudging around like my
my dumb old India Inc. Does. And he said, why
don't we use that kind of ink put it in
a pen? And not only that, why don't we take
a pen that has a little time metal ball at
(17:01):
the end that rotates. It also seals that tube so
the ink doesn't come flowing out. It does double duty,
double duty. And then the rotation is what draws that
inc out that in a little gravitational pull and I
think I might be onto something here. Yeah, and he
definitely was. And this this article hilariously says that he
(17:22):
vowed to make a pen that used fast drying ink
because at the time that was a real problem. Like
the the ink that you had in a pen to
keep it from drying out in the pen had to
be super watery. Right, So the idea of making a
pen that wasn't a fountain pen that used fast drying ink,
that was it was quite a vow. I'm sure the
person giving him the newspaper tours like, are you sure. Yeah,
(17:46):
he said, I'm I just vowed it, I'm gonna do it.
So he did. He got together. Luckily I had a brother, George,
who was a chemist. Yeah, that that was very helpful. Um.
In June three he got that patent with a European
Patent Office made bureau pens. It was the first ballpoint
(18:08):
pen to be brought to market. And the British government
you were talking about the Air Force, their Royal Air
Force went crazy for it. So they just bought the rights. Okay,
So I couldn't find that anywhere else. Really, I saw
that the Royal Air Force ordered thirty thousand of these,
but not that they bought the rights. Well, let's say this,
they either bought the rights or all but bought the
(18:30):
rights by being their number one customer. Right. I like
how you married the two facts. Yeah, so I mean
they were not only did they right well at high altitudes,
but they were just sturdy. And it was a pin
that you could take into battle with you. Yeah, so
it wouldn't flood as they call it at high altitudes.
And yeah, it was pretty a pretty durable pen um
(18:53):
and so Bureau he patented it with his brother, George
founded the the Bureau Pen Company, right, And I think
that's so cute. He named it after himself, even though
he and his brother did it, and he very easily.
No Bureau was his last name. I'm sorry he could
have named right, that's what I thought he'd done. His
last name is Bereau, Okay, so that makes way more sense.
(19:15):
I thought he'd been like, George, thank you, but I'm
naming this pen after myself. But it was it was
a pretty big hit. I don't think it was a
commercial success right away. Um, but that big order or
the purchase by the Royal Air Force, Um, definitely helped
the Bureau company established itself almost simultaneously. Well, a year
(19:36):
or two later, there was a guy in America named
Milton Reynolds, and he said, I just found some of
these bureau pens on a business trip I think in
like Argentina or somewhere, and um, he said, I'm going
to totally rip this off. And he did, and he
founded a company, UM and created the Reynolds pen, which
(19:57):
is basically the Bureau pen. Yeah, and these were really successful. Um.
I saw articles as ten bucks. But I found an
article from the New York Times from the nineteen forties
that talked about at Gimbals uh in New York, you
could buy one for twelve fifty, which was super expensive.
(20:17):
I mean twelve fifties expensive for a single pin today.
Sure you know, like a point pinoa be a real
jerk to pay twelve fifty for a pen these days,
with this economy. But this little article said that people
all but trampled one another to get ahold of these pins.
Gimbals ordered fifty thousand of them and sold thirty thousand
of them in week one. Eventually there would be a
(20:39):
lot of lawsuits, UM, back and forth about the patent. Basically,
those never went anywhere because what they were essentially saying
is the idea for the ball bearing, which is kind
of what makes us all possible, has been around for
so long that no one can really claim this to
the point where like you can sue one another. That's
(21:00):
how I could not find how Reynolds got away with it.
My um my idea was that they had just filed
the patent. George in Laslow had filed the patent in Europe,
and um Reynolds was doing it here in the Undy.
But it was that I didn't realize that there was
actually a patent battle. Yeah, and then there was a battle,
like Favor came on board. I mean everybody started making
(21:22):
pens like crazy all of a sudden. Favor then eventually
sued uh Reynolds because they just sued them for a
shoddy product. Really, I didn't. I'm not sure how that
quite works because it wasn't like they were a consumer.
They get that off of the market. But uh, they
were kind of right, I don't think. I don't know
if they won that lawsuit, but a lot of these
(21:43):
returns UH pins were returned. H these initial Reynolds pins
were returned because they didn't work, but children with burns
on their arms because the pen just suddenly caught fire.
But he made almost six million dollars in nineteen five
dollars in the first ti months of his company, so
he was set. So by the way, Chuck, I'm on
(22:05):
the west Sig inflation calculator. Yeah, you have it app
twelve dollars. I should just have it as like an
app in my brain, you know. Maybe, oh, that is
the first thing I'll do, and we start adding apps
to our brains. But um, twelve dollars and fifty cents
and would be a hundred and seventy three dollars in
sixteen cents here. Yeah, that's a little crazy for a
(22:28):
brand new pen. If people have been living with fountain
pens and they were sick of them, the idea of
something that improved on that much would I could see
running and droves the gimbals being like, you're you're gonna
go out of business eventually, and Macy's will stick around,
so tell me all your pen They also did you
know it was a lot of advertising hullabaloo, Like they
(22:50):
called them the pen of the Atomic era and sort
of all that futuristic stuff. People went wild for healthy glow.
But as far as my own big pen, uh, this
was a revolution because, like we said, twelve fifties, a
lot of dough back then in a Frenchman named Marcel.
(23:10):
Uh would it be beache b I c h I
think it's big is bi. That's why he dropped the
h is so people could pronounce it. Yeah. He developed
a process for making these things really cheap per unit,
and all of a sudden, you could get a pen
for twenty nine thirty five to thirty five cents. Uh,
and he called it the big pen. And that really
(23:32):
changed thing because Uh in ten ten years later he
came to the United States and everyone was like, man,
we've been buying all these credit expensive pens for twelve
fifty Yeah, Mr Bick comes along. These aren't great early on,
but they only cost you know, cents. Yeah. But the
so these big pens were, I mean, they made quite
a splash. And one of the ways that they did
was the lower prices. Not only offered these pens for
(23:56):
much lower prices than the other pens, they they they
created competition among all the ballpoint pen manufacturers, and all
of a sudden, you could get a ballpoint pen for
like ten cents when three years before you would have
paid twelve fifty. And it really changed the industry. And
as as it just kept going and going and manufacturing
(24:17):
got better and better, and so did two did these
highly disposable, cheap ballpoint pens thanks to Bick. Have you
ever like taken a good look at the big logo.
It's freaky, man. It's like a little school kid with
a ball head, right, yeah, ball point head. Yeah, And
there's like a light reflecting off of the sphere of
(24:38):
the ball. But it also just kind of, you know,
looks like a cyclops and he's holding a pen behind
his back to like, what are you gonna do with
that pen? Kid? I wonder if that's how young Marcel
Bick's himself. Maybe so, I don't know, he's uh into
data art. So let's talk about the design of these things.
(24:59):
The brilliant andlicity of the ballpoint pin design. Like we
mentioned that the little ball there is a buffer between
the paper and the ink. Uh, it rolls around it.
It fits very tightly in this socket, but not so
tightly that it can't roll. Because there's nothing more annoying
than a ball that's stuck in place, which happens from
(25:22):
time to time. It means your pen is toast probably
probably so. But this little socket, like, I'm glad this
article pointed this out. It's it's really small and it
might be hard to sort of imagine it. But if
you if you get in the time machine and go
to your dad's bathroom, you might find a deodorant called
a roll on deodorant band band roll on, And it's
(25:47):
the same exact thing, same technology, and that you have
a ball keeping that fluid inside in the reservoir, you know,
from leaking out, and then as it rolls around your
your disgusting armpit, some of that juice goes onto your
disgusting skin. Yeah, and burns a whole clear through it.
Yeah yeah, yeah did you No, I was never into
(26:13):
roll on because it burns a hole in your skin.
Spray No, I don't think I ever had in a spray. Um. No.
I've always been like a solid stick, dude. I can't
even use like the speedsticks stuff that's like, yeah, it's
gotta be like solid. Yeah, if it's not white, great,
(26:35):
but I mean it can't be like gel. It has
to be solid like that. Yeah. See, I can only
use the unscented gel stuff. I can't find unsented sticks anymore.
I used to use sure because that was the only
uncented stick you could find. Use men an unscented gel. Wow, well,
I might have to give that a try, because it's
(26:55):
been a while since I really gave my under arms
a chemical burning. But all that stuff is not supposed
to be great for you, you know, like Emily gives
me the natural stuff, and you know you know what
that means. It means chuck stinks. Tom's makes this great one.
Um it's I think Apricot sent it. It's wonderful. Human
(27:16):
uses it. Sometimes you use it. I've used it before,
but it's hard to find the uncented natural stuff. Yeah,
that's true. And then I don't know, man, you know,
I just I need a little extra now. Same here, man,
I need powerful chemicals to overcome the stink from my
under arms. I use um acts because I'm in eighth grade.
But it's the only stuff that's like a good solid
(27:38):
stick that works with a minimum amount of application. Isn't
that the stuff that just stinks to high heavens? Well,
I mean, if you really slather it on or you
use the body spray, it's gonna smell, but um, it
has a has a scent to it. Yeah. Um, I'm
using black sugar right now. Um. And just we've either
(28:01):
gotten three new sponsors or we will never be sponsored
by We're doing a lot of buzz marketing right now.
It's true. But anyway, roll on any persprint technology and
ballpoint pen technology are the exact same. I think that's
the point we're trying to make exactly. Oh so with
this ballpoint pen ball, Um, the the it's extraordinarily small,
(28:27):
like on my pilot G two, since I use a
point seven millimeter, the ball is so small that it
makes a line that's just seven tenths of a millimeter wide. Yeah,
that's what that means. I never knew that. It's a
very very tiny, tiny little ball. Like when you look
at the end of a pen, you don't really see
the ball the the ball in the ball point. It's
(28:48):
that small you have to really look. And that's a
point seven. Yeah used the point one. No I haven't.
I'm not crazy, Chuck. Come on, I don't want to
line that unless it's like something super specific I'm trying
to do, like a nice point five. Yeah, I've tried
point five. I like it a little thicker than that,
(29:09):
so I go with the seven. It's not like I'll
never use a point five, but foot point seven's my
my favorite for sure. Blue point seven point one would
be if you're doing like cross hatching on an illustration
or something, I could see it for that. I don't
even know what that means. You know, when you make
the lines for shading drawing, that's cross hatch. So I
(29:31):
want everyone to go to YouTube and type in close
up of a ballpoint pen, and somebody went to the
trouble of doing like an extreme close up it must
be through some sort of microscope video camera of a
ballpoint pen making a mark on a piece of paper,
and it's really fascinating interesting. So what you're talking about
(29:53):
getting back to the way that these work. The ball
holds the ink above it keeps it from spilling out,
also keeps it from drying out. But when pressure is
applied to the ball by pressing the pen to the
paper or whatever you're writing on, it releases the ball
or spins the ball so that the backside of the
ball that's covered in ink spreads across the paper and
(30:17):
that same part of the ball that just spread ink
on the paper rolls back up into the socket where
there's more ink to be spread onto it, and for
this process to be continued on again and again wherever
you're rolling the ball on the paper, Because when you're writing,
what you're doing is rolling a tiny ball with ink
on it all over a paper. I love it. That's it.
(30:40):
That's a ball point pen. All right. Well, let's take
another break here and we will talk more about INC
and space pens right after this, Chuck, let's talk inc. Baby.
(31:10):
All right, you're a blue man. Yep. Black. It means
I like iron, you like carbon basically, So when you're
talking INC in a ballpoint pin, uh, you've got a
pigment or some sort of a dye that's dispersed in
a liquid called a vehicle. So it's not like you
can just take a bunch of pigment and throw it
(31:31):
in a pin. It needs to be it needs to
have some juice that it's mixed with, right, Uh. And
that's called the vehicle. Yeah, and it can be any
number of things. I actually found this really really confusing,
and I looked all over the internet and just got
even more confused. But tannins, which I thought were pigments,
(31:53):
apparently are vehicles, and something you want to look for
in a vehicle, like a tannin, which is something you
would get from fermenting leaves or something like there's a
lot of tannins in your kombucha or your wine. Right. Um,
those tannins it basically adhere. They carry the ink from
the writing instrument to the paper and as the as
(32:16):
the ink dries, the tannins bind the ink to the paper,
making a permanent mark. That's what you're looking for. So
you've got your pigment, you've got your dye, you have
your agent. Whatever it is that's coloring the ink. It
can be anything from like a chemical um, an inorganic
chemical like cadmium or uh. It could be carbon, or
(32:40):
it can be iron and it would be dissolved in
that vehicle tannins. And then you might also add additives,
which are things that create um other properties of ink
that you're looking for, Like they use gum arabic to
kind of um increase the viscosity of the ink and
to make it so that once it dries, it doesn't
(33:01):
crack as much as stays kind of bendy on the paper. Yeah,
and these vehicles. So does that mean like if you
have a vehicle, a plant based vehicle, it's like linseed oil,
does that mean linseed oil is a tannin? That's what
I'm saying, Like, there's not a lot of specific information
(33:21):
that explains this out there. I don't know. In other words,
we're gonna have to do a show on tannins as penance.
Please say no, no, okay, good by this. But like
you were talking about the organic pigments you mentioned earlier,
I'm a carbon man, you're an iron man. The carbon
is the black, the iron is the blue. Other inorganic
(33:42):
compounds like chromium is where you get your yellow greens
and oranges, and then or maybe cadmium red and yellow.
It kind of just depends. So the thing that what
you're looking for, though, if you if it's a pigment,
it won't dissolve in water, but it will dissolve in
some other stuff like maybe alcohol or something like that.
Agents will dissolve in in solvents like alcohol, but also water.
(34:07):
And then you have lacquers where you actually take the
coloring agent and marry it to powdered aluminum that's lacquer.
So those are like the three color ways of delivering
colors that you can you can use. But so with
this vehicle, whatever it is that you can dissolve the
coloring agent and that will deliver this coloring agent from
(34:30):
the pen to the paper. That's what you you want.
So maybe the tannin is an additive, or maybe the
tannin just pulls dual duty and it will deliver that
stuff and dissolve um something like iron salts in it
and bind to the paper as well. Who knows, we'll
never know. We're gonna die not knowing what the beauty
of this show is. Someone smarter than us will clear
(34:51):
up what tannins are. I hope so, because I mean
I really looked this up, man, I looked up like
I looked at on like um like I think a
UK Chemical Society's blog post on inks, and they didn't
explain it very well. I just don't. I don't get
it well. Regardless of what a tannin is or is not,
what you're doing with a ballpoint pen and the ink is,
(35:12):
you know a lot of R and D goes into
that dance between thick and thin because you want it
to be thick, but you also want it to dry
quickly and you want it to work with You can't
be so thick that it doesn't respond to gravity, because
that's not a pin anymore. No, it's it's really and
(35:34):
the reason why, uh, you can't write upside down as suppose,
because it responds to gravity. If you're laying in your
bed as a fourteen year old writing a love letter, uh,
you know, holding the pad above your head, staring at
the ceiling. You know, if you think about that pin
rolling around that inc, you know there's an air pocket
in that cartridge and it's gonna reverse itself, and that
(35:58):
air is going to be at the top, and you
are not gonna be able to write very long upside
down right exactly. And yeah, you might be able to
make as like a mark for just a moment, and
then it just turns into a scratch and what you've
just done is used up whatever inc was on that
roller ball for a second, and then now there's no
more inc. Which is I've never really thought about it.
But yes, of course that's why you can't write upside
(36:19):
down with a ballpoint pen. Yes, but we got space pens,
and uh, they're pressurized and that's kind of pretty cool.
Do you have one of these? No? Have you? Yeah?
I got one of the gift once. Oh boy. So
do you remember our Space Race episode? I cannot, for
the life of me, remember, Chuck, if we continue this
(36:42):
legend or debunked it. Do you? I don't know if
we even mentioned it. I am almost certain we talked
about Yeah, hopefully we said that it was apocryphal. But
there's this this legend from the Space Race that UM,
the American Um Space Age. See, NASA spent years and
(37:03):
years and years trying to figure out how to get
a pen into space UM because they wanted to for
the astronauts something to to be able to write within space.
But because of zero gravity, because you need gravity with
a ballpoint pen, if it's in zero gravity or micro gravity,
that inkin't gonna flow downwards and you've got a problem.
(37:24):
So NASA spent so much money on funding and years
of research trying to come up with a pen. And
one day some American astronauts were talking to some of
their Soviet counterparts and we're just telling them how much
trouble NASA was having, And the cosmonauts said, well, we
just use pencils, and the NASA astronauts are like wah wah,
(37:49):
and NASA looks stupid and the Soviets look good, and um,
America just did a big face palm. It's it's totally
bunk bunk because the Russian used our pens, right they did,
and initially everybody used pencils, but there was there there
was something where you can find like a kernel of
truth to that, like there's always a kernel of truth
(38:11):
on any urban legend um and this one is NASA
spent a lot of money on some mechanical pencils, not
years of research or anything like that, but I think
back in the early sixties they ordered like, um forty
pencils mechanical pencils from a company out of Houston that
(38:31):
charged them the modern equivalent of a thousand dollars each.
And the public found out about this and was not
very happy, right, so there was a big there was
a big to do about how to replace these pencils
because they didn't want to use regular pencils because the
Apollo one UM launch had had gone horribly or I
(38:52):
think a test had gone horribly and some of the
astronauts had burned to death in the capsule, So they
didn't want anything that could burn a forward their capsules, right,
So they but now mechanical pencils were out, so they
needed some sort of replacement. Well, they didn't spend any
money on looking for a new pen or any years
of research, because in nineteen they were approached by a
(39:16):
guy named Paul C. Fisher and he said, I gotta
pen for you. It's called a space pen. Have a look,
and they went, it's almost as if you had have
made this just for us, because you even called it
the space pen. And did he actually name it the
Fisher space pen? He named it the a G seven
Anti gravity space pen. Yeah. And like I said, at
(39:38):
the at the onset of this little part, these were
pressurized and it was that kind of solved all the problem.
Their pressurized to the reservoir that is to about forty
pounds per square inch. And there's also a special inc.
It's what you would call a Visco Elastic inc. And
they liken it in our own article to like a
thick rubber cement. And it actually still need to that
(40:00):
ball though that ball point in this case, uh is
necessary to liquefy it and kind of get that action going,
and they say you can even write underwater, which I'm
not sure how that would come into play, but maybe
it's just a fun little advertising point. Yeah. But the
fact that it's pressures overcomes micro gravity, so it actually
(40:20):
works and it will work here on Earth upside down too. Yeah.
And there's also uh no hole in these reservoirs, like
there are regular fountain pins, so not only are you
not wasting any ink, but there's no chance of leakage. Yeah,
they're they're um very widely touted as lasting a hundred years.
(40:41):
The air the air is not going to get in
and dry them out. Remember the erasable pin? I do, man,
I'd totally forgotten about those until this article came along. Yeah,
like I and I'm sure you do too. Remember when
they came on the market. It was the early nineteen eighties,
and all of a sudden you could have a little
uh eraser mate, like the paper mate became the eraser mate,
(41:05):
and you could write stuff and pen and as long
as you got back to it within and chances are
it was usually right away. But supposedly about ten hours,
uh is how much time you had to go in
there and erase the inc and you could erase it
like the way yet it was. It was definitely not
a perfect thing. But pencils are sort of the same
(41:25):
well there, sort of the same way. Uh yeah, I
guess so. Well, I mean it kind of depends, like
you can definitely erase a pencil better, but it depends
on the kind of paper, whether or not you want
to leave no trace that anything had been written. Right,
But it's definitely better than pens. But the so the
trick with eraseable pens, the way that they were eraseable
is that they weren't actually using ink, so there wasn't
(41:46):
something to bind them to the paper. I mean there was,
but it took a very long time to be bound,
about ten hours. And the ink that they used was
actually liquid rubber cement, and so when you would write
in this we rever cement, you had that said amount
of time before it really bound and you could conceivably
erase it to totally forgot about those, but it said
(42:07):
it's not made from dies, Like how did they color it?
You know, I don't know. I would say that it
was probably one of the top ten wonders of modern chemistry.
Uh yeah, I'll buy that, Okay, Why not. Somebody's got
to They're still out there too. I don't. I don't
think people are is knocked out by them as I
(42:27):
used to be. But it's not the eighties. Everybody was
really coked up back then, and it was really easy
to impress people, including me as a twelve year old.
You were cooked up as a twelve year old. I've
got one last one. Have you heard of rollerball pens? Yeah?
What are those? It's basically like my pilot would, it's
(42:48):
considered an ink jail pen. But you could also make
the case that it's a rollerball pen, but a rollerball
pen it sounds like something different. It's actually just a
type of ballpoint pen. The difference between a rollerball all
in a ballpoint pen is the ink. So a roller
rollerball pen has slightly more liquid inc whereas a ball
point pens inc is going to actually be paced. Um
(43:11):
that kind of like that space pen is activated and
liquefied a little more when the ball starts rolling on it.
But they're they're both ballpoint pens. It's just the ink
inside that differentiates the two. Yeah, well I do like those.
My god, I cannot believe we got as much out
of this episode as we did. And sometimes it's the
paper too that you're writing on, Like have you ever
(43:33):
gone to sign for a check at a restaurant and
it's the smoothest, most like wonderful writing experience of your life? Yeah,
I think it's the the you know that I don't
even know what it's made out of, but that kind
of shiny receipt paper in some restaurants like Golden Corral, combined,
oh yeah, combined with the kind of spongy uh check
(43:59):
book what you call those things carbon paper? No? Well, yeah,
but I'm talking about the thing they deliver your your
check in the little chick. I don't know what that's called.
I'll bet there's a name for it. That the little
pad like you know, like writing on a piece of
bare paper on a wood table is not nearly as
pleasurable as if there's a stack of paper. No, no,
(44:19):
certainly not. So there's something to all that combination of
all those things with the right uh, the right check
from the right restaurant. But the girl the little check
book though, can't um it can't be too puffy or
else then you risk poking through the paper if your
pens agreed. So since I can't remember. I don't know
(44:42):
the name of what they deliver the check in the
little booklet. I will say that the little things on
the ends of the shoelace are called egglets, just in
case anyone out there didn't know that. And if you
go to you know, some farmed a table hipster restaurant,
they may deliver your check a clamshell. You know, I've
(45:03):
not seen that one. People get all cute with it,
like here, we're gonna We're gonna deliver your check in
an old eighteenth century wooden clothes pin and and clip
it to your tie and pinch your cheeks. Yeah, just
just give me the check, clip it to your tie.
I'm not wearing a tie, you will be. You got
(45:26):
anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want
to know more about ballpoint pens, there's nothing less to know.
So just go out, find your favorite, buy a few
of them, and use them happily and in good health,
or maybe give fountain pens to try to see if
that's your thing. Uh. And since I said if that's
your thing, I think I said something like that, it's
time for listener mayl. They call this Colorado sar Follow
(45:50):
up search and research, search and rescue. That's what we do,
search and research. That's true, Pete and repeat. Hey, guys,
Colorado's population has been growing by roughly seventeen percent every decade,
which is pretty amazing. Actually, when I wasn't we were
out there for those shows, I remember Den Brights talking
(46:11):
about the population boom of the past, like twenty years. Uh,
that's me talking. By the way. He said, there are
a lot of new residents now wanting to experience are
awesome mountains that, combined with the health renaissance across the country,
has created a lot of interest in fourteen ers. Uh.
And he goes on to explain as follows, Colorado has
(46:33):
fifty eight peaks that are over fourteen thousand feet, so
that's what he's talking about the fourteen ers. Some of
them are easy and only a few miles with a
trailhead already at eleven thousand feet. Others are brutal hikes
of twenty plus miles, extremely loose rock, ropeless climbing, and
death if you fall. Sometimes it's really easy to research
(46:53):
information on the routes. But in spite of all this
information out there, the allure of the mountain calls and
many people had out unprepared. Every year people are rescued
or died due to dumb mistakes that many websites will
blatanty tell you not to make and teach you how
to avoid because of the easy availability of information. And
I think he there's like fourteen or dot com or
(47:15):
something that's what he recommended. There's a healthy debate taking
place among the hiking community as to whether or not
Colorado should begin charging for search and rescue. Your podcast
at the Nail on the Head with the pros and
cons thought you might be interested in a little insight.
Capital Peak is the deadliest and most dangerous of the
fourteen ers, and has killed six people in the past
year alone. However, five of them made an obvious mistake
(47:38):
by taking what they thought was a shortcut that doesn't exist.
Oh god, yeah, man, I'm planning on attempting it in
two weeks, as I have done thirty eight of the
fifty eight peaks That is from Tyler Nesbar and he
went to Mike two of the Denver shows. Oh nice, Tyler,
thanks a lot for coming out. I hope you liked it. Yeah,
be safe out there, dude, for sure. Um. Yeah, Actually,
(48:01):
it's a matter of fact, drop us a line f
you're done to let us know you made it backsafe,
and we'll tell everybody. Okay, yeah, it sounds like Tyler
is doing it right. Okay, but just in case, you know,
in case, thanks again Tyler for getting in touch. If
you want to be like Tyler, well, then buy goodness.
Go to our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com,
look up all of our social media links, or do
(48:23):
it the old fashioned way and send us an email
to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryan. It's just the two of
us today, and both of us are totally astounded that
you pressed play on an episode called how ballpoint pens
(00:23):
work or something to that effect. Yeah, And when I
found this, I was like no, But then I started
reading it and it was far more interesting than I thought.
I love ones like this where you just like, this
sounds so dull that I want to actually pop my
eyes out with it by a ballpoint pen, not listen
to anything, But now it turns out to be interesting.
(00:46):
Like Grass. Remember our episode on Grass you could forget
the great debate over whether you should flood your lawn
with a quarter inch of water or not? Yeah? Answer,
you should not? Uh so, Chuck? Yes, to begin, I
have a question for you. Have you ever seen a
(01:07):
ballpoint pen? They have them? That's become one of your great,
long time running jokes. I don't know what you mean, Chuck.
Have you ever breathed air? Ah? Yeah? I mean I
was using my black Bick ballpoint pen. Yeah, I remember today.
(01:30):
I even remember because blue pins are for dopes. You,
my friend, are out of your mind. You like blue pins.
Blue pen is the only way to go, my friends.
And as a matter of fact, the pilot G two
point seven millimeter pen ink gel pen in blue is
(01:51):
the only way to go. That's my favorite pen on
the entire planet. Well, I will say today I'm using
the standard Bick black. Uh, like the one that in
elementary school you could take a part and make into
a great spitball shooter. Oh yeah, that was. It was
an off off label prescription for that. Yeah, it's the
(02:11):
clear one, not the white plastic case, but the clear
case or the you know clear pinbody. But h and
I do love that pen. But I know the pin
that you speak of, and I do love it because
I love there's nothing like a pen that just takes
to the paper perfectly. Yeah, it's immagical. That's what gel
(02:32):
ink pens do their beautiful things. And the thing I
like the reason I like blue and it comes in black.
If that's your thing, you know, I'm not gonna hate
on it. But if when you underline something printed out
like our notes, um, and then you go back over
it with highlighter, like I do, the blue really stands out.
The black just kind of like blends in with the
(02:52):
printed out words. All right, Well, here's what I used
to do is and you probably remember the days when
I would be looking at my highlighted text with red
ink things written down because the red really popped. But
then I just sort of got tired of it, and
I'm just a black ink guy. You're you're sticking and picking.
(03:13):
I'm sticking and picking. You're picking and sticking. That's what
I mean. Uh So, should we talk about writing over
the years. We should, as anyone listening still if you are,
we're going to continue on just in case. So let's
let's start about writing over there, because this is pretty interesting, right, yeah,
tuk tuk. That's where we should start, tuk took. And
(03:34):
we should shout out to Mary Bellis, who wrote a
thought co little um brief thing called A Brief History
of Writing that kind of ran down some points that
will cover. But she points out the tuk Tuk. She
doesn't call him tuk took, but that's really what she means.
That's because I've trademarked it. Sure, um tuk Tuk started
writing with basically sharpened stones by carving things on the
(03:54):
size of cave walls. Easy PC. That was probably our
first writing in pliment. Yeah, like no ink by this point.
Um as with the Greeks when they started writing, they
had a little stylus made of bone or metal or
something and they would mark things on wax coated tablets
and it would take always. It seems like it's the
(04:16):
Chinese who come up with the great innovations in ancient
times and still who knows. We're not allowed to read
Chinese websites though, No, but they invented and really crafted
Indian ink, Yes, which is pretty clever little mixture its
(04:36):
soot um, specifically from pine smoke. Vellas says, it's pretty
pretty on the nose if you ask me. And then
some oil, lamp oil, and then you take a donkey
and squeeze gelatine from it, which I'm wondering, like, does
that mean that you have to kill the poor donkey
or can you just come up and milk of gelatine?
(04:58):
I think the donkey loves that well, I wonder because
I think gelatine is actually made from hooves. I think
you're right, And usually if you start making things from hooves,
the animal, the hoof used to be attached to is
no longer with us. So it's a sad way to
make ink. But that's how they made ink for thousands
of years. Actually, yeah, there was a philosopher, Chinese philosopher
(05:20):
name Tien Chew and his inc. Was the one that
that really sort of became the go to inc for
for many, many many years. Yes, he called it chewink.
We called it what chewink? Really? No, No, I'm making
(05:42):
stuff up at this point. I can't tell he had
the he had the idea. This was I think back
around BC that he started mixing natural dyes and um
things from berries, different kinds of plants um to make
different colored ink. So ink went from just black two colored,
and as a result, um they started attaching different meanings
(06:04):
to these different colored inks. He admitted the four color pin.
But oh yeah, I remember that. Oh I forgot all
about us. Didn't they go up to like eight colors too? Yeah,
they got They got pretty out of hand. And the
thing that stunk about those is they never wrote really well, no,
they definitely didn't. There. The gimmick was more that you
could write at all in different colors in the same pin.
(06:26):
You know, they were for elementary school kids. So one
of the things that um that happened as the writing implements.
And I hadn't really realized this, but as our writing
implements became more and more refined, just better and better.
And part of that was not just like the implement
but also the types of ink way were using and
how they were delivered, and then the paper whatever substance
(06:48):
we were putting them onto. These the original things which
started out is basically drawings on cave walls, got more
and more um refined, and actually it grew more and
more abstract, and they became our system of alphabets, letters
and at first the so from what we from what
we know, the first alphabet ever created was created in
(07:11):
ancient Greece, classical Grease, by a scholar named Cadmus. And
all of the um the original written alphabets that were invented,
we're all upper case. Nothing about upper case. Everybody's just
shouting to one another constantly. Right, And I didn't know this,
but there's another word for upper case and lower case.
(07:32):
It's magiscule and minuscule, or the actual technical terms for
upper case and lower case. And the story goes that
the reason they're called upper case and lower case. Is
that in the days of um UH type set printing,
you would keep your your magiscule letters in a different drawer,
(07:53):
usually higher up out of reach, because you didn't use
them as often than you would the minuscule letters. You
keep those in the lower case. And that's where the
term comes from from what I understand. Very interesting. I
thought so too. Maybe the fact of the podcast, I
don't know, we'll have to just keep going and find out,
has nothing to do with pens. The Romans actually created
(08:13):
a reed pen, and this makes a lot of sense.
It would use stems from marsh grasses, like bamboo type
of stuff, which made perfect sense because it's hollowed out already.
All you do is sharpened the end of it, uh,
you know, to come to a point like a little nib.
Then put the ink in there, and you've got a
very rudimentary pen, which you know worked pretty well for them. Yeah,
(08:37):
apparently these things were so tight that you had to
like squeeze them to squeeze the ink out of the end,
so it wouldn't just like dribble out constantly, although I'm
sure it's still would. It's not a perfect system. It
isn't a perfect system, and there's there's still room for improvement. Um.
And that came in seven hundred CE, right about or
(08:59):
so years go, when somebody thought to use a quill
from a bird feathered animal. Yeah, and that was a
big one. It says in here that the longest period
in history as far as writing implements goes, was the
quill pen. Yeah, pretty amazing a thousand years. Yeah, I
hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, it was the best
(09:20):
They basically got to the quill pen, or like until
some somebody invince a ballpoint pin. This bird feather is
about the best thing going. Yeah, And I mean they
used so you could use a bird feather as a
quill pen for about a week before it would get
gummed up and you'd have to have another one. And
they actually um figured out that the bird from a
(09:44):
or the feather from a living bird plucked in the
spring provided the optimal quills. And even more than that,
depending on whether you're right handed or left handed, you
wanted to pluck the feather from the left or the
right wing. Yeah, Because if you're right handed and you're
writing with a quill from a right wing, then that
(10:07):
that guy's gonna be tickling your nose every time. And
it may be fun for a little while, but what
you really want is a feather from the left wing
and that way, if you're right handed in that way,
that feather swoops to the outside of your face. Yes,
it would have having the wrong the wrong feather quill
would have like just been another excuse not to balance
(10:29):
your checkbook, you know. Yeah, and these things lasted for
about a week. Um, you needed a special knife to
sharpen them. Uh, took a long time to to get
it kind of prepared. And they were, you know, like
I said, about a week old and they were done,
so they were fairly disposable, but they still held down
the fort until early fountain pins for over a thousand years. Yeah,
(10:52):
and fountain pens are their own thing. They are, um,
surely you know or remember from time to time, I'm
will get like a letter from somebody who's like a
fountain pen enthusiast. It's like a whole thing. You remember that, Yeah,
Or you get a graduation gift that's like a nice
fountain pen and you're like, jeez, really, but I'm saying
you and I have gotten like letters from face to
(11:15):
like write these beautiful letters out and fountain pens. I
think at least one of one person has sent us
an actual, like really good fountain pen um. And I've
never caught the bug, but there there is, like there's
a subculture people out there are so into fountain pens
that they expressed that by writing letters to one another
using fountain pens. Obviously it's really cool. I mean I
(11:38):
have never like you've never taken to it. I'm a
ballpoint man through and through, but I get it. You know, sure,
it's it's cool, it's classy. You're not gonna yuck their yum.
In other words, no, And I don't have very nice
penmanship anymore either, so it would just, you know, I
kind of tie those things together, Like if you're writing
a letter in a fountain pen, you don't write like
(12:00):
I do because that would just be dumb. Right, I
write like a serial killer in an insane asylum holding
a cran with a fist. That's how I write. Uh.
Should we take a break and jump over to the
ball point Yeah, let's all right. So a ballpoint pen.
(12:38):
You say that word over and over and it's you
never really stopped to think about what that means. But
in the end of that little pen and it's impossible
to not just sort of obsess over this after you've
maybe listened to this episode or or researched it like
we did. But when I was writing today, I was
just constantly thinking about that little ball. You know, it
(13:00):
haunted you. How undersung it is? Okay, I see, I
thought you were just like you. You felt like it
was eavesdropping on you. You could feel it like king
at the atoms in your hand or something weird like that. No,
just thinking of the simple genius of this invention. It's
you know, at the end of that pin is a little, small,
tiny rotating ball A lot of times just steel or brass,
(13:22):
maybe tungsten carbide. And it was revolutionary and completely different
than anything that came before it. Yeah, and and to
go back to the fountain pen to kind of put
a button on that, Like, Yes, fountain pens are pretty awesome,
and when you master using a fountain pen um you
probably do like it. But if you're just an average
(13:44):
mom who's like, look, just give me a writing implement.
I want to write something down and not getting any
jollies from this looking at it. From that perspective, the
ballpoint pen is an improvement in a number of ways
over the fountain pen, and specifically, one of the ways
that it's an improved it is that you can use
it up in an airplane much more easily. Yeah, the ink,
(14:07):
there were problems with the ink at high altitudes and
fountain pens, yeah, and just problems with the ink at
any altitude. You know, it doesn't flow super evenly. I
mean if you have a really nice pin and know
how to use it, but like a cheap fountain pen,
it was no good. The ink is very slow to
dry and smudgy. It uh would clogg a lot. And
(14:28):
once it's kind of clogged and gummy, then either have
to be really good at cleaning it or it's just junk. Yes,
so um. One of the ways that the ink comes
out of a fountain pen is through air, through capillary
action and air. And so since you have air in
a fountain pen, that means that since ink dries in
the presence of air, which is what you want when
(14:49):
it touches the paper, it will also dry inside the pen,
which is how it gets gunked up like you were
talking about. But in an airplane too. When you take
a fountain pen that's been down on on planet Earth
for a while, that air that's in the fountain pen
gets trapped in the air. So when you take it
up in an airplane in a pressurized cabin, it's still
(15:11):
like the cabin's pressurized, but it's still much less pressure
than it is at sea level, which is where the
pen just was. And because of this, the higher pressure
air inside the pen wants to move to where it's
lower pressure. Higher pressure always moves to lower pressure, I think,
unless there's some Rando exception. I'm not thinking of that
we're going to get a thousand emails about. But like
(15:35):
high pressure stuff wants to move to low pressure stuff,
So that high pressure air tries to move out of
the fountain pen, and as it does, it pushes the
ink out. So fountain pens tend to flood on planes,
which again is not that big of a problem these days,
but if this was the nineteen forties and you were
a pilot for the Royal Air Force or a navigator
or something, it was a big problem. Yeah, for sure,
(15:55):
which is one of the reasons why ball points came along. Yeah,
and the the ballpoint idea had been around since the
eighteen hundreds, but it never really took like, they can
never figure out how to make a good working pen
that actually was able to go to market. It was
I didn't see that. It was it's been around since
the eight hundred times that the original idea for the
(16:18):
ballpoint pin. Yeah, but they could never fashion a pin
that really worked well. Yeah. I would think also it
would really depend on the technology of the ink, for sure.
I think that was a big part of it. But
it would take a journalist to Hungarian journalists named Laslow
b r Oh to take a tour of a newspaper
facility when he was like, wait a minute, these newspapers
(16:41):
are coming out and they're being stacked on each other
right after printing, and it's not smudging around like my
my dumb old India Inc. Does. And he said, why
don't we use that kind of ink put it in
a pen? And not only that, why don't we take
a pen that has a little time metal ball at
(17:01):
the end that rotates. It also seals that tube so
the ink doesn't come flowing out. It does double duty,
double duty. And then the rotation is what draws that
inc out that in a little gravitational pull and I
think I might be onto something here. Yeah, and he
definitely was. And this this article hilariously says that he
(17:22):
vowed to make a pen that used fast drying ink
because at the time that was a real problem. Like
the the ink that you had in a pen to
keep it from drying out in the pen had to
be super watery. Right, So the idea of making a
pen that wasn't a fountain pen that used fast drying ink,
that was it was quite a vow. I'm sure the
person giving him the newspaper tours like, are you sure. Yeah,
(17:46):
he said, I'm I just vowed it, I'm gonna do it.
So he did. He got together. Luckily I had a brother, George,
who was a chemist. Yeah, that that was very helpful. Um.
In June three he got that patent with a European
Patent Office made bureau pens. It was the first ballpoint
(18:08):
pen to be brought to market. And the British government
you were talking about the Air Force, their Royal Air
Force went crazy for it. So they just bought the rights. Okay,
So I couldn't find that anywhere else. Really, I saw
that the Royal Air Force ordered thirty thousand of these,
but not that they bought the rights. Well, let's say this,
they either bought the rights or all but bought the
(18:30):
rights by being their number one customer. Right. I like
how you married the two facts. Yeah, so I mean
they were not only did they right well at high altitudes,
but they were just sturdy. And it was a pin
that you could take into battle with you. Yeah, so
it wouldn't flood as they call it at high altitudes.
And yeah, it was pretty a pretty durable pen um
(18:53):
and so Bureau he patented it with his brother, George
founded the the Bureau Pen Company, right, And I think
that's so cute. He named it after himself, even though
he and his brother did it, and he very easily.
No Bureau was his last name. I'm sorry he could
have named right, that's what I thought he'd done. His
last name is Bereau, Okay, so that makes way more sense.
(19:15):
I thought he'd been like, George, thank you, but I'm
naming this pen after myself. But it was it was
a pretty big hit. I don't think it was a
commercial success right away. Um, but that big order or
the purchase by the Royal Air Force, Um, definitely helped
the Bureau company established itself almost simultaneously. Well, a year
(19:36):
or two later, there was a guy in America named
Milton Reynolds, and he said, I just found some of
these bureau pens on a business trip I think in
like Argentina or somewhere, and um, he said, I'm going
to totally rip this off. And he did, and he
founded a company, UM and created the Reynolds pen, which
(19:57):
is basically the Bureau pen. Yeah, and these were really successful. Um.
I saw articles as ten bucks. But I found an
article from the New York Times from the nineteen forties
that talked about at Gimbals uh in New York, you
could buy one for twelve fifty, which was super expensive.
(20:17):
I mean twelve fifties expensive for a single pin today.
Sure you know, like a point pinoa be a real
jerk to pay twelve fifty for a pen these days,
with this economy. But this little article said that people
all but trampled one another to get ahold of these pins.
Gimbals ordered fifty thousand of them and sold thirty thousand
of them in week one. Eventually there would be a
(20:39):
lot of lawsuits, UM, back and forth about the patent. Basically,
those never went anywhere because what they were essentially saying
is the idea for the ball bearing, which is kind
of what makes us all possible, has been around for
so long that no one can really claim this to
the point where like you can sue one another. That's
(21:00):
how I could not find how Reynolds got away with it.
My um my idea was that they had just filed
the patent. George in Laslow had filed the patent in Europe,
and um Reynolds was doing it here in the Undy.
But it was that I didn't realize that there was
actually a patent battle. Yeah, and then there was a battle,
like Favor came on board. I mean everybody started making
(21:22):
pens like crazy all of a sudden. Favor then eventually
sued uh Reynolds because they just sued them for a
shoddy product. Really, I didn't. I'm not sure how that
quite works because it wasn't like they were a consumer.
They get that off of the market. But uh, they
were kind of right, I don't think. I don't know
if they won that lawsuit, but a lot of these
(21:43):
returns UH pins were returned. H these initial Reynolds pins
were returned because they didn't work, but children with burns
on their arms because the pen just suddenly caught fire.
But he made almost six million dollars in nineteen five
dollars in the first ti months of his company, so
he was set. So by the way, Chuck, I'm on
(22:05):
the west Sig inflation calculator. Yeah, you have it app
twelve dollars. I should just have it as like an
app in my brain, you know. Maybe, oh, that is
the first thing I'll do, and we start adding apps
to our brains. But um, twelve dollars and fifty cents
and would be a hundred and seventy three dollars in
sixteen cents here. Yeah, that's a little crazy for a
(22:28):
brand new pen. If people have been living with fountain
pens and they were sick of them, the idea of
something that improved on that much would I could see
running and droves the gimbals being like, you're you're gonna
go out of business eventually, and Macy's will stick around,
so tell me all your pen They also did you
know it was a lot of advertising hullabaloo, Like they
(22:50):
called them the pen of the Atomic era and sort
of all that futuristic stuff. People went wild for healthy glow.
But as far as my own big pen, uh, this
was a revolution because, like we said, twelve fifties, a
lot of dough back then in a Frenchman named Marcel.
(23:10):
Uh would it be beache b I c h I
think it's big is bi. That's why he dropped the
h is so people could pronounce it. Yeah. He developed
a process for making these things really cheap per unit,
and all of a sudden, you could get a pen
for twenty nine thirty five to thirty five cents. Uh,
and he called it the big pen. And that really
(23:32):
changed thing because Uh in ten ten years later he
came to the United States and everyone was like, man,
we've been buying all these credit expensive pens for twelve
fifty Yeah, Mr Bick comes along. These aren't great early on,
but they only cost you know, cents. Yeah. But the
so these big pens were, I mean, they made quite
a splash. And one of the ways that they did
was the lower prices. Not only offered these pens for
(23:56):
much lower prices than the other pens, they they they
created competition among all the ballpoint pen manufacturers, and all
of a sudden, you could get a ballpoint pen for
like ten cents when three years before you would have
paid twelve fifty. And it really changed the industry. And
as as it just kept going and going and manufacturing
(24:17):
got better and better, and so did two did these
highly disposable, cheap ballpoint pens thanks to Bick. Have you
ever like taken a good look at the big logo.
It's freaky, man. It's like a little school kid with
a ball head, right, yeah, ball point head. Yeah, And
there's like a light reflecting off of the sphere of
(24:38):
the ball. But it also just kind of, you know,
looks like a cyclops and he's holding a pen behind
his back to like, what are you gonna do with
that pen? Kid? I wonder if that's how young Marcel
Bick's himself. Maybe so, I don't know, he's uh into
data art. So let's talk about the design of these things.
(24:59):
The brilliant andlicity of the ballpoint pin design. Like we
mentioned that the little ball there is a buffer between
the paper and the ink. Uh, it rolls around it.
It fits very tightly in this socket, but not so
tightly that it can't roll. Because there's nothing more annoying
than a ball that's stuck in place, which happens from
(25:22):
time to time. It means your pen is toast probably
probably so. But this little socket, like, I'm glad this
article pointed this out. It's it's really small and it
might be hard to sort of imagine it. But if
you if you get in the time machine and go
to your dad's bathroom, you might find a deodorant called
a roll on deodorant band band roll on, And it's
(25:47):
the same exact thing, same technology, and that you have
a ball keeping that fluid inside in the reservoir, you know,
from leaking out, and then as it rolls around your
your disgusting armpit, some of that juice goes onto your
disgusting skin. Yeah, and burns a whole clear through it.
Yeah yeah, yeah did you No, I was never into
(26:13):
roll on because it burns a hole in your skin.
Spray No, I don't think I ever had in a spray. Um. No.
I've always been like a solid stick, dude. I can't
even use like the speedsticks stuff that's like, yeah, it's
gotta be like solid. Yeah, if it's not white, great,
(26:35):
but I mean it can't be like gel. It has
to be solid like that. Yeah. See, I can only
use the unscented gel stuff. I can't find unsented sticks anymore.
I used to use sure because that was the only
uncented stick you could find. Use men an unscented gel. Wow, well,
I might have to give that a try, because it's
(26:55):
been a while since I really gave my under arms
a chemical burning. But all that stuff is not supposed
to be great for you, you know, like Emily gives
me the natural stuff, and you know you know what
that means. It means chuck stinks. Tom's makes this great one.
Um it's I think Apricot sent it. It's wonderful. Human
(27:16):
uses it. Sometimes you use it. I've used it before,
but it's hard to find the uncented natural stuff. Yeah,
that's true. And then I don't know, man, you know,
I just I need a little extra now. Same here, man,
I need powerful chemicals to overcome the stink from my
under arms. I use um acts because I'm in eighth grade.
But it's the only stuff that's like a good solid
(27:38):
stick that works with a minimum amount of application. Isn't
that the stuff that just stinks to high heavens? Well,
I mean, if you really slather it on or you
use the body spray, it's gonna smell, but um, it
has a has a scent to it. Yeah. Um, I'm
using black sugar right now. Um. And just we've either
(28:01):
gotten three new sponsors or we will never be sponsored
by We're doing a lot of buzz marketing right now.
It's true. But anyway, roll on any persprint technology and
ballpoint pen technology are the exact same. I think that's
the point we're trying to make exactly. Oh so with
this ballpoint pen ball, Um, the the it's extraordinarily small,
(28:27):
like on my pilot G two, since I use a
point seven millimeter, the ball is so small that it
makes a line that's just seven tenths of a millimeter wide. Yeah,
that's what that means. I never knew that. It's a
very very tiny, tiny little ball. Like when you look
at the end of a pen, you don't really see
the ball the the ball in the ball point. It's
(28:48):
that small you have to really look. And that's a
point seven. Yeah used the point one. No I haven't.
I'm not crazy, Chuck. Come on, I don't want to
line that unless it's like something super specific I'm trying
to do, like a nice point five. Yeah, I've tried
point five. I like it a little thicker than that,
(29:09):
so I go with the seven. It's not like I'll
never use a point five, but foot point seven's my
my favorite for sure. Blue point seven point one would
be if you're doing like cross hatching on an illustration
or something, I could see it for that. I don't
even know what that means. You know, when you make
the lines for shading drawing, that's cross hatch. So I
(29:31):
want everyone to go to YouTube and type in close
up of a ballpoint pen, and somebody went to the
trouble of doing like an extreme close up it must
be through some sort of microscope video camera of a
ballpoint pen making a mark on a piece of paper,
and it's really fascinating interesting. So what you're talking about
(29:53):
getting back to the way that these work. The ball
holds the ink above it keeps it from spilling out,
also keeps it from drying out. But when pressure is
applied to the ball by pressing the pen to the
paper or whatever you're writing on, it releases the ball
or spins the ball so that the backside of the
ball that's covered in ink spreads across the paper and
(30:17):
that same part of the ball that just spread ink
on the paper rolls back up into the socket where
there's more ink to be spread onto it, and for
this process to be continued on again and again wherever
you're rolling the ball on the paper, Because when you're writing,
what you're doing is rolling a tiny ball with ink
on it all over a paper. I love it. That's it.
(30:40):
That's a ball point pen. All right. Well, let's take
another break here and we will talk more about INC
and space pens right after this, Chuck, let's talk inc. Baby.
(31:10):
All right, you're a blue man. Yep. Black. It means
I like iron, you like carbon basically, So when you're
talking INC in a ballpoint pin, uh, you've got a
pigment or some sort of a dye that's dispersed in
a liquid called a vehicle. So it's not like you
can just take a bunch of pigment and throw it
(31:31):
in a pin. It needs to be it needs to
have some juice that it's mixed with, right, Uh. And
that's called the vehicle. Yeah, and it can be any
number of things. I actually found this really really confusing,
and I looked all over the internet and just got
even more confused. But tannins, which I thought were pigments,
(31:53):
apparently are vehicles, and something you want to look for
in a vehicle, like a tannin, which is something you
would get from fermenting leaves or something like there's a
lot of tannins in your kombucha or your wine. Right. Um,
those tannins it basically adhere. They carry the ink from
the writing instrument to the paper and as the as
(32:16):
the ink dries, the tannins bind the ink to the paper,
making a permanent mark. That's what you're looking for. So
you've got your pigment, you've got your dye, you have
your agent. Whatever it is that's coloring the ink. It
can be anything from like a chemical um, an inorganic
chemical like cadmium or uh. It could be carbon, or
(32:40):
it can be iron and it would be dissolved in
that vehicle tannins. And then you might also add additives,
which are things that create um other properties of ink
that you're looking for, Like they use gum arabic to
kind of um increase the viscosity of the ink and
to make it so that once it dries, it doesn't
(33:01):
crack as much as stays kind of bendy on the paper. Yeah,
and these vehicles. So does that mean like if you
have a vehicle, a plant based vehicle, it's like linseed oil,
does that mean linseed oil is a tannin? That's what
I'm saying, Like, there's not a lot of specific information
(33:21):
that explains this out there. I don't know. In other words,
we're gonna have to do a show on tannins as penance.
Please say no, no, okay, good by this. But like
you were talking about the organic pigments you mentioned earlier,
I'm a carbon man, you're an iron man. The carbon
is the black, the iron is the blue. Other inorganic
(33:42):
compounds like chromium is where you get your yellow greens
and oranges, and then or maybe cadmium red and yellow.
It kind of just depends. So the thing that what
you're looking for, though, if you if it's a pigment,
it won't dissolve in water, but it will dissolve in
some other stuff like maybe alcohol or something like that.
Agents will dissolve in in solvents like alcohol, but also water.
(34:07):
And then you have lacquers where you actually take the
coloring agent and marry it to powdered aluminum that's lacquer.
So those are like the three color ways of delivering
colors that you can you can use. But so with
this vehicle, whatever it is that you can dissolve the
coloring agent and that will deliver this coloring agent from
(34:30):
the pen to the paper. That's what you you want.
So maybe the tannin is an additive, or maybe the
tannin just pulls dual duty and it will deliver that
stuff and dissolve um something like iron salts in it
and bind to the paper as well. Who knows, we'll
never know. We're gonna die not knowing what the beauty
of this show is. Someone smarter than us will clear
(34:51):
up what tannins are. I hope so, because I mean
I really looked this up, man, I looked up like
I looked at on like um like I think a
UK Chemical Society's blog post on inks, and they didn't
explain it very well. I just don't. I don't get
it well. Regardless of what a tannin is or is not,
what you're doing with a ballpoint pen and the ink is,
(35:12):
you know a lot of R and D goes into
that dance between thick and thin because you want it
to be thick, but you also want it to dry
quickly and you want it to work with You can't
be so thick that it doesn't respond to gravity, because
that's not a pin anymore. No, it's it's really and
(35:34):
the reason why, uh, you can't write upside down as suppose,
because it responds to gravity. If you're laying in your
bed as a fourteen year old writing a love letter, uh,
you know, holding the pad above your head, staring at
the ceiling. You know, if you think about that pin
rolling around that inc, you know there's an air pocket
in that cartridge and it's gonna reverse itself, and that
(35:58):
air is going to be at the top, and you
are not gonna be able to write very long upside
down right exactly. And yeah, you might be able to
make as like a mark for just a moment, and
then it just turns into a scratch and what you've
just done is used up whatever inc was on that
roller ball for a second, and then now there's no
more inc. Which is I've never really thought about it.
But yes, of course that's why you can't write upside
(36:19):
down with a ballpoint pen. Yes, but we got space pens,
and uh, they're pressurized and that's kind of pretty cool.
Do you have one of these? No? Have you? Yeah?
I got one of the gift once. Oh boy. So
do you remember our Space Race episode? I cannot, for
the life of me, remember, Chuck, if we continue this
(36:42):
legend or debunked it. Do you? I don't know if
we even mentioned it. I am almost certain we talked
about Yeah, hopefully we said that it was apocryphal. But
there's this this legend from the Space Race that UM,
the American Um Space Age. See, NASA spent years and
(37:03):
years and years trying to figure out how to get
a pen into space UM because they wanted to for
the astronauts something to to be able to write within space.
But because of zero gravity, because you need gravity with
a ballpoint pen, if it's in zero gravity or micro gravity,
that inkin't gonna flow downwards and you've got a problem.
(37:24):
So NASA spent so much money on funding and years
of research trying to come up with a pen. And
one day some American astronauts were talking to some of
their Soviet counterparts and we're just telling them how much
trouble NASA was having, And the cosmonauts said, well, we
just use pencils, and the NASA astronauts are like wah wah,
(37:49):
and NASA looks stupid and the Soviets look good, and um,
America just did a big face palm. It's it's totally
bunk bunk because the Russian used our pens, right they did,
and initially everybody used pencils, but there was there there
was something where you can find like a kernel of
truth to that, like there's always a kernel of truth
(38:11):
on any urban legend um and this one is NASA
spent a lot of money on some mechanical pencils, not
years of research or anything like that, but I think
back in the early sixties they ordered like, um forty
pencils mechanical pencils from a company out of Houston that
(38:31):
charged them the modern equivalent of a thousand dollars each.
And the public found out about this and was not
very happy, right, so there was a big there was
a big to do about how to replace these pencils
because they didn't want to use regular pencils because the
Apollo one UM launch had had gone horribly or I
(38:52):
think a test had gone horribly and some of the
astronauts had burned to death in the capsule, So they
didn't want anything that could burn a forward their capsules, right,
So they but now mechanical pencils were out, so they
needed some sort of replacement. Well, they didn't spend any
money on looking for a new pen or any years
of research, because in nineteen they were approached by a
(39:16):
guy named Paul C. Fisher and he said, I gotta
pen for you. It's called a space pen. Have a look,
and they went, it's almost as if you had have
made this just for us, because you even called it
the space pen. And did he actually name it the
Fisher space pen? He named it the a G seven
Anti gravity space pen. Yeah. And like I said, at
(39:38):
the at the onset of this little part, these were
pressurized and it was that kind of solved all the problem.
Their pressurized to the reservoir that is to about forty
pounds per square inch. And there's also a special inc.
It's what you would call a Visco Elastic inc. And
they liken it in our own article to like a
thick rubber cement. And it actually still need to that
(40:00):
ball though that ball point in this case, uh is
necessary to liquefy it and kind of get that action going,
and they say you can even write underwater, which I'm
not sure how that would come into play, but maybe
it's just a fun little advertising point. Yeah. But the
fact that it's pressures overcomes micro gravity, so it actually
(40:20):
works and it will work here on Earth upside down too. Yeah.
And there's also uh no hole in these reservoirs, like
there are regular fountain pins, so not only are you
not wasting any ink, but there's no chance of leakage. Yeah,
they're they're um very widely touted as lasting a hundred years.
(40:41):
The air the air is not going to get in
and dry them out. Remember the erasable pin? I do, man,
I'd totally forgotten about those until this article came along. Yeah,
like I and I'm sure you do too. Remember when
they came on the market. It was the early nineteen eighties,
and all of a sudden you could have a little
uh eraser mate, like the paper mate became the eraser mate,
(41:05):
and you could write stuff and pen and as long
as you got back to it within and chances are
it was usually right away. But supposedly about ten hours,
uh is how much time you had to go in
there and erase the inc and you could erase it
like the way yet it was. It was definitely not
a perfect thing. But pencils are sort of the same
(41:25):
well there, sort of the same way. Uh yeah, I
guess so. Well, I mean it kind of depends, like
you can definitely erase a pencil better, but it depends
on the kind of paper, whether or not you want
to leave no trace that anything had been written. Right,
But it's definitely better than pens. But the so the
trick with eraseable pens, the way that they were eraseable
is that they weren't actually using ink, so there wasn't
(41:46):
something to bind them to the paper. I mean there was,
but it took a very long time to be bound,
about ten hours. And the ink that they used was
actually liquid rubber cement, and so when you would write
in this we rever cement, you had that said amount
of time before it really bound and you could conceivably
erase it to totally forgot about those, but it said
(42:07):
it's not made from dies, Like how did they color it?
You know, I don't know. I would say that it
was probably one of the top ten wonders of modern chemistry.
Uh yeah, I'll buy that, Okay, Why not. Somebody's got
to They're still out there too. I don't. I don't
think people are is knocked out by them as I
(42:27):
used to be. But it's not the eighties. Everybody was
really coked up back then, and it was really easy
to impress people, including me as a twelve year old.
You were cooked up as a twelve year old. I've
got one last one. Have you heard of rollerball pens? Yeah?
What are those? It's basically like my pilot would, it's
(42:48):
considered an ink jail pen. But you could also make
the case that it's a rollerball pen, but a rollerball
pen it sounds like something different. It's actually just a
type of ballpoint pen. The difference between a rollerball all
in a ballpoint pen is the ink. So a roller
rollerball pen has slightly more liquid inc whereas a ball
point pens inc is going to actually be paced. Um
(43:11):
that kind of like that space pen is activated and
liquefied a little more when the ball starts rolling on it.
But they're they're both ballpoint pens. It's just the ink
inside that differentiates the two. Yeah, well I do like those.
My god, I cannot believe we got as much out
of this episode as we did. And sometimes it's the
paper too that you're writing on, Like have you ever
(43:33):
gone to sign for a check at a restaurant and
it's the smoothest, most like wonderful writing experience of your life? Yeah,
I think it's the the you know that I don't
even know what it's made out of, but that kind
of shiny receipt paper in some restaurants like Golden Corral, combined,
oh yeah, combined with the kind of spongy uh check
(43:59):
book what you call those things carbon paper? No? Well, yeah,
but I'm talking about the thing they deliver your your
check in the little chick. I don't know what that's called.
I'll bet there's a name for it. That the little
pad like you know, like writing on a piece of
bare paper on a wood table is not nearly as
pleasurable as if there's a stack of paper. No, no,
(44:19):
certainly not. So there's something to all that combination of
all those things with the right uh, the right check
from the right restaurant. But the girl the little check
book though, can't um it can't be too puffy or
else then you risk poking through the paper if your
pens agreed. So since I can't remember. I don't know
(44:42):
the name of what they deliver the check in the
little booklet. I will say that the little things on
the ends of the shoelace are called egglets, just in
case anyone out there didn't know that. And if you
go to you know, some farmed a table hipster restaurant,
they may deliver your check a clamshell. You know, I've
(45:03):
not seen that one. People get all cute with it,
like here, we're gonna We're gonna deliver your check in
an old eighteenth century wooden clothes pin and and clip
it to your tie and pinch your cheeks. Yeah, just
just give me the check, clip it to your tie.
I'm not wearing a tie, you will be. You got
(45:26):
anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want
to know more about ballpoint pens, there's nothing less to know.
So just go out, find your favorite, buy a few
of them, and use them happily and in good health,
or maybe give fountain pens to try to see if
that's your thing. Uh. And since I said if that's
your thing, I think I said something like that, it's
time for listener mayl. They call this Colorado sar Follow
(45:50):
up search and research, search and rescue. That's what we do,
search and research. That's true, Pete and repeat. Hey, guys,
Colorado's population has been growing by roughly seventeen percent every decade,
which is pretty amazing. Actually, when I wasn't we were
out there for those shows, I remember Den Brights talking
(46:11):
about the population boom of the past, like twenty years. Uh,
that's me talking. By the way. He said, there are
a lot of new residents now wanting to experience are
awesome mountains that, combined with the health renaissance across the country,
has created a lot of interest in fourteen ers. Uh.
And he goes on to explain as follows, Colorado has
(46:33):
fifty eight peaks that are over fourteen thousand feet, so
that's what he's talking about the fourteen ers. Some of
them are easy and only a few miles with a
trailhead already at eleven thousand feet. Others are brutal hikes
of twenty plus miles, extremely loose rock, ropeless climbing, and
death if you fall. Sometimes it's really easy to research
(46:53):
information on the routes. But in spite of all this
information out there, the allure of the mountain calls and
many people had out unprepared. Every year people are rescued
or died due to dumb mistakes that many websites will
blatanty tell you not to make and teach you how
to avoid because of the easy availability of information. And
I think he there's like fourteen or dot com or
(47:15):
something that's what he recommended. There's a healthy debate taking
place among the hiking community as to whether or not
Colorado should begin charging for search and rescue. Your podcast
at the Nail on the Head with the pros and
cons thought you might be interested in a little insight.
Capital Peak is the deadliest and most dangerous of the
fourteen ers, and has killed six people in the past
year alone. However, five of them made an obvious mistake
(47:38):
by taking what they thought was a shortcut that doesn't exist.
Oh god, yeah, man, I'm planning on attempting it in
two weeks, as I have done thirty eight of the
fifty eight peaks That is from Tyler Nesbar and he
went to Mike two of the Denver shows. Oh nice, Tyler,
thanks a lot for coming out. I hope you liked it. Yeah,
be safe out there, dude, for sure. Um. Yeah, Actually,
(48:01):
it's a matter of fact, drop us a line f
you're done to let us know you made it backsafe,
and we'll tell everybody. Okay, yeah, it sounds like Tyler
is doing it right. Okay, but just in case, you know,
in case, thanks again Tyler for getting in touch. If
you want to be like Tyler, well, then buy goodness.
Go to our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com,
look up all of our social media links, or do
(48:23):
it the old fashioned way and send us an email
to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff Works dot com
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