The Fascinating History of Fountain Pens

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Get your writing instruments out for this one. Yeah, please do. Please do write this down. We thank our super producer, Max the Freight Train Williams. What do you think, Noel? Calligraphy Williams?

I was going to say, Max, the pen is mightier than the sword, William.

I like how you're leaning into the W on SWORD. That's none other than Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bolin. And Noel, you and I are very excited to explore the history of the Fountain Pen.

That's true. We are. And what a fascinating history it is. We're going to go from quills to pilots and every place in between.

The Superior Pen.

Oh, I don't know about that one. All right.

So our research associate, Ames, taught us a lot of this. And, Noel, I just love the way they kick us off here. Can you give us the gist?

Well, in a world. Where every dentist, dog groomer, and life coach has personalized pens by the thousands. You're not supposed to take them, though. You're supposed to give them back. But we all know how that works. Who owns a pen?

Who owns a lighter?

It's like a lighter, right? It's hard to imagine what came before. And I mentioned a bit of a continuum from quills to dip pens and finally to the humble or not so humble, depending, because they can get a little pricey, fountain pens. the more elegant predecessor to the ubiquitous rollerball, not the fight to the death sci-fi future sport, but the one rattling around in just about every junk drawer across the planet. From scratchy to sophistication, we're going to examine the evolution of the fountain pen and where it stands today, culturally speaking.

Ah, yes.

So this is the wild thing. When you are using a pen at your ordinary day-to-day life in any sort of office situation, you are probably working with what we call a rollerball pen. That is economy of scale. That's a reason these pens are so easily available, so often stolen and given. But back in the day, writing was crazy.

The idea of writing was like sorcery, and writing with ink was super tedious. And as you kind of teased, not tediously, Noel, in ancient Egypt, reed pens were crafted from a literal reed straw.

Yeah, the same thing that ninjas would often use to breathe through when they're approaching a fort to storm. Reed straws, or bamboo in some cases, they would be shaped into a square point at one end, a term that will continue on in the evolution that we're going to talk about, called the nib, and then split down the middle. The nib would then be dipped into ink and used for writing on Papyrus, not in papyrus, the font, the much maligned font, though usually not for super long because these things would lose their points. very, very quickly and had to be replaced pretty frequently. Following the reed pen was the quill pen. And Ben, you and I both went to an event some years back at La France's Tavern

in New York City, one of the oldest taverns in the world, or in the country, I want to say.

In the United States.

The United States, that's right, where signers of the Declaration of Independence would kick it. smoky back rooms and we went to a literary uh launch party for our buddy aj bahamas jacobs the puzzler for his book the year of living constitutionally and the swag bag that was passed out to all the guests included a quill and a little pot of ink and if i'm not mistaken it was like powdered ink that was very accurate period accurate you.

Are not mistaken That was amazing, and we do stand for A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, as people will say. We had a phenomenal time there because we were learning about calligraphy and writing technology. If we go to our friends at the Britannica, we will see that a reed pen is followed by the quill. A hollow, horny barrel of a bird's feather used as a principal writing instrument from the 6th century CE until the mid-1800s. That's correct.

The strongest quills were obtained from living birds because in their new growth periods in the spring, they would be shedding these outer wing feathers or follicles. and they were considered the most suitable for the task of writing. The second and third were particularly preferred. Quills from the left wing were even more preferred because the feathers curved outward and away from the more, you know, common right-handed writers.

Sure.

And also, everybody check this out. There is a preposterous amount of left-handed U.S. presidents. Do with that what you will. These quills are used from the 6th century, again, to the 1800s, and they were not fancy calligraphic stuff. They were used for writing whatever you had to write down at the time, stuff like the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence from earlier.

The old John Hancock was signed with that particular type of writing implement.

Classic John, right? This is an improvement over the reed pen, but the quill has these design flaws, as we already teased. Imagine you are writing a beautiful poem about to someone you are very in love with. Maybe it's a person, maybe it's America. You get about five words in and you gotta dip your stuff in the ink. Yeah, you gotta dip your nib in the ink and then you have to hope you don't spill it before you write it.

This was a huge problem back in the day and quite ridiculous, thankfully. We have a solution, the fountain pen.

Yeah, and maybe if anyone out there is thinking, why are you glossing over Japan and all of their incredible contributions? The hanku, right?

The stamp.

Yeah, well, that, but also, I mean, their incredible contributions to calligraphy. But they used brushes, if I'm not mistaken, for that task. I don't think they were in the pen universe.

Sumi-e, right? Mm-hmm. Also, yes, this is pretty Western-centric because we're looking at a mechanism, a ridiculous mechanism. Noel, when's the last time you wrote with a quill?

I was going to say, I barely remember the last time I wrote with my hand, Ben. We have kind of— What? What? every day. Yeah, man, it's the muscles kind of atrophy. But no, I don't believe, I don't know that I've ever written with a quill. The one that we got from Bahamas, I just, you know, kept that as a souvenir, but I did not attempt to write with it. How about you?

Oh, you know, I am cartoonish, Noel. I'll tell you this. I don't enjoy fountain pens for the exact same reason that rollerball pens exist. The Pilot V5 or V7 is probably my favorite writing instrument. But look, let's imagine we are back in olden times and we have our quill, right? And we have to dip it in the ink and hope we don't mess up. And we're Leonardo da Vinci.

At this point, you know, that's one of our earliest examples.

For sure. Leonardo da Vinci, known for being an incredible artist. and inventor, a sketcher. Uh, what is it? The, uh, what was it called? Am I, am I thinking of the da Vinci do the man that's played out? Uh, That's the one. Wasn't that him or was that Michelangelo? That was Da Vinci, right?

That's Da Vinci.

Yeah, yeah. That's what we're talking about. So he was a big sketcher and he would draw plans and schematics and things like that. So yeah, it was discovered through analysis of his handwriting that his ink flow remained consistent rather than fading away as the quill does. And a lot of those sketches that I was talking about appeared to be done with a fountain pen type instrument, though not the one that we know as the modern fountain pen, which we're going to get to.

Yeah, yeah.

Da Vinci was kind of a MacGyver of his time. We have to be honest about that.

He was a polymath, big time.

Yes, just so. And so we do know that not too long ago, an Italian artisan named Amerigo Bombera, no relation to the American continent's That guy was, ooh, we should do an episode.

Oh, I don't know much about this. I don't know much about him other than his namesake. But yeah, let's definitely write that down.

Yeah, yeah.

Max, do you have us on that one?

I got you.

All right, great.

So this other Amerigo recreates the Da Vinci-designed pen for a TV show over in Italy. It's called Super Quark. Uh, Noel, do you have a good Italian accent?

Uh, let's see when you put me on the spot like that, it's hard to conjure. Uh, I would say, you know, my, I would want to say, uh, uh, but that's really offensive. Uh, so no, Ben, I do not.

Okay. Okay.

Well, folks, just hear us out here as well. Uh, this idea that Da Vinci comes up with because he is, as Noel says, a polymath, uh, It doesn't take off. People are super into Big Quill for about 200 years.

Yeah, Big Bird.

You get these mentions of this idea of a fountain pen all the way back into the 1600s.

Yeah, a German inventor, a fellow by the name of Daniel Schventer, came up with the idea for a pen that would be made from two quills, one to hold the ink inside of the other, sort of a turducken-type situation. Samuel Pepes mentioned the idea of a pen to carry ink in his diary in 1663. The oldest known surviving example of a fountain pen was made by Nicolas Billon and is inscribed right on the thing with the year 1702.

An illustrated description known as the Plume sans Fin was published in 1723.

Which is interesting because we know logically that if there is an artifact that was engraved, it means earlier engraved. iterations of it exist.

And I'm doing a real rough translation as I am no Frenchophile, Francophile, but I think plume sans fin means plume without end, which would make sense given the constant flow of the ink.

Yeah, and you don't have to constantly dip your quill and worry about the life of the birds. The Fountain Pen as Ames teaches us today, consist of three parts. You've got the ink reservoir inside the pen, right? And you've got the feed, which will push the ink from that reservoir to the tip of the pen. And then the tip or the nib is that little pointed metal piece.

If you've got a fancy pen, While you're writing your notes on Ridiculous History, please check, folks, the ones that bifurcate, the ones that divide when you push too hard on the paper.

So the feed delivers ink to the metal nib, which then goes onto the paper when you touch the tip of that nib to it. Like you said, Ben, the absorbency of the paper continues that process. This is the part that I love, the science-y part, using a concept called capillary action. So you might remember that from the way water and nutrients move up the stems of plants.

Or when you're drinking a glass of water. take a strip of a napkin and put it over the top of the glass and have a little, dare I say, nib into the surface of the water and watch the water run up. That is capillary action.

Yeah, it climbs up. So when you're writing, the paper draws the ink through the pen continuously until the pen is empty, or of course you lift it up and then you have to refill it.

Yeah, and at this point, We're talking about one of your favorite things, Newell, parallel thinking. We're talking about a lot of prototypes, a lot of good ideas. It takes us a while as a civilization to get to the final form, right? The final design. We have earlier prototypes of the fountain pens. We have them competing in the 1600s.

There's the first official English patent for a fountain pen that is issued in 1809. And it's to, I must defer to you. How do we say it?

That's very sweet. Very kind of you, Ben. I will take it. I will take it and run with it in the form of Frederick Fulch. There's an umlaut over the O, so that's a U sound. Yeah, Frederick Fulch. And the first commercially successful fountain pen was called the Penographic, which when you look at it on paper, it looks like it says pornographic, but maybe that just reminds me of the gutter. This is the Penographic. This was in 1819 by John Sheffer. But it is usually a Romanian engineer named Petros Ponaru, a mathematician, an engineer, physicist, and inventor who is officially credited with inventing. the modern fountain pen, because his design was first to include a lot of the components that we know today. A barrel, or from

the historical description, a never-ending portable pen, like that term earlier that I did look up, and that means the plume sans fin, never-ending quill, or never-ending feather. Yeah, so a never-ending portable pen that recharges itself, he says, with ink. And at the time, this must have been remarkable, uh, you know, nice.

Yeah.

I didn't, I thought it was beautiful.

Uh, it's, uh, we're reaching the economy of scale, ridiculous historians in 1830, we solved the problem of the steel nib, the, the little bit at the end of your pen that delivers ink to a page. So now we have interchangeable, affordable, uh, steel nibs. They get manufactured in large quantities. This happens in Birmingham, England, and this leads to a period that people call the Birmingham pen trade. And true story, over half of the world's supply of those little pieces that get the ink to the paper is Were manufactured in Birmingham, England for quite some time.

The Boomingham nib boom. I know I know it well. I don't, but I do now. And I was mentioning to you guys, you and Max off mic that I once subscribed to, I think what I referred to as a man box and you didn't quite know what I meant. It is a subscription service that sends like doodly stuff to dudes. And, you know, it'll be like a whiskey tumbler or.

Like some sort of switchblade.

Well, I bought the switchblade separately because I'm an adult and I can do what I want. But it did come with some knives, like, you know, camping things, little wallets and fun stuff. But it came with a reed. refillable fountain pen that had these nibs that you would, uh, that actually were charged already with the ink. So maybe it's not quite the same as what we're talking about here, but they, the little, you know, box of nibs that came with was labeled as, as nibs, but they were full of, uh, ink already.

We get to get to 1848 here because now we're on a J curve of development. We've got this American inventor shout out to the States. Uh, Noel, help me with this one. Azel Storrs? Sure.

Azel? I couldn't have done it any better.

Azel Storrs?

Azel. Azel. Old buddy. Yep. Azel Storrs Lyman. He patented a pen that was described in the patent as having a combined holder and nib. And then a guy named Robert William Thompson invented the refillable pen in 1849. Yeah. In 1883, we've got Louis Waterman who patented the now standard capillary action system. that stabilizes ink flow and really brings us into what we are referring to affectionately as the golden age of fountain pens.

Yes.

Oh, my gosh. Classic Lewis. This is the halcyon age of fountain pens. Now, all of a sudden, we have the three, the three variables pushing up together like Voltron or the Avengers. We've got the iridium tipped gold nibs. We've got hard rubber barrels. We've got free flowing ink. This is coming from pure pens.

Yeah. I love that exists by the way, pen enthusiasts, the world over.

Yes.

Yes. And on pure pens for all their use.

Yes.

And Ames, uh, we hope you're, we are doing you proud.

Uh, I'm sorry, Iridium tipped?

Yes.

Wait a minute, I recognize that. Iridium is a currency in the Borderlands games, if I'm not mistaken. Yes.

Yes folks uh nola max are still hardcore into borderlands how's it going for you guys.

Oh i've actually fallen off quite a bit because i replaced it with uh.

Uh splatoon well.

Splatoon um raiders and now of course control residents but i do enjoy the borderlands games and iridium is a an element i think that you collect that allows you to what is it max get like higher level upgrades or you can only use it for certain things or what's.

The It changes between games, but yeah, it's like a super valuable currency that's hard to use. But to answer your question, Ben, I am actually thinking about doing a Borderlands 2 replay because one of the best games ever made, one of the best video games of all time is still Borderlands 2.

It's an incredible game. I think it occurred to me that Iridium might be radioactive just because it sounds so much like irradiated. Yes, yeah.

The element itself is not radioactive. but there are isotopes that are. We don't have time for this. We got to get back into our fountain pen stuff. So now we're basically in the early days of the Soda Wars, for instance, right? Everybody is making their favorite version of a always on fountain pen, right? And everybody loves it.

And everybody wants to flex. It's like having a, how do I pronounce this, Nola Patek? Is that the watch?

You know, it's funny. Like, that is how I think you pronounce it properly. But a lot of the, like, 42nd Street watch guys that I follow on the Internet, they say paddock, which I think is wrong. But they say it. They all say it. I think it might just be, like, a lot of people from, like, Long Island and certain parts of New York take great pride in mispronouncing things and doing it aggressively.

Yes.

How vague. Mm-hmm.

Maybe not quite, but you know what I'm saying.

I thought it worked.

There's a certain word like, ask me a question or, you know, like they just, they know that that's not exactly how he's pronounced it, but they're like, I don't care. This is how I say it. You can, you know, yeah. Take a long walk off a short pier.

There we go.

The fountain pen did take a long walk off a short pier because, uh, Amid all these massive mechanical improvements, this thing has a catbird seat for a while. It's better than pulling a feather off your friendly bird and always worrying about where the ink goes. There are decades where the fountain pen, in various iterations, is awesome. People worship it. It is used by Prince and Pauper alike.

Until the next iteration, the rollerball pen.

Ah, yes, the rollerball pen. This is something that we start to see. showing up and kind of becoming perfected, I guess you could say, by the 1960s. Early iterations of the rollerball didn't really catch on. They struggled to replicate the success and the popularity of the fountain pen because they were a little pricier. Also, they had a bit of an ink flow issue, not particularly consistent.

And they were nouveau riche, let's be honest.

Sure.

And they also were notoriously leaky. Though fountain pens, you know, also I think there's certainly tropes about leaky fountain pens. But fountain pens, because of their history, they, as Ames points out, had a certain je ne sais quoi because they were a little more bespoke and kind of, you know, handcrafted. Yeah.

And as we were teasing, in the 1960s, the manufacturers had reckoned with the production flaws. in the ballpoint pen at scale, right? The ruler ball pen. And this is where we see Waterman and Montblanc, they start producing these ruler ball pens with a lot more variety. And now it's just like Timex creating bespoke watches, right? Different ink colors, engravings, fancier manufacturing elements. The ballpoint pen is, gradually becomes the new status symbol. So if you are, let's say, getting through college or getting through high school, you have perfect attendance in a year of elementary school, you get gifted an amazing pen, right? And now it becomes a limited edition.

It also, as you know, results in pretty cool Yeah.

It just became a little bit more accessible to the average human. So gradually, the fountain pen kind of became relegated more to collectors and enthusiasts, sort of the way, I mean, I guess we are kind of, I don't know, I'm only, I'm sort of new to it, but like, you know, everyone, you can tell time using your iPhone or your computer or like, you know, a cheap digital watch or a quartz watch. So people that are really into watches or mechanical watches, It becomes a little bit more of a flex or a niche thing or someone that's just fascinated by the craftsmanship of it. But it is not necessarily something that is unique. It is more something that is of interest to you, you know, a hobbyist or a collector.

Do you want a fountain pen?

I don't because I just don't write enough with my hand, like I was saying. There is a part of me that wants to maybe get one of those cool Japanese planners and maybe start doing it more, but I'm not quite there yet. But I do have that nifty little French fountain pen that I told you about that I got from the man box. But to the earlier point, in recent years, much like– almost like, to your point, Ben, a bit of a backlash– against the digitization of everything, much like a watch collecting. Um, there is a bit of a resurgence in fountain pens. Um, you will often see much like the watch content that I'm always yelling about on Tik TOK or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, unboxing videos of new fountain pens, um, you know, tutorials

on how to refill them properly and maintain them properly and things like that. Yeah.

They were once the, uh, they were once the status of like the gold watch you get at retirement, right? Your dad would say, oh, they gave me a pen and a watch when I was done breaking my heart for 50 years or whatever. Now, to your earlier point there, Noel, there's a surging popularity in all things analog, and we welcome it. collectors are coming out of the woodwork, enthusiasts are coming out of the stationary, we could say, and people are writing again. We are tremendously, I think all three of us, we are tremendously excited about this. For sure.

And I know we're both fans of The incredibly specific and precise nature of a lot of Japanese products, whether it be like a bath implements, like I recently bought like this really cool exfoliating product. washcloth that's long and you can use it to like wash your back. And like, you know, it's pretty, they just, I don't know, they're so good at these kinds of things. And that extends to a lot of writing implements. If you've ever been to Muji, which is sort of like I describe it often to people that don't know about it as like Japanese Ikea, you can get all these crazy pens there that are affordable in all different colors, but they also make something called like the Pilot Kakuno, which I think

is something you could probably get. which is only $ 15. It's a fountain pen designed for beginners. It has a little smiley face on the nib. But if you want to go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, you've got the Namiki Emperor Maki fountain pen, which has an 18-carat gold nib. is handmade and takes months to produce just one. It must be made of like the center of a tree or something. That's going to run you about $ 20, 000.

U.S. dollars?

Yeah, U.S.

Dollars.

So we're talking high-end watch prices for a single pen. And it probably comes in an incredible you know, wooden case. It's also made from the same tree or something.

Right. And we know the name of the tree, and it has a history, and you can show up there once a year on a moonless night, and it'll speak to you if you write to it. Yeah, very Ghibli. The potential here. is exactly what you're describing, Noel, because as Ames was mentioning, you have this variation. You've got, just like your favorite pilot pen now in the United States, you can have a size that goes from extra fine to very broad. You have different types of flexibility, and you have different types of metal, including gold.

I don't know, man.

I'm vastly fascinated by this. You can still, even today, get what they call a traditional dip pen, which means you have to put it into the ink reservoir just the way those problematic stalking-riddled founding fathers did when they wrote the Constitution.

That's right. And to the earlier point, I think it was, what was it, the name of the website? It was Pen, Pure Pen, I think is what it was called. There are communities for this stuff, as you can imagine there is for Anything. I'm about to attend New York Comic Con, which is the kind of thing that you go to if you're into all kinds of fandom and nerdery. That kind of world does exist for pen enthusiasts. You've got pen shows where people travel from all around the world.

There are attendees who will sometimes travel and stay in the conference hotel for all three days. There's one in particular, but I bet there's more than one.

Oh, we got to do AIM's best joke.

Yeah, it's right here. We're definitely going to do it because you've got folks that are pen influencers, and the joke really writes itself, Ben. They're pen influencers, of course.

All right.

It's also different from what we call pen testing, penetration testing. You can play along at home. I think legal will not allow Noel Max and yours truly to say that it is very easy to to put on an orange construction vest, and walk wherever you wish. These pen enthusiasts will travel across the world to see their vintage favorites.

They will travel to teach and hang out with each other. There is a huge community of people who love fountain pens and it actually made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. SCOTUS, our nine creepy ringwraiths, did issue the following statement. I'll read it here in full. We'll keep it short.

Quill pens have remained part of the courtroom scene. White quills are placed on council tables each day that the court sits. as was done at the earliest sessions of the court. End quote.

Noel, do you think the Supreme Court is using quills right now? I think they're using regular pens.

I can't imagine that a lot of the folks sitting on the Supreme Court even know how to write.

I'm sorry.

Shady. Shady, shade, shade. Some of them are fine. Well-deserved, though. It is the kind of thing, though, that I could imagine members of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom perhaps doing with their peruque wigs or whatever. Yes, their peruques. They do lean on tradition over there a little bit more than we do. But we'll wrap this episode in this incredible research from Ames. With a really cool pop cultural reference from the Indiana Jones franchise, there's a really cool scene where Sean Connery, who plays Indy's father, uses his trusty fountain pen as a kind of MacGyver-esque subterfuge or diversion. He's trapped... In a small room on a Nazi-controlled Zeppelin, Professor Henry Jones Sr. finds himself being

bullied by an aggressive Nazi officer and thinking on his toes, because of course he is, you know, Indiana Jones' father, he uses his fountain pen to squirt ink into the officer's eyeballs, which blinds and disorients him and allows Indiana Jones and his father to make their escape. As a character, Dr.

Marcus Brody, played by the actor Denham Elliott, says in the film, and also Max Williams' nickname, of course, the pen is truly mightier than the sword.

And we'll close with this one from our buddy Samuel Clemens, street name Mark Twain. In 1897, he said, None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain pen does. or half its cussedness, but we can try. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning in. Big shout out to our super producer, Max the Freight Train Williams. Big shout out to A.J. Bahamas Jacobs. Noel, did you see that A.J. is pioneering a new kind of puzzle?

I wouldn't doubt it. I wouldn't put it past him. What could be a new kind of puzzle?

Dude, he calls it a micro crossword.

Hmm.

I love it. Yeah, you get it.

Is it one cross? That's it?

No, it's one cell. It's a one-letter thing.

I'm going to have to look that up. I can't possibly imagine how that goes. But huge thanks to that man and his contributions to culture and cross-wordery.

Right. And the opposite of those accolades to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a. The Quister, Big, big thanks, of course, to the rude dudes at Ridiculous Crime. And Noel, if it's OK, Max, if it's OK, if I say it to both of you guys, happy birthday to Alex Williams.

Oh, my gosh. I did not know. I'm so bad at birthdays. I will reach out to the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Williams, who composed our theme. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The Fascinating History of Fountain Pens

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