By
Mary
Bellis
The history of writing instruments
by which humans have recorded and conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery
lists, is the history of civilization itself. This is how we know the story
of us, by the drawings, signs and words we have recorded.
The cave man's first inventions were
the hunting club (not the auto security device) and the handy sharpened-stone,
the all-purpose skinning and killing tool. The latter was adapted into
the first writing instrument. The cave man scratched pictures with the
sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of his cave dwelling. The cave drawings
represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops or hunting
victories.
With time,
the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings.
These symbols represented words and sentences, but were easier and faster
to draw and universally recognized for meaning. The discovery of clay made
portable records possible (you can't carry a cave wall around with you).
Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities
of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8,500 B.C.
With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping,
pictographs evolved and slowly lost their picture detail. They became abstract-figures
representing sounds in spoken communication. The alphabet
replaced pictographs between 1700 and 1500 B.C. in the Sinaitic world.
The current Hebrew alphabet and writing became popular around 600 B.C.
About 400 B.C. the Greek alphabet was developed. Greek was the first script
written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and the Roman
(later Latin) writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only
uppercase letters, when the writing instruments were refined enough for
detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 A.D.)
The earliest means of writing that
approached pen and paper as we know them today was developed by the Greeks.
They employed a writing stylus, made of metal, bone or ivory, to place
marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets made in hinged pairs, closed
to protect the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting (purely
text messages made by hand) originated in Greece. The Grecian scholar,
Cadmus invented the written letter - text messages on paper sent from one
individual to another.
Writing was
advancing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into
wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed
for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink
was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin
of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu
(2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C. Other cultures developed
inks using the natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants and
minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning
attached to each color.
 The
invention of inks paralleled the introduction of paper. The early Egyptians,
Romans, Greeks and Hebrews, used papyrus and parchment papers. One of the
oldest pieces of writing on papyrus known to us today is the Egyptian "Prisse
Papyrus" which dates back to 2000 B.C. The Romans created a reed-pen perfect
for parchment and ink, from the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses,
especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into
a primitive form of fountain pen. They cut one end into the form of a pen
nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the stem, squeezing the reed
forced fluid to the nib.
By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink
developed, a composite of iron-salts, nutgalls and gum, the basic formula,
which was to remain in use for centuries. Its color when first applied
to paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black and then
over the years fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in
old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in 105 A.D. but it
only became known about (due to Chinese secrecy) in Japan around 700 A.D.
and brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. Paper was not widely used
throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century.
The writing instrument that dominated
for the longest period in history (over one-thousand years) was the quill
pen. Introduced around 700 A.D., the quill is a pen made from a bird feather.
The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from
the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the
feathers curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer. Goose
feathers were most common; swan feathers were of a premium grade being
scarcer and more expensive. For making fine lines, crow feathers were the
best, and then came the feathers of the eagle, owl, hawk and turkey.
Quill pens lasted for only a week
before it was necessary to replace them. There were other disadvantages
associated with their use, including a lengthy preparation time. The early
European writing parchments made from animal skins, required much scraping
and cleaning. A lead and a ruler made margins. To sharpen the quill, the
writer needed a special knife (origins of the term "pen-knife".) Beneath
the writer's high-top desk was a coal stove, used to dry the ink as fast
as possible.
Plant-fiber paper became the primary
medium for writing after another dramatic invention took place: Johannes
Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal
letters in 1436. Simpler kinds of printing e.g. stamps with names, used
much earlier in China, did not find their way to Europe. During the centuries,
many newer printing technologies were developed based on Gutenberg's printing
machine e.g. offset printing.
Articles written
by hand had resembled printed letters until scholars began to change the
form of writing, using capitals and small letters, writing with more of
a slant and connecting letters. Gradually writing became more suitable
to the speed the new writing instruments permitted. The credit of inventing
Italian 'running hand' or cursive handwriting with its Roman capitals and
small letters, goes to Aldus Manutius of Venice, who departed from the
old set forms in 1495 A.D. By the end of the 16th century, the old Roman
capitals and Greek letterforms transformed into the twenty-six alphabet
letters we know today, both for upper and lower-case letters.
When writers had both better inks
and paper, and handwriting had developed into both an art form and an everyday
occurrence, man's inventive nature once again turned to improving the writing
instrument, leading to the development of the modern fountain pen.
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