To a wetter point

Since I did a blog on the humble pencil it’s only fair that I do one on the design and history of the pen as well, the word pen means feather in Latin and this makes since because the very first pens where simply large bird feathers dipped in the ink. This large bird feather was called the quill and was used for a very long time used through the 1800s in fact. It’s important to note that many Asian countries never used the quill they instead used a bamboo stick sharpened to a very fine point. Some say that Galileo Galilei designed the first ballpoint pen but this has yet to be accepted. The very first ballpoint pen patent was in 188 by a man named Kayleigh Loud who was trying to make a pen that would write on tanned leather. Although it was patented in 1888 the ball point pen didn’t become prominent until the early 20th century when mass production and precision machining made it possible to produce the pens in quantity. Even though ball points are super popular the fountain pen is still In use today. Some people even keep a quill on their desks as a decoration and perhaps as a reminder to how much we’ve advanced even in the simple things like a pen.