The history
5,000 years from a sharpened reed to a ball that rolls ink.
For most of history, writing meant dipping a sharpened stick or feather in ink every few words. Scribes in Egypt and Greece cut reeds, Europe wrote with goose feathers for a thousand years, and a Fatimid caliph asked for a pen that held its own ink. Then steel nibs, the fountain pen and, in the 1930s, a Hungarian journalist's rolling ball put a cheap, reliable pen in every pocket.
c. 3000 BCE
Reed pens and ink
Scribes, Egypt
953
A pen holding its own ink
Fatimid court, Ifriqiya
1827
Fountain pen patent
Petrache Poenaru, France
1888
Ballpoint patent
John J. Loud, USA
1938
Practical ballpoint
László & György Bíró, Hungary
1963
Fibre-tip pen
Yukio Horie, Japan
3000 BCE – 1800
Writing means dipping. Reeds, brushes and quills carry a little ink from a pot to the page, and paper arrives from China.
3000 BCE
c. 3000 BCE
Egyptian scribes wrote on papyrus with thin rushes chewed or cut into a brush-like tip, dipped in ink made from soot (carbon) bound with plant gum.
Why it mattered. Carbon ink is so stable that texts written with it thousands of years ago are still black today.
300 BCE
c. 300 BCE
Scribes cut a hard reed (in Greek, kalamos) to a point and split its tip, so the ink ran down the split to the paper as they wrote.
Why it mattered. A slit that feeds ink to a point is the ancestor of every pen nib.
105
105 CE
Cai Lun, an official of the Han court, is credited with improving and standardising papermaking from bark, hemp, rags and old fishing nets. Paper spread along the Silk Road to the Islamic world and, much later, to Europe.
Why it mattered. Pens are only half the story: cheap paper made writing an everyday act.
600
c. 600 CE
Flight feathers, usually from geese, became Europe's main writing tool. The hollow shaft held a small drop of ink, and a penknife recut the point as it wore down. Isidore of Seville mentions quills in the early 600s.
Why it mattered. The quill wrote most of Europe's books, letters and laws for over a thousand years. The word “pen” comes from the Latin penna, feather.
953
The Fatimid caliph asked for a pen that wouldn't stain his hands or clothes. According to his chronicler, Qadi al-Nu'man, he was given a pen that carried ink in a reservoir and let it out only when used for writing.
Why it mattered. It is the earliest known record of what we'd now call a fountain pen.
1100
c. 12th–19th centuries
Ink made from oak galls and iron salts turns from pale to deep black as it reacts with air, and bites into parchment so it can't be scraped off. It was the standard ink for centuries.
Why it mattered. Many of the most important documents in Western history are written in it, but its acidity slowly eats the page.
1636
Schwenter described a pen made from two quills, one inside the other. The inner quill held ink, sealed with a cork, and fed it to the writing point.
Why it mattered. An early European attempt at a pen that doesn't need dipping.
1800 – 1938
Machines stamp out steel nibs by the million, and inventors finally make a pen that carries its own ink without leaking.
1822
1820s
Birmingham factories began stamping nibs out of sheet steel by machine. By the mid-1800s the city made more than half of the world's pens.
Why it mattered. A cheap, long-lasting nib replaced the quill and brought writing to schools and offices everywhere.
1884
Waterman patented a feed with fine channels that let ink out by capillary action while letting air in, so the pen stopped blotting. The popular story that a leaking pen cost him a contract may be a legend.
Why it mattered. Balancing ink out and air in is still how every fountain pen works.
1888
30 October 1888
Loud, a leather tanner, patented a pen with a small rotating steel ball held in a socket, for marking rough surfaces like leather. It was too coarse for writing letters and the patent lapsed.
Why it mattered. The rolling ball worked, but the right ink was still fifty years away.
1888
Gray's telautograph used a pen connected to linkages that turned its movements into electrical signals. A second pen, miles away, copied the writing as it happened.
Why it mattered. An ancestor of the fax machine and of the digital stylus.
1908
Sheaffer patented a fountain pen with a lever on the side. Flip it and it squeezed a rubber ink sac inside; let go and the sac drew in fresh ink from a bottle.
Why it mattered. No more eyedroppers: filling a pen became clean and quick.
1938 – 1960
A rolling ball and thick, fast-drying ink make the first pen that almost anyone can afford and nobody needs to refill.
1938
15 June 1938
László Bíró, a journalist, noticed that newspaper ink dried fast without smudging, but was too thick for a fountain pen. With his brother György, a chemist, he paired thick, quick-drying ink with a ball in a socket and patented it in Britain.
Why it mattered. The right ink made the rolling ball practical. In many countries a ballpoint is still called a “biro”.
1943
Fleeing the war in Europe, the brothers settled in Argentina, filed a new patent and began making “Birome” pens. Argentina celebrates Inventor's Day on 29 September, László Bíró's birthday.
Why it mattered. The ballpoint's first commercial home was in South America.
1945
1944–45
The British government licensed Bíró's design so RAF aircrew could write in unpressurised planes, where fountain pens leaked as the air pressure dropped.
Why it mattered. A war-time need proved the ballpoint was tougher than the fountain pen.
1945
29 October 1945
American businessman Milton Reynolds rushed out a ballpoint and sold it at Gimbels department store for $12.50, a lot of money at the time. Crowds queued and thousands sold on the first day, though many early pens leaked or skipped.
Why it mattered. It showed the enormous demand for a pen you never had to dip or fill.
1950
Bich bought rights to Bíró's design and used Swiss watchmaking machines to make precise balls cheaply. The Cristal's clear hexagonal barrel shows the ink left, and a tiny hole in the barrel equalises air pressure.
Why it mattered. Bic says it has sold more than 100 billion Cristals: the pen became disposable.
1950 – today
Felt tips, rollerballs, gel ink, erasable ink and pens that write on glass.
1952
Rosenthal's marker was a glass bottle of ink with a wool-felt wick that drew ink up to the tip by capillary action.
Why it mattered. Bold, quick-drying lines on almost any surface: the start of the felt-tip.
1963
Horie developed a pen with a tip made of bundled acrylic fibres, fed by capillary action from a water-based ink reservoir. The Pentel Sign Pen became hugely popular.
Why it mattered. The ancestor of today's felt-tips, fineliners and whiteboard markers.
1964
Ohto paired a ballpoint's rolling ball with thin, water-based ink, giving a smooth, wet line like a fountain pen's.
Why it mattered. Same ball, different ink: the ink's thickness changes everything about how a pen writes.
1965
Fisher patented a sealed refill with pressurised nitrogen behind the ink, so it writes upside down, underwater and in weightlessness. Astronauts used it from Apollo 7 in 1968. The popular tale that NASA spent millions on it while Soviet cosmonauts used pencils is a myth: Fisher paid for its development.
Why it mattered. It solved the ballpoint's dependence on gravity.
1984
Sakura launched a ballpoint using gel ink: water-based ink thickened with a polymer that flows when the ball turns and thickens again at rest.
Why it mattered. Vivid, opaque colours, including metallics and pastels, that ordinary ballpoint ink can't carry.
2006
2006–2007
Pilot's FriXion pens use thermosensitive ink that turns clear when warmed. Rubbing with the pen's rubber tip makes enough heat from friction to erase it.
Why it mattered. A new trick for an old tool, from chemistry rather than mechanics.
2015
2010s
Pressure- and tilt-sensitive styluses, such as the Apple Pencil (2015), let tablets record handwriting and drawing with the feel of a real pen.
Why it mattered. Gray's 1888 idea, finally in everyone's hands: writing that becomes data.
Did you know?
The word “pen” comes from the Latin penna, which means feather.
In many countries a ballpoint is still called a “biro”, after László Bíró.
Argentina celebrates Inventor's Day on 29 September, Bíró's birthday.
RAF aircrew were among the first to use ballpoints, because fountain pens leaked at altitude.
The story that NASA spent millions on a space pen while cosmonauts used pencils is a myth.
The people
c. 50 – 121 · Court official · China
Credited with improving papermaking in 105 CE.
1799 – 1875 · Inventor and engineer · Romania
Patented an early self-feeding fountain pen in Paris.
1837 – 1901 · Inventor and businessman · USA
Patented a feed that balanced ink out and air in.
1835 – 1901 · Electrical engineer · USA
Invented the telautograph, which sent handwriting down a wire.
1844 – 1916 · Tanner and inventor · USA
Patented the first ballpoint pen in 1888.
1867 – 1946 · Jeweller and inventor · USA
Patented the lever-filling fountain pen.
1899 – 1985 · Journalist and inventor · Hungary and Argentina
With his brother György, made the first practical ballpoint.
1892 – 1976 · Businessman · USA
Sold the first ballpoints in the United States.
1914 – 1994 · Industrialist · France
Created the Bic Cristal, the best-selling pen in history.
1913 – 2006 · Inventor · USA
Created the pressurised space pen.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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