Pen: a brief historiographical discourse.

Indranil Sarkar

Introduction: The English proverbial phrase "The pen is mightier than

the sword" was coined by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton
in 1839, in his historical play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy (generally
shortened to Richelieu).The Cardinal uttered the words in the 2 nd Scene of
the 2nd Act of the play to mean that communication, or in some
interpretations, administrative power or advocacy of an independent press, is
a more effective tool than direct violence. The speech of the Cardinal was ---

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
True, This!
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! itself is nothing!
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But taking sorcery from the master-hand

To paralyse the Csars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! Take away the sword
States can be saved without it!
In 1870, literary critic Edward Sherman Gould wrote that Bulwer "had the
good fortune to do, what few men can hope to do : he wrote a line that is
likely

to

live

for

ages." [Wikipedia] According to the

Cambridge

Dictionaries website the saying emphasizes that "thinking and writing have
more influence on people and events than the use of force or violence".
Beginning of writing: Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken
language. Written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in
Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500 -3000 BCE. This early writing was
called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a
reed implement. In India and in China writing was associated with religious
ritualistic acts. The Mahabharata was written in the 2 nd or 3rd millennium. The
Harappan and the Swaraswati civilization had the custom of writing down
their social and intellectual activities.
Defn.of a pen: The term pen originates from Latin penna
meaning feather. A pen is a writing implement used to apply ink to a
surface, such as paper, for writing or drawing.
Origin of Pen: The Pen has a curious evolutionary history. Beginning with a
Reed pen in 3000 BCE, it has reached the stage of a Digital pen in the 21 st
century. In the evolutionary journey it has crossed the stages of Quill Pen,
Dip-Pen, Nip-Pen, Fountain pen, Ball Pen, Roller Ball Pen, and Marker pen.
As early as 4,000 B.C., people used crude pens consisting of hollow straws or
reeds that supported a short column of liquid. During the 500s B.C., people
began to make pens from the wing feathers of such birds as geese and
swans. The shaft of the feathers was hardened, and the writing tip was
shaped and slit to make writing easy. These feather pens were known as
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quill pens, and they were widely used until the development of steel-nib
pens in the 1800s.However,even before that there was the use of Reed
pens which were made of Reed found in the marshy banks of rivers. In
Bengali/Sanskrit reeds are called Khag. The reed was cut into pieces of 7
to 10 inches and one end was sharpened for inscribing words or pictures on
papers or papyrus. Reed pens were used in India during the Saraswati
civilization in the 2nd or 3rd millennium. Reed pens were slowly replaced by
quills from about the 7th century. As a matter of fact Reed pens gave way to
Quill pens when papyrus was replaced by animal skins around 100B.C.After
the fall of the Roman empire, the Romans could not manage Reed easily
and started using Quill pens as an alternative. Quill pens continued till 18 th
century. Quill pens were used to write and sign the Constitution of the United
States in 1787.
In India: In India the history of pen and writing goes back to Saraswati
Civilization /Harappan Civilization which existed in the 2 nd or 3rd millennium
when Rigveda was written.

Bulrush (Nal Khagra)

Reed Pen (Khager Kalam)

However, there is a funny but sad story regarding the pen used by Lord
Ganesha while writing the Mahabharata.

Sage Vyasdeva convinced Ganesha to write down the Mahabharata. Ganesha

agreed on condition that Byashdeva would not stop in the midway.
Byashdeva also told that Ganesha would not stop writing in the mid-way. But,
once Ganeshas stylus got broken and as he could not stop, he broke one of
his teeth and continued. (Have you ever noticed the teeth of Lord Ganesha?
One tooth is broken, isnt it?). There may be some truth in the fun story. The
duo took three years to complete writing the biggest epic of the world. The
Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey
combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana having more than
100000 slokas and 1.8 million words.
In Sumerian Civilization: The first known writing derives from the lower
reaches of the two greatest rivers the Nile and the Tigris. So the two
civilizations separately responsible for inventing writing techniques are the
Egyptian and the Sumerian (in what is now Iraq). It has been conventional to
give priority, by a short margin, to Sumer dating the Sumerian script to
about 3100 BC and the Egyptian version a century or so later.
First Fountain Pen: The earliest historical record of a pen employing a
reservoir dates back to the 10th century (in 953).But in general, Pens
evolved in the 18th century. Initially there were a type of pens called nibpens having copper or silver nibs. These pens were dipped into a small
amount of ink and words were written on paper. These were called dippens. These were inconvenient and writing was very tedious. To solve the
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problem L. E. Waterman, an Insurance clerk invented the Fountain pen in

1883.Fountain pens were initially called nib-pen as these pens had steel
nibs. However, a copper nib found in the ruins of Pompei is a proof of the use
of nib-pen even in 79 AD. There is also a reference to 'a silver pen to carry
ink in Samuel Pepys' diary for August 1663. Modern fountain pen was
invented by Romanian Petrache Poenaru
The

French

Government

patented

it

when he was a student in Paris.

in

May

1827.But,

in

England,

Bartholomew Folsch received a patent in 1809 for a pen with an ink reservoir.
The story of watermans experiment: L. E. Waterman, an insurance
salesman, purchased a writing contraption with its own ink reservoir. But
when it leaked, ruining a sale, he got an idea for a better one and decided to
make it himself. In those days a salesman often wore a vest chain with a
small metal container holding a vial of ink in one pocket and a collapsible
penholder in the other. Waterman examined several so-called pocket pens
and saw that none of them had a mechanism for the sure control of ink flow.
He determined to invent one. Applying the principle of capillary attraction, he
designed a feed with a groove for air intake and three narrow slits in the
bottom of the groove. As air bubbles interred, they pressed against the ink in
the barrel and the ink descended through the slits in a uniform flow to the
pen point.
This device was so novel that the Patent Office granted a patent in 1884,
only a few months after the filing. Waterman claimed that his new
mechanism would "prevent the excessive discharge of the ink when the pen
is in use." It was the first practical fountain pen and its three-fissure feed
became the standard principle for all other makes produced thereafter.
Waterman started assembling his pens on a kitchen table in the rear of a
cigar store. In September of 1885 he started to advertise. After that
Watermans Ideal rode the road to fortune.

The first pens were long tubes with a cap fitted on a projection at the top of
the barrel. The cone cap, sliding over the end, did not come until 1899.
Colour was first used in 1898 with the hexagon holder. A self-filling piston
replaced the reloading eye dropper in 1903. In a 1908 model, the barrel was
made with a movable sleeve which exposed a metal bar; by finger pressure
the bar squeezed a soft rubber sac. Up to this time there had been no sacs in
fountain pens.
By the late 1800s, inventors had perfected an early version of the fountain
pen. This pen represented a major improvement over previous pens, because
it featured an ink reservoir and a capillary to feed. Earlier pens held only a
small amount of ink at a time and had to be repeatedly dipped in ink.
First Ball Pen: The first ball point pen to replace the then common "fountain
pen" was introduced by Milton Reynolds in 1945. It used a tiny ball bearing
which rolled heavy gelatin ink onto the paper. Its price was $10 at the
beginning and had a slogan It writes under water. However it was not the
Reynolds who invented the Ball Pen. The idea of using a rotating ball to
distribute the ink to the paper was developed by the American inventor John
H. Loud. The Jewish-Hungarian journalist Lszl Br in 1930. John J. Loud of
Weymouth in 1888 and Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916 were awarded with the
patents to market the Ball pens. Ballpoint pens received little notice until
World War II (1939-1945). Many pilots began using ballpoint pens during this
conflict, because such pens did not leak at high altitudes. After the war,
ballpoint pens became increasingly popular. Soft-tip pens and rolling-ball
pens both were introduced during the 1960s.
Digital Pen: Our age is called the Digital age. Keeping pace with the time
our inventors have supplanted the erstwhile fountain pen or more novel Ballpen by digital pens. A digital pen is an input device which captures the
handwriting or brush strokes of a user, converts handwritten analog
information created using "pen and paper" into digital data, enabling the
data to be utilized in various applications. For example, the writing data can
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be digitized and uploaded to a computer and displayed on its monitor. The

data can then be interpreted by handwriting software (OCR)) to allow the
digital pen to act as a text entry interface and be used in different
applications or just as graphics. [Wikipedia]

Atary Digital Pen

A digital pen is generally larger and has more features than a stylus. Digital
pens typically contain internal electronics and have features such as touch
sensitivity, input buttons, memory, writing data transmission capabilities,
and electronic erasers.
Summing Up:Pen is a powerful means of mankind for inheritance of
civilizations,

redecoration

of

thoughts,

decoding

mans

mind

and

communication of feelings. Nowadays the pen has exceeded the writing

function itself. To possess a pen with integrity of quality and perfect design
becomes a symbol of nobility.

Shakespeare Pen Is Smokin-The New Yorkers

The significant statement of The New Yorker reminds us a few famous

quotes which are very close to Edward Bulwer-Lyttons proverbial
sentence. These are
i.Greek poet Euripides, who died about 406 BC, is sometimes quoted as
writing: "The tongue is mightier than the blade."
ii."Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than 1,000 bayonets,"
Napoleon is sometimes quoted as saying.
iii."A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword", said Robert
Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Despite heavy competition from the ballpoint (and later the rolling-ball pen,
which used a more liquid ink and provided more "fountain-pen-like" writing
smoothness), the fountain pen never really went away; it mostly just went up
market. In Europe, particularly, the fountain pen remained the preferred tool
of the educated writer, and the center of gravity of fountain pen sales and
production gradually moved across the Atlantic during the 1960s and 70s.
Both Sheaffer and Parker, the strongest of the U.S. firms for fountain pens,
have expanded their overseas production facilities to meet the need. Using
Antique fountain pens has become a luxurious fashion among the educated
youths in recent years.

Links/References/Quotes:i.www.wikipedia.org
ii. http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab33#ixzz3tB1XwH2C
iii.www.historyworld.net
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iv.www.hindumythology.com
v. http://www.ancient.eu/writing/(Jashua J.Mark)
v.www.sheaffer.com
i.s/02-12-2015