Pens and Pencils

I just learned the other day that ballpoint pens came about in the 1940s. Apparently, in the WWII time frame, they remained largely unreliable.

 Waterman fountain pen advertisement, claiming the pen to be the "the arm of peace" in French.

I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.  Pens, in the 40s, and the 50s, largely remained fountain pens.

Frankly, even the Bic ballpoint pens I used through most of junior high and high school were less than reliable. The ink dried up, or it separated in the plastic tube holding it.   Sometimes they leaked and the ink came out everywhere.  But they were easier to use than fountain pens.  With fountain pens I was always like Charlie Brown in the cartoons, with ink going absolutely everywhere, or at least all over my hands.

Which didn't keep me from trying to use them.  I did.  I've always liked fountain pens, and I always admired my dad's ability to use them.  When I was young he had some nice fountain pens at home that he used.  I have them know, but I don't use them.  In later years he switched to cheaper basically disposable fountain pens which took cartridges, rather than having to be filled up from an ink bottle, and I tried to use that kinds in school. But it just didn't work out for me.

More recently some company has developed a wholly disposable fountain pen, and sometimes we have those at work. They're really neat, and they generally don't blow up.  Still, on the other hand, modern roller ball ink pens, a nifty successor to the ballpoint pen, is such a nice pen, and so rarely blows up, that they really can't be beat, as a practical matter.  Still, fountain pens, even disposable ones, are pretty neat.

In the era this blog tried to focus on, fountains were it, in terms of pens.  Mass production of fountain pens, and relatively modern fountain pens, began in the late 19th Century.

But, given as the story of the pen for the first half of the 20 Century was the story of the fountain pen, that means a lot of writing was done with the pencil.

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in which he is holding a pencil.

Pencils seem to have become semi extinct in some ways in modern times, although that's obviously an exaggeration.  I can hardly get my own kids to use a pencil, even for math homework, which drives me crazy.  By extension, however, I can recall my attempts to use a ballpoint pen for math homework as a source of irritation for my own father, so perhaps that's simply an example of history repeating itself.

Pencils, however, were the writing instrument for people on the go to a large extent prior to the ballpoint pen. When I was a geology student we largely used pencils in the field, not pens, and I'm sure that's true of every outdoor profession.  Army quartermasters, who were issued a pommel bag to go with their 1917 Packers saddle, found that the pommel saddlebag had loops for pencils so that the quartermaster could take notes.  Pens just weren't an option.

Something that was an option for some things, however, was the brush.  A lot of cartoons were ink and brush.  Bill Mauldin's famous cartoons from World War Two, for example, were done with ink and brush, not pen and ink.  Perhaps most modern cartoons are as well, I have no idea.

Anyhow,  the prime focus of this blog is to try to track changes in the 20th Century, and here's a subtle, but important one. Soldiers in the field, newspaper reporters, lawyers in court, prior to WWII, were packing around pencils, not pens.