A Slightly Accurate History of Writing Tools by Nancy Eady

On Saturday, July 27, Kait Carson discussed the tools she used for writing, which led me to look at the history of writing tools. With apologies to the true historians in our group, here is a loose history of writing implements.

The first writing was recorded on cave walls, monuments and stone. Imagine the genius of those earliest writers who were ordered to record information in a permanent, portable medium. The alphabet, papyrus, reed pen and ink had to be invented.

Ancient Egyptians, required by ancient law to invent the first of everything unless the Chinese called dibs, rose to the challenge with papyrus and reed pens. The alphabet took longer.

According to legend, a well-traveled Phoenician captain-merchant, named Ahumm (“brother of the sea”) came home from a hard day of translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Hebrew, Linear Script A & B, Induscript, Etruscan, Cretan hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. When he came home, his wife asked him to translate a prescription she had received from a Sumerian physician in the area (illegible signatures and handwriting part of medicine even then).  Ahumm threw up his hands in disgust, decided there had to be a better way, and promptly invented the alphabet, including, for the first time, written vowels. Vowels were the most startling innovation of the new alphabet, the excellency of which is demonstrated by comparing: “Jk rn bhnd th cws” with “Jack ran behind the cows.”   (Poets, especially, were grateful. The word “cows” is much easier to rhyme then “cws.”)  The alphabet arrived just in time for the invention of ancient literature.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were first composed and perfected orally and performed that way for at least 400 years. That changed when Scriptogoras, a wandering bard, suffered a crippling attack of laryngitis, ending a promising career. Since neither unemployment benefits nor Social Security Disability existed, Scripto, as his friends called him, combined the new writing inventions with the new alphabet to produce written copies of both the Iliad and Odyssey, a wildly popular innovation.

Writers used reed pens and papyrus for over 1000 years, but around 600 A.D., a local writer’s group in Spain (also known as “a monastery”) looked at the calendar and noticed that “The Dark Ages” began seventeen days earlier. Looking up “The Rules” for “The Dark Ages,” they were dismayed to learn that rule number twelve mandated that imports from Rome and other distant places would no longer arrive regularly.  They almost despaired, since neither hard reeds nor the papyrus plant were found locally. Since, like all writers, they could not stop writing, they looked for alternatives. Parchment was already available, although not as popular as papyrus, but no one knows which adventurous person first picked up a feather, dumped the end in ink and started scribbling away. Current scholarship suggests that the quill person was descended from the braver soul who watched a bird lay an egg and proclaimed, “I’ll eat that!”

The quill pen remained popular until the mid-1800’s, an unmatched run of 1200+ years. However, its fellow medium, parchment, declined rapidly in popularity once China exercised their “first invention” option for paper - which explains why the Egyptians settled for papyrus - and later allowed the papermaking process to reach the Middle East. “Given” to the Islamic world by Chinese prisoners - the description of the donors calls into question the voluntary nature of the gift - the paper-making process jumped to southern Spain, controlled by the Islamic Moors. It took 120 years for someone in northern Spain to realize the South had a good thing going, but from there, papermaking spread through Europe.

In the mid-1850’s, the quill lost its preeminence. Fierce debates exist between scholars about the reasons for the quill’s declining popularity after 1200 years—did the increase in literacy outstrip the supply of big feathers? Did the Birds Union finally put their feet down, their wings up and flee lest their members become completely naked?  Did a writer (or writer’s spouse) say, “You know, writing this way is really, really messy; let’s find a better way?”

 

Whatever the reason, quill pens gave way to steel nib pens. Nib pens, like quills, required the author to dip the pen into the ink bottle every five words, which explains the unpopularity of “stream of consciousness” styles. Then, in 1850, Lewis Edson Waterman lost a major insurance sale because of a leaky pen and decided to invent the fountain pen. History does not record how successful in insurance Mr. Waterman was, but as a pen dude, he rocked.  The fountain pen sparked even more innovation, a/k/a the ballpoint pen.

The final stage of the mechanization of the writing process began with the invention of the typewriter. The first commercially successful typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard was produced in 1873. Manual typewriters were heavy and loud, but oh so fun to use. In my family, we have one manual typewriter that has been used by five generations!  Granted the last two generations, myself and my daughter, mainly played with it rather than type anything serious; we still touched keys that made metal rods strike a ribbon to make an imprint of a letter on paper. In the 1980s, computers changed everything, which brings us back to Kait and Scrivener…

The Fifth Generation