What did the original pen look like? How did it evolve?

For thousands of years, human beings have been leaving traces. Some pictures of people and animals in caves are at least 25,000 years old. However, the time for humans to record history with pens is much shorter. The development of pen-making technology in the past two thousand years is the best embodiment of human creative thinking.

2000 BC: People in China write with a brush made of mouse hair. This ink is a mixture of soot, lamp oil and gel.

BC 1200: The Egyptians extracted natural dyes and colors from berries, plants and minerals to make black water. This pen is a thin reed. 600 years later, the Egyptians invented papyrus.

AD 400: Many civilized societies invented more stable ink. It is made of iron salt, oak bile and gum Arabic. This basic formula has been used for centuries.

AD 700: The Romans invented quill pens, using feathers from the wings of big birds. Feather pen became the main writing tool in the later 1000.

1548: Juan de Iciar, a Spanish calligrapher, mentioned bronze pens for the first time in his calligraphy manual.

1700: Nicolas Bion (a master of musical instrument making in Louis XIV's France) first left drawings for fountain pens. He has five pens handed down from generation to generation.

1803: British engineer Brian Jintang obtained the patent for the first steel nib.

1809: Peggy Williamson obtained the patent for pen making for the first time in the United States, which is a fountain pen with ink in the pen tube. However, his design has many defects.

1830: British steelworkers william joseph Gillot, william mitchell and James Stephen Perry invented the method of mass production of nib. Due to the improvement of steel quality in the next 20 years, fewer and fewer people use quill pens.

1884: Lewis Edersen wortmann, an insurance salesman in new york, invented the first practical fountain pen after losing an important customer because the pen was broken.

1888: John Lauder of weymouth, Massachusetts, USA obtained the patent for the first ballpoint pen, but it was not mass-produced until the patent expired.

In the first decade of the 20th century, four pen manufacturers dominated the market, namely Parker, Xifeili, Will Yongfeng and Liverman.

19 12: Xifeili Pen Co., Ltd. added a pull rod water absorption device to the pen tube of fountain pen. Before this, people used droppers to add ink to fountain pens.

1935: Wolman introduced the ink bag, which was a small glass tube with a cork at that time.

1938: Hungarian journalist László Bíró and his brother Georg invented the first practical ballpoint pen. It uses printing ink that can be dried quickly. The British government later allowed them to make ballpoint pens for British Air Force pilots. Ballpoint pens do not leak oil at high altitude, while fountain pens leak oil.

1945: Milton Reynolds, a Chicago businessman, redesigned Biro's invention and introduced it to the United States. Biro's invention was not patented in America at that time. Yongfeng Company, which owns the patent right of Biro's invention, soon put their products on the market. The new fountain pen caused a sensation and sold well.

1950: French baron Marcel Bisch founded BIC company. His company is good at mass production of ballpoint pens. (Today, the bicycle company is the largest pen-making company in the world, selling 2,654,380,000 pens every day and 7.6 billion pens a year. )

195 1 year: after the initial craze, the public found that ballpoint pens were expensive and unreliable. The sales of ballpoint pens dropped sharply. The pen is back.

1954: Parker Pen Company launched a "notebook" ballpoint pen. This more reliable new ballpoint pen takes five times as long as the most popular similar products. Sales of ballpoint pens have picked up again.

1962: Tomiiki Horie of Tokyo Stationery Company is famous for inventing felt-tip pens.

1966: Fisher invented the space pen for NASA. The ink bag of this pen is pressurized and can write in weightlessness.

1979: Gillette has introduced a new type of pen, which can erase words within 10 hour. The key is to use rubber glue as ink.

1984: Japan Sakura Company introduced neutral ink pen, which is an intermediate product of ballpoint pen and marker pen, and uses neutral pen.

1996: Pentel Company of the United States introduced "Milkys" neutral ink pen, which was deeply loved by American children.