For thousands of years, humans have been leaving their mark. Some of the drawings of people and animals in caves are at least 25,000 years old. However, humans have been recording history with pens for a much shorter time. .The development of pen-making technology over more than two thousand years is the best embodiment of human creative thinking.
2000 BC: The Chinese used brushes made of mouse hair to write. The ink was made of soot, lamp oil and Made from a mixture of gels.
1200 BC: The Egyptians extracted natural dyes and colors from berries, plants and minerals to make black water. The "pen" was a thin reed. 600 years later, Egypt Man invented papyrus.
400 AD: Many civilized societies invented a more stable ink. It was made from a mixture of iron salts, oak galls, and gum arabic. This basic recipe uses Centuries.
700 AD: The Romans invented the quill (quill pen), which used feathers from the wings of a large bird. The quill became the main (Western) pen for the next 1,000 years. A writing instrument.
1548: Spanish calligrapher Juan de Iciar first mentions a bronze pen in his calligraphy manual.
1700: Nicholas Bee Ong (a musical instrument maker in the Louis XIV era of France) was the first to leave drawings for fountain pens. Five of his pens have been handed down.
1803: British engineer Brian Donkin won the first Patent for steel pen nib.
1809: Peregrine Williamson obtained the first patent for pen making in the United States, a fountain pen with ink in the barrel. However, His design had many flaws.
1830: British steelworkers William Joseph Gilot, William Mitchell and James Stephen Perry invented a method for mass-producing steel pen nibs. Due to In the following 20 years, the quality of steel improved, and fewer and fewer people used quill pens.
1884: Lewis Edson Waterman, an insurance salesman in New York, lost his life when his pen broke. An important customer later invented the first practical fountain pen.
1888: John Lauder of Weymouth, Massachusetts, USA obtained the patent for the first ballpoint pen, but did not wait until the patent expired. , it has never been mass-produced.
In the first decade of the 20th century: 4 fountain pen manufacturers dominated the market, they were Parker, Sheaffer, Weill-Yongfeng and Liveman.< /p>
1912: Sheaffer Pen Company added a rod water-absorbing device to the fountain pen barrel. Before that, people used droppers to add ink to fountain pens.
1935 Year: Liveman introduced the ink bag, which was a small glass tube with a cork.
1938: Hungarian journalist Ladislow Biro and his brother Georg invented the first A practical ballpoint pen. It uses printing ink that dries quickly. The British government later allowed them to make ballpoint pens for British Air Force pilots. Ballpoint pens will not leak oil at high altitudes, while fountain pens will leak ink.
1945: Chicago businessman Milton Reynolds redesigned Biro's invention and introduced it to the United States. At that time, Biro's invention was not patented in the United States. Yongfeng Company, which owned the patent for Biro's invention, quickly Their products were also introduced to the market. The new fountain pen became a sensation and sold very well.
1950: French Baron Marcel Bish established Bic. His company was good at mass-producing ballpoint pens. (Today, BAK is the world's largest pen company, selling 21 million pens a day, 7.6 billion a year.)
1951: After the initial enthusiasm, the public discovers the high price of ballpoint pens , and unreliable. Ballpoint pen sales plummeted. Fountain pens made a comeback.
1954: Parker Pen Company introduces the "Jotter" ballpoint pen. This new, more reliable ballpoint pen lasted longer than its most popular counterpart 5 times longer. Sales of ballpoint pens rebounded again.
1962: Horie Oyosaki of Tokyo Stationery Company became famous for inventing the felt-tip pen.
1966: Fisher Invented the space pen for NASA. The ink bag of this pen has been pressurized and can write in a state of weightlessness.
1979: Gillette launched a new pen that wrote The words can be wiped off within 10 hours. The secret is to use rubber glue to make them
Ink.
1984: Japan's Sakura Company launched a gel-ink pen, which was an intermediate product between ballpoint pens and markers, using gel-ink.
1996: The American Pentel Company launched "Milkys" gel ink pens, which were very popular among American children.