From Quills to Clicks
We've come a long way from scribes using little brushes made of camel hair.
During an excavation in London, archaeologists discovered hundreds of writing tablets from the earliest years of Roman rule in the first century. One of them depicts letters that may have come from a school lesson in learning the alphabet. There is nothing new under the sun – including homework!
Writing is a precious inheritance, bequeathed to us by our forebears. After all, we would never have known that Thomas Cromwell begged: “Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!” (1540), or that John Wesley prayed: “Lord, let me not live to be useless,” (1790) if their words had not been written down. We would not have heard that: “While we are postponing, life speeds by,” (Seneca, (AD60) or realize that the question is, “To be or not to be”.
After all, we would never have known that Thomas Cromwell begged: “Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!” (1540), or that John Wesley prayed: “Lord, let me not live to be useless,” (1790) if their words had not been written down.
From ancient epics to a first century invitation to a birthday party, to the Magna Carta and beyond, the written word is the means by which we learn what has happened before we were born. For example, a Roman soldier from Gaul, freezing in second century Britain, wrote home for socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants. The weather hasn’t changed much since then!
But to write, you need to have something to write with, something to make the marks that someone else can read.
Reeds
The earliest writing we know of is found in Mesopotamia and dates from around 3000BC. The scribes used the end of a stiff reed to press marks into the surface of wet clay. This left triangular marks and straight lines, a style known today as cuneiform. The clay was left to dry and, unless it was baked in a kiln, it could be soaked in water and used again.
The Ancient Egyptians had an abundance of reeds in the Nile and they added to the effectiveness of the implement by cutting it to a fine point, making a slit in it and using a pigment as ink. Egyptians also made their writing surface from reeds called papyri. This is the origin of our word ‘paper’.
Brushes 这是一个笔触
In China 3000 years ago, scribes used little brushes made of rats’ or camels’ hair. This made the beautiful calligraphy of Chinese scripts as they could make graceful curves with both thick and thin lines.
Stylus
The Romans used a pointed implement made of metal. The everyday method of communicating was on wax tablets. A wooden frame was filled with a shallow layer of wax on which the marks were made by a stylus. One end was pointed for writing and the other flattened for smoothing out the wax for reuse. Like cuneiform, writing was limited to straight lines.
Quill
Quills were the most widely used writing implements for many centuries. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from 100BC were written with quills. These were the wing feathers of various birds. The very finest were goose feathers from the left wing. The left wing was preferred because the feather curved in the best direction for the right-handed scribe.
You could, in theory, surprise an unsuspecting bird and rob it of a wing feather if you needed a pen in a hurry but this wouldn’t endear you to the recipient of your message (or the bird) as it would be blotted and nearly illegible. There was a skill in preparing quills. The feathers had to be cured and then sharpened and shaped. Unlike the popular representation of quills in historical dramas, most of the feathery filaments were usually cut off, leaving a ‘flag’ at the top. This allowed for easier writing as the tickly bit of the feather didn’t interfere with the fingers of the writer.
Scribes carried ‘pen knives’. If their quill was getting a bit ropey,they just reached for their pen knife and sharpened it.
Dipping pens
The quill was an early form of dipping pen. By the early nineteenth century, metal nibs were made which lasted much longer and could be made very cheaply. They were cut from sheet metal and had a slit in the point. The nibs were slotted onto a separate handle and could be replaced easily.
A girl with pigtails learned to keep them to the front of her shoulders to avoid the boy behind her dipping them in his inkwell!
Many older people can still recall the inkwells dropped into a hole in the corner of school desks. The pen nib was dipped into this ink and hopefully used to write on a page. Equally often the loaded pens were finger-flicked across the room causing a splat of ink on a neighbour’s page, or better still, his shirt. A girl with pigtails learned to keep them to the front of her shoulders to avoid the boy behind her dipping them in his inkwell!
Fountain pens and ball pens
A pen with its own reservoir of ink, called a fountain pen, was developed and refined from the 1870s and overlapped with the dipping pen. These can be collectors’ items now and are regarded as fine, specialist implements for those who love the smooth flow of ink.
Then in the 1930s, along came a Hungarian, Ládisló Bíró. He filled a narrow tube with ink and fitted a rolling ball to a pointed end and the ubiquitous implement we know today, the ball pen, was born.
For us, ball pens are now as plentiful as those reeds in the Nile, and probably just as hard to find when you need one!
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