[基础知识总汇]：关于书写工具简史

韦伯猫

收集了不少资料，按照单独主体，分帖子张贴在这个总贴中，方便各位查阅

韦伯猫

A Brief History of Writing Instruments

Part 1: From cave paintings to the quill pen -- how ink, paper and pens were all were invented.



Ancient writing instruments - From left to right: quills, bamboo, pen sharpeners, fountain pens, pencils, brushes.



By Mary Bellis



The history of writing instruments by which humans have recorded and
conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery lists, is the history of
civilization itself. This is how we know the story of us, by the
drawings, signs and words we have recorded.



The cave man's first inventions were the hunting club (not the auto
security device) and the handy sharpened-stone, the all-purpose
skinning and killing tool. The latter was adapted into the first
writing instrument. The cave man scratched pictures with the
sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of his cave dwelling. The cave
drawings represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops
or hunting victories.



With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their
drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences, but were
easier and faster to draw and universally recognized for meaning. The
discovery of clay made portable records possible (you can't carry a
cave wall around with you). Early merchants used clay tokens with
pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped.
These tokens date back to about 8,500 B.C. With the high volume of and
the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and
slowly lost their picture detail. They became abstract-figures
representing sounds in spoken communication. The alphabet replaced
pictographs between 1700 and 1500 B.C. in the Sinaitic world. The
current Hebrew alphabet and writing became popular around 600 B.C.
About 400 B.C. the Greek alphabet was developed. Greek was the first
script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine
and the Roman (later Latin) writings. In the beginning, all writing
systems had only uppercase letters, when the writing instruments were
refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around
600 A.D.)



The earliest means of writing that approached pen and paper as we know
them today was developed by the Greeks. They employed a writing stylus,
made of metal, bone or ivory, to place marks upon wax-coated tablets.
The tablets made in hinged pairs, closed to protect the scribe's notes.
The first examples of handwriting (purely text messages made by hand)
originated in Greece. The Grecian scholar, Cadmus invented the written
letter - text messages on paper sent from one individual to another.



Writing was advancing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging
pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian
Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised
stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine
smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The
ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became
common by the year 1200 B.C. Other cultures developed inks using the
natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants and minerals. In
early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to
each color. The invention of inks paralleled the introduction of paper.
The early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Hebrews, used papyrus and
parchment papers. One of the oldest pieces of writing on papyrus known
to us today is the Egyptian "risse Papyrus" which dates back to 2000
B.C. The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink, from
the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed
bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into a primitive form of
fountain pen. They cut one end into the form of a pen nib or point. A
writing fluid or ink filled the stem, squeezing the reed forced fluid
to the nib.



By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron-salts,
nutgalls and gum, the basic formula, which was to remain in use for
centuries. Its color when first applied to paper was a bluish-black,
rapidly turning into a darker black and then over the years fading to
the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in old documents.
Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in 105 A.D. but it only became
known about (due to Chinese secrecy) in Japan around 700 A.D. and
brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. Paper was not widely used
throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century.



The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history
(over one-thousand years) was the quill pen. Introduced around 700
A.D., the quill is a pen made from a bird feather. The strongest quills
were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five outer
left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the feathers
curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer. Goose
feathers were most common; swan feathers were of a premium grade being
scarcer and more expensive. For making fine lines, crow feathers were
the best, and then came the feathers of the eagle, owl, hawk and turkey.



Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to replace
them. There were other disadvantages associated with their use,
including a lengthy preparation time. The early European writing
parchments made from animal skins, required much scraping and cleaning.
A lead and a ruler made margins. To sharpen the quill, the writer
needed a special knife (origins of the term "pen-knife".) Beneath the
writer's high-top desk was a coal stove, used to dry the ink as fast as
possible.



Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after another
dramatic invention took place: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing
press with replaceable wooden or metal letters in 1436. Simpler kinds
of printing e.g. stamps with names, used much earlier in China, did not
find their way to Europe. During the centuries, many newer printing
technologies were developed based on Gutenberg's printing machine e.g.
offset printing.



Articles written by hand had resembled printed letters until scholars
began to change the form of writing, using capitals and small letters,
writing with more of a slant and connecting letters. Gradually writing
became more suitable to the speed the new writing instruments
permitted. The credit of inventing Italian 'running hand' or cursive
handwriting with its Roman capitals and small letters, goes to Aldus
Manutius of Venice, who departed from the old set forms in 1495 A.D. By
the end of the 16th century, the old Roman capitals and Greek
letterforms transformed into the twenty-six alphabet letters we know
today, both for upper and lower-case letters.



When writers had both better inks and paper, and handwriting had
developed into both an art form and an everyday occurrence, man's
inventive nature once again turned to improving the writing instrument,
leading to the development of the modern fountain pen.

韦伯猫

A Brief History of Writing Instruments

Part 2: The History of the Fountain Pen



Illustration: Lewis Waterman Pens



By Mary Bellis



Lewis Waterman patented the first practical fountain pen in 1884.
Writing instruments designed to carry their own supply of ink had
existed in principle for over one hundred years before Waterman's
patent. For example, the oldest known fountain pen that has survived
today was designed by a Frenchmen named M. Bion and dated 1702.
Peregrin Williamson, a Baltimore shoemaker, received the first American
patent for a pen in 1809. John Scheffer received a British patent in
1819 for his half quill, half metal pen that he attempted to mass
manufacture. John Jacob Parker patented the first self-filling fountain
pen in 1831.  However, early fountain pen models were plagued by
ink spills and other failures that left them impractical and hard to
sell.



The fountain pen's design came after a thousand years of using
quill-pens. Early inventors observed the apparent natural ink reserve
found in the hollow channel of a bird's feather and tried to produce a
similar effect, with a man-made pen that would hold more ink and not
require constant dipping into the ink well. However, a feather is not a
pen, only a natural object modified to suit man's needs. Filling a long
thin reservoir made of hard rubber with ink and sticking a metal 'nib'
at the bottom was not enough to produce a smooth writing instrument.
Lewis Waterman, an insurance salesman, was inspired to improve the
early fountain pen designs after destroying a valuable sales contract
with leaky-pen ink. Lewis Waterman's idea was to add an air hole in the
nib and three grooves inside the feed mechanism.



Lewis Waterman penA mechanism is composed of three main parts. The nib,
which has the contact with the paper. The feed or black part under the
nib controls the ink flow from the reservoir to the nib. The round
barrel that holds the nib and feed on the writing end protects the ink
reservoir internally (this is the part that you grip while writing).



All pens contain an internal reservoir for ink. The different ways that
reservoirs filled proved to be one of the most competitive areas in the
pen industry. The earliest 19th century pens used an eyedropper; by
1915, most pens had switched to having a self-filling soft and flexible
rubber sac as an ink reservoir. To refill these pens, the reservoirs
were squeezed flat by an internal plate, then the pen's nib was
inserted into a bottle of ink and the pressure on the internal plate
was released so that the ink sac would fill up drawing in a fresh
supply of ink.



Several different patents issued for the self-filling fountain pen design:



    * The Button Filler: Patented in 1905 and first
offered by the Parker Pen Co. in 1913 as an alternative to the
eyedropper method. An external button connected to the internal
pressure plate that flattened the ink sac when pressed.

    * Lever Filler: Walter Sheaffer patented the lever
filler in 1908. The W.A. Sheaffer Pen Company of Fort Madison, Iowa
introduced it in 1912. An external lever depressed the flexible ink
sac. The lever fitted flush with the barrel of the pen when it was not
in use. The lever filler became the winning design for the next forty
years, the button filler coming in second.

    * Click Filler: First called the crescent filler,
Roy Conklin of Toledo commercially produced the first one. A later
design by Parker Pen Co. used the name click filler. When two
protruding tabs on the outside of the pen pressed, the ink sac
deflated. The tabs would make a clicking sound when the sac was full.

    * Matchstick Filler: Introduced around 1910 by the
Weidlich Company. A small rod mounted on the pen or a common matchstick
depressed the internal pressure plate through a hole in the side of the
barrel.

    * Coin Filler: Developed by Lewis Waterman in an
attempt to compete with the winning lever filler patent belonging to
Sheaffer. A slot in the barrel of the pen enabled a coin to deflate the
internal pressure plate, a similar idea to the matchstick filler.



There are nine standard nib-sizes, with three different nib-tip cuts:
straight, oblique and italic. The early inks caused steel nibs to
quickly corrode and gold nibs held up to the corrosion. Iridium used on
the very tip of the nib replaced gold because gold was too soft. Most
owners had their initials engraved on the clip. It took about four
months to break in a new writing instrument since the nib was designed
to flex as pressure was put on it (allowing the writer to vary the
width of the writing lines) each nib wore down accommodating to each
owner's own writing style. People did not tend to loan their fountain
pens to anyone for that reason.



The ink cartridge introduced around 1950 was a disposable, pre-filled
plastic or glass cartridges designed for clean and easy insertion. They
were an immediate success. The introduction of the ballpoints, however,
overshadowed the invention of the cartridge and dried up business for
the fountain pen industry. Fountain pens sell today as a classic
writing instrument and the original pens have become very hot
collectibles.

韦伯猫

书写工具简史part 3: 圆珠笔战役！



A Brief History of Writing Instruments

Part 3: The Battle of the Ballpoint Pens



"No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had" - Samuel Johnson.



A Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro invented the first ballpoint
pen in 1938. Biro had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper
printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He
decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. The thicker ink
would not flow from a regular pen nib and Biro had to devise a new type
of point. He did so by fitting his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its
tip. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated picking up ink
from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. This principle of
the ballpoint pen actually dates back to an 1888 patent owned by John
J. Loud for a product to mark leather. However, this patent was
commercially unexploited. Laszlo Biro first patented his pen in 1938,
and applied for a fresh patent in Argentina on June 10, 1943. (Laszlo
Biro and his brother Georg Biro emigrated to Argentina in 1940.) The
British Government bought the licensing rights to this patent for the
war effort. The British Royal Air Force needed a new type of pen, one
that would not leak at higher altitudes in fighter planes as the
fountain pen did. Their successful performance for the Air Force
brought the Biro pens into the limelight. Laszlo Biro had neglected to
get a U.S. patent for his pen and so even with the ending of World War
II, another battle was just beginning..



Historical Outline - The Battle of Ballpoint Pens



The first pen-writing instrument was the quill pen dipped into dark
paint. There became a need to lengthen the time between dips, eliminate
splatter, eliminate smearing and improve pen handling.



    * Early 1800s: The first designs for pens that could hold their own ink patented.

    * 1884: L.E. Waterman, a New York City insurance
salesman, designed the first workable fountain pen, the fountain pen
becomes the predominant writing instrument for the next sixty years.
Four fountain pen manufactures dominate the market: Parker, Sheaffer,
Waterman and Wahl-Eversharp.

    * 1938: Invention of a ballpoint pen by two
Hungarian inventors, Laszlo Biro and George Biro. The brothers both
worked on the pen and applied for patents in 1938 and 1940. The
new-formed Eterpen Company in Argentina commercialized the Biro pen.
The press hailed the success of this writing tool because it could
write for a year without refilling.

    * May 1945: Eversharp Co. teams up with
Eberhard-Faber to acquire the exclusive rights to Biro Pens of
Argentina. The pen re-branded the “Eversharp CA” which stood for
Capillary Action. Released to the press months in advance of public
sales.

    * June, 1945: Less than a month after
Eversharp/Eberhard close the deal with Eterpen, Chicago businessman,
Milton Reynolds visits Buenos Aires. While in a store, he sees the Biro
pen and recognizes the pen’s sales potential. He buys a few pens as
samples. Reynolds returns to America and starts the Reynolds
International Pen Company, ignoring Eversharp’s patent rights.

    * October 29, 1945: Reynolds copies the product in
four months and sells his product Reynold's Rocket at Gimbel’s
department store in New York City. Reynolds’ imitation beats Eversharp
to market. Reynolds’ pen is immediately successful: Priced at $12.50,
$100,000 worth sold the first day on the market.

    * December, 1945: Britain was not far behind with
the first ballpoint pens available to the public sold at Christmas by
the Miles-Martin Pen Company.



The Ballpoint Pen Becomes a Fad



Ballpoint pens guaranteed to write for two years without refilling,
claimed to be smear proof. Reynolds advertised it as the pen "to write
under water." Eversharp sued Reynolds for copying the design it had
acquired legally. The previous 1888 patent by John Loud would have
invalidated everyone's claims. However, no one knew that at the time.
Sales skyrocketed for both competitors. Nevertheless, the Reynolds’ pen
leaked, skipped and often failed to write. Eversharp’s pen did not live
up to its own advertisements. A very high volume of pen returns
occurred for both Eversharp and Reynolds. The ballpoint pen fad ended -
due to consumer unhappiness.



    * 1948: Frequent price wars, poor quality products,
and heavy advertising costs hurt each side. Sales did a nosedive. The
original asking price of $12.50 dropped to less than 50 cents per pen.

    * 1950: The French Baron called Bich, drops the h and starts BIC and starts selling pens.

    * 1951: The ballpoint pen dies a consumer death. Fountain pens are number one again. Reynolds folds.

    * January, 1954: Parker Pens introduces its first
ballpoint pen, the Jotter. The Jotter wrote five times longer than the
Eversharp or Reynolds pens. It had a variety of point sizes, a rotating
cartridge and large-capacity ink refills. Best of all, it worked.
Parker sold 3.5 million Jotters @ $2.95 to $8.75 in less then one year.



The Ballpoint Pen Battle is Won



    * 1957: Parker introduces the tungsten carbide
textured ball bearing in their ballpoint pens. Eversharp was in deep
financial trouble and  tried to switch back to selling fountain
pens. Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker Pens and Eversharp's
assets finally liquidated in the 1960’s.

    * Late 1950's: BIC ® held 70 percent of European market.

    * 1958: BIC buys 60 percent of the New York based Waterman Pens.

    * 1960: BIC owns 100 percent of Waterman Pens. BIC sells ballpoint pens in U.S. for 29 - 69 cents.



The Ballpoint Pen War is Won



BIC ® dominates the market. Parker, Sheaffer and Waterman, capture the
smaller upscale markets of fountain pens and expensive ballpoints.



    * Today: The highly popular modern version of Laszlo
Biro's pen, the BIC Crystal, has a daily world wide sales figure of
14,000,000 pieces. Biro is still the generic name used for the
ballpoint pen in most of the world. The Biro pens used by the British
Air Force in W.W.II worked. Parker black ballpoint pens will produce
more than 28,000 linear feet of writing -- more than five miles, before
running out of ink.

等一支

<>定.....................这么快 感谢</P><>不过不过 开个玩笑 我去背单词去 </P><>看原文 可以好好体会中..................................</P>

韦伯猫

铅笔和橡皮的逸事



Pencil and Eraser Trivia



Pencil and Eraser Trivia



Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite Valley
on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near
Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown person. Shortly after this
the first pencils were made in the same area.



The breakthrough in pencil technology came when French chemist Nicolas
Conte developed and patented the process used to make pencils in 1795.
He used a mixture of clay and graphite that was fired before it was put
in a wooden case. The pencils he made were cylindrical with a slot. The
square lead was glued into the slot and a thin strip of wood was used
to fill the rest of the slot. Pencils got their name from the old
English word meaning 'brush'. Conte's method of kiln firing powdered
graphite and clay allowed pencils to be made to any hardness or
softness - very important to artists and draftsmen.



Charles Marie de la Condamine, a French scientist and explorer, was the
first European to bring back the natural substance called "India"
rubber. He brought a sample to the Institute de France in Paris in
1736. South American Indian tribes used rubber to making bouncing
playing balls and as an adhesive for attaching feathers and other
objects to their bodies.



In 1770, the noted scientist Sir Joseph Priestley (discoverer of
oxygen) recorded the following, "I have seen a substance excellently
adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead
pencil." Europeans were rubbing out pencil marks with the small cubes
of rubber, the substance that Condamine had brought to Europe from
South America. They called their erasers "peaux de negres". However,
rubber was not an easy substance to work with because it went bad very
easily -- just like food, rubber would rot. English engineer, Edward
Naime is also credited with the creation of the first eraser in 1770.
Before rubber, breadcrumbs had been used to erase pencil marks. Naime
claims he accidentally picked up a piece of rubber instead of his lump
of bread and discovered the possibilities, he went on to sell the new
rubbing out devices or rubbers.



In 1839, Charles Goodyear discovered a way to cure rubber and make it a
lasting and useable material. He called his process vulcanization,
after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. In 1844, Goodyear patented his
process. With the better rubber available, erasers became quite common.



The first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil was issued in 1858
to a man from Philadelphia named Hyman Lipman. This patent was later
held to be invalid because it was merely the combination of two things,
without a new use.



At first penknives were used to sharpen pencils. They got their name
from the fact that they were first used to shape feather quills used as
early pens. In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician applied
for a patent (French patent #2444) on an invention to sharpen pencils.
However, it was not until 1847 that Therry des Estwaux first invented
the manual pencil sharpener, as we know it.



John Lee Love of Fall River, MA designed the "Love Sharpener." Love's
invention was the very simple, portable pencil sharpener that many
artists use. The pencil is put into the opening of the sharpener and
rotated by hand, and the shavings stay inside the sharpener. Love's
sharpener was patented on November 23, 1897 (U.S. Patent # 594,114).
Four years earlier, Love created and patented his first invention, the
"lasterer's Hawk." This device, which is still used today, is a flat
square piece of board made of wood or metal, upon which plaster or
mortar was placed and then spread by plasterers or masons. This was
patented on July 9, 1895.



One source claims that the Hammacher Schlemmer Company of New York
offered the world's first electric pencil sharpener designed by Raymond
Loewy, sometime in the early 1940s.



In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first pencil factory in the United States in New York City.

等一支

<>感谢 我熬不下去了 文章好极了  </P><>瞌睡了 </P><>楼主 太敬业了 注意休息会 </P><>在大陆 深夜了 共剪西窗烛 晚安[em10][em17][em37]</P>

韦伯猫

翻译不可能了，我翻译几个标题就很累了。口述翻译倒是容易一些。[em04]

long37

<DIV class=quote><B>以下是引用<I>韦伯猫</I>在2005-1-19 1:24:16的发言：</B>
翻译不可能了，我翻译几个标题就很累了。口述翻译倒是容易一些。[em04]</DIV>
<>猫,有空可以用电脑翻啊,然后改顺了就行啊.</P>

韦伯猫

那也太长了。坚决不翻。翻译大概是我比较讨厌的工作之一了，口译不怕，就怕笔译[em06]

等一支

<>对自己要求好严格 啊</P><>定.................................</P>

llxiang

给我一点时间，几天之内我就可以翻译好，到时候还请大家指教。

long37

<DIV class=quote><B>以下是引用<I>llxiang</I>在2005-1-29 14:53:14的发言：</B>
给我一点时间，几天之内我就可以翻译好，到时候还请大家指教。</DIV>
<>那就等着你的的大作了.</P>

jenhowe

翻到此帖，留个记号

王善德

期待中文的

一默

原帖由 llxiang 于 2005-1-29 14:53 发表
给我一点时间，几天之内我就可以翻译好，到时候还请大家指教。

严重期待中

ghostzz101

英文~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~看得太累 翻译 急需

我闻如是

原帖由 一默大师 于 2008-2-18 08:45 发表

严重期待中

你还期待什么啊？ 也不看看什么时候的帖子了，3年了。

jenhowe

看英文有困难的已经有人翻译过了一部分

http://www.penbbs.com/viewthread.php?tid=485

sky_r6

这个帖子多好啊，怎么那么多年都没人顶？