the story of invention

 

Written by Ali Subhan Kiani

Dec 12 2021 3 min read

The story of inventions

Once upon a time, long long ago many inventions surfaced. These invention mostly appeared as a result of research that changed the lives of people drastically.

The history of pen

Pen is a general name for a writing tool that uses liquid pigment to leave a mark on the surface. This liquid pigment is ink. History of pens starts in Ancient Egypt where scribes, trying to find replacement for styluses and writing in clay, invented reed pens.

Pens finally took on an actual shape in 3000 BC, as the ancient Egyptians used a special type of rush that was growing on the coastline. This special type of rush is known to us as "Juncos Maritimes", or sea rushes. These plants were used to develop writing on papyrus scrolls. These sea rushes were used to make thin reed bushes/reed pens. These sea rushes were very-much useful to scribes (people who write out documents), as they used reed pens to write their books.

Heavy reading

The first writing that we have evidence of is of Mesopotamian clay tablets. Word were written on this wet clay bricks using a stick and left to dry. Most of the writing was in the form of pictures

Stroke of genius

The ancient Chinese wrote their characters in ink using brushes made up of camel or rats hair. Cluster of hair were bound and tied to the end of a stick to form a brush. For fine writing, they used a few hairs glued into the end of a hollow reed.

Light as a feather

A quill - the hollow shaft of a feather was first used as a pen around 500BC. Dried and cleaned, goose, swan or turkey feather were most popular because the thick shaft held the ink and pen was easy to handle. The tip was shaved to a point with a knife and split slightly to ensure that the ink flowed smoothly.

Paper making

Ancient Egyptian wrote on papyrus, a kind of a plant. The plant stem was arranged in layers and hammered to make a sheet. The earliest fragments of paper that have been discovered come from china. Paper was made from wood pulp and rags which were soaked in water and beaten in to a pulp.

Ink it…..

Around 1300 BC, the Chinese and Egyptians developed inks from soot from the oil burned in lamps, mixed with water and plant gums. They could make different colored inks from earth pigments such as red ocher. Oil based inks were developed in the middle age for use in printing. More recent developments such as the fountain and the ballpoint were designed to get the ink on paper without needing to refill the pen constantly

A pressing point

In the first millennium BC the Egyptians wrote with reeds and rushes which they cut to form a point. A reed pen was made by cutting a thick stick from a reed plant and pointed with one end to form a nib. It was sharp enough to make a mark on paper