Just the Facts
We take them for granted. We abuse them, we lose them, forget them, chew on the ends when we are nervous, snap them, tap them, toss them around and let them run out of ink. They have been around since the days of the pharaohs, documenting our lives and our history with nary a thank-you. The importance of the writing instrument is so elementary that we forget that without them, history would be lost. There would be no buried scrolls, no signed declarations and no diary from a young girl in hiding. As historian C.E. Bosworth noted in his article "A Mediaeval Islamic Prototype of the Fountain Pen?," in the year 953, Ma'ad al-Mu'izz, the caliph of Egypt, demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes, and was provided with a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib via gravity and capillary action. With such a history, it is safe to say, wheel be damned—writing instruments and their accessories may not be the first, but they may very well be among the most important inventions in human history.