Alos Blog

I was talking yesterday about logo pens and i think a little history of them doesn’t hurt.So..

The history of pens goes back to ancient Egypt, 3000 BC., when scribes used thin reed brushes or reed pens to write on papyrus scrolls.

They used a form of writing with images. By 1300 BC, The Romans developed a form of writing on a thin sheet of wax or wooden tablet. They used a metal stylus. The advantage of this kind of writing was that when they no longer needed the writing, they rubbed it out with the flat end of stylus. In the same period, In Asia, scribes used a bronze stylus.

In the Dark Ages the Anglo-Saxons used tablets filled with wax for notes and for planning the layout of books. They were writing on parchment as well. The “pen” they were using for the waxed tablets were metal or bone styluses. This kind of stylus had a pointed end and a flat end for rubbing out the words.

Having trouble obtaining reeds after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Europeans found that writing on parchment with a quill pen altered the style of their writing.  They used capital letters all the time, but later they developed faster styles with small letters. There is a specific reference to quills in the writings of St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century and we can say that quill pens were the writing instrument from 600 to 1800 AD.
The modern history of pens begins with the first years of the 1800s when there was a mass production of steel pens. The fountain pen was invented by the Romanian student Petrache Poenaru in 1827. Since then there was a steadily accelerating stream of fountain pen patents and pens in production.