Pen

[14][17] The reed pen survived until papyrus was replaced as a writing surface by animal skins, vellum and parchment.

The smoother surface of skin allowed finer, smaller writing with a quill pen, derived from the flight feather.

[18] The quill pen was used in Qumran, Judea to write some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to around 100 BC.

[19] Quill pens were still widely used in the eighteenth century, and were used to write and sign the Constitution of the United States in 1787.

[24][full citation needed] The earliest historical record of a pen with a reservoir dates back to the 10th century AD.

[25] A student in Paris, Romanian Petrache Poenaru invented a fountain pen that used a quill as an ink reservoir.

[27] In 1938, László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to design new types of pens, including one with a tiny ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket.

In 1940, the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, moved to Argentina, fleeing Nazi Germany.

Collaborating with the Croatian entrepreneur Edmund Moster, he started the Penkala-Moster Company and built a pen-and-pencil factory that was one of the biggest in the world at the time.

In the 1960s, the fiber- or felt-tipped pen was invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company, Japan.

A high quality drafting pen will usually have a ceramic tip, since this wears well and does not broaden when pressure is applied while writing.