Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 206-209. (Budapest, 2009)

KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK —COMMUNICATIONS - Strasser, Gerhard F.: Az első „töltőtolltól" a golyóstollakig - írószerszámok orvosoktól és orvosok számára

FROM THE FIRST "FOUNTAIN PEN" TO BALL POINT PENS — WRITING INSTRUMENTS FROM AND FOR MEDICAL DOCTORS GERHARD F. STRASSER /. Preliminaries^ In a conference section devoted to the History of Travel, Travel Medicine, and Traveler's Medical Kits it may be surprising at first to have a paper devoted to the history of writing instruments that were devised by medical doctors or persons close to this profession. It goes without saying that such tools were of prime importance in the field of medicine where doctors needed to expediently take extensive notes in order to establish a patient's medical history or write tamper-proof prescriptions. For centuries the feather quill was the only such writing instrument that doctors — or anyone involved in the business of writing — could use, especially when traveling overland in a stage coach or similar conveyance or in a doctor's hackney carriage. No wonder complaints about the need for a good supply of feathers, a sharp penknife to cut them into quills or about the nuisance of the constant dipping into an ink bottle can be found throughout the ages. Dante's complaint in Inferno (XXIV.6) is well known: "Ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra" — "because the pen he uses does not last long" — it describes the short life span of the quill of the poet, who at least was working at a solid writing desk. Traveling long-distance merchants, who could not use a pencil for bookkeeping, carried a cowhorn for their ink supplies; the Egyptians or Romans used a glass vial to carry a small amount of ink along. 2. First Attempts at Comhining Ink Supply and Writing Pen in the 17th Century In 953 a request by Ma'ad al'Mu'izz, the caliph of Egypt, for a pen which would not stain Iiis hands and clothes was successfully met when he was given a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib via gravity and capillary action.

1 The invention clearly never became widely known, and it took another 650 years until a proposal for an ink Container inside a quill can be found in a Geman cryptological publication that came out some 4 Paper presented in July 2009 at the Twcnty-Third International Congress of the History of Science and Technology: Ideas ans Instruments in Social Context, Budapest. 1 al-Mu'izz commissioncd the construction of the pen vvith the follovving instructions: "We vvish to construct a pen which can be used for writing without having recourse to an itik-holder and whose ink will be contained inside it. A person can fi 11 it with ink and write whatever he likes. The writer can put it in his sleeve or anywhere he wishes and it will not stain nor will any drop of ink leak out of it. The ink will flow only when therc is an intcntion to write. We are unaware of anyone prcviously ever constructing (a pen such as this)." Quoted in Bosworth, C.E.: A Mediaeval Islamic Prototype of the Fountain Pen? Journal of Semitic Studies XXVI (1981) 1. Source: WIKIPEDIA, Fountain Pen.