The fiber or "felt-tip" pen is a wondrous development in the history of writing. It allows the writer to scrawl their message to the world on almost any surface, safe in the knowledge that their pearls of wisdom will be read for the rest of time.
Primitive felt-tip pens date back to the 1940s. They were crude devices—not unlike a fountain pen in design—with a reservoir for ink, but with a piece of felt or some other porous material for the ink to slowly run through, instead of the traditional nib or stylus.
Sidney Rosenthal dramatically improved on this in design in 1953. He took a squat glass bottle of ink with a wool-felt wick and writing tip. He called this new device the "Magic Marker" due to its ability to write on any surface. It represented a significant development in the technology of felt-tip pens, which started to be used more and more.
In 1962 Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company in Japan invented the modern felt-tip pen, which had a smaller tip than previous incarnations and was therefore more suited to writing on paper. Horie's invention was the result of his desire to develop a writing brush (commonly used in Japan) that had the convenience of a pen. He created a firm narrow point by binding together and shaping acryl fibers. It was the first pen to use dye rather than ink, which meant than many different colors could be used. Gravity caused the dye to be channelled to the little fibers in the tip of the pen.
Some people predict that soon all of our writing will be done using digital media instead of paper, making pens a thing of the past. But others believe that whenever people want to express themselves in writing, the convenient felt-tip pen will still rule.
