The quill
For well over a thousand years in Europe, the standard writing tool was a quill: a large flight feather, most commonly from a goose, with the tip cut into a writing point. Evidence for quill use in Europe is usually dated to the early medieval period, and earlier scribes used reed pens, which were common in the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East. The two tools overlapped for a time.
A quill was prepared with a sharp knife, the origin of the term penknife. The maker cleaned the feather, hardened the shaft, often with heat or by soaking, and then cut a slanted tip with a narrow slit up the middle. The slit let ink flow by capillary action down toward the point and allowed the tip to flex under pressure. Feathers from the left wing were sometimes preferred because of the way they curved away from a right-handed writer’s hand, though practice varied.
Strengths and frustrations
A good quill gave a flexible, responsive line that suited both formal hands and quick writing. It was cheap, and a skilled writer could recut one in moments. But the tool had drawbacks:
- The point wore down and needed frequent recutting.
- Quills varied from feather to feather, so results were inconsistent.
- The writer had to dip into an inkwell every few words.
- Fresh ink had to be dried, so sand or blotting powder was commonly used on a finished page.
Offices that wrote all day, such as government departments and merchants’ counting houses, therefore spent a lot of time on pen maintenance. As the volume of writing grew, the problem became more noticeable.
Early metal pens
People experimented with metal pens for centuries, including pens made of copper alloys or silver. They tended to be stiff, scratchy or quick to corrode. A tool that held a fine point and also flexed like a quill was hard to achieve with the available metals and methods. Steel nibs were attempted in the late eighteenth century, and accounts name makers in England, including a Birmingham maker said to have produced some for a well-known scientist, though these stories are hard to verify. Patents in the early nineteenth century, such as ones associated with the engineer Bryan Donkin, show that the idea was being pursued seriously.
Mass production in Birmingham
The real change came in the 1820s and 1830s, when manufacturers found they could make nibs in large numbers from thin steel sheet. Birmingham, already a center of metalworking, became the leading hub. John Mitchell, Joseph Gillott and Josiah Mason are among the best-known names associated with the trade, and their companies were reportedly turning out pens in vast quantities. Exact output figures from the period vary by source, so it is safer to say simply that production reached industrial scale.
The process depended on tools that were already common in metal factories. Steel strip, produced in rolling mills, was cut into blanks. Each blank was pierced, shaped into a curve, hardened, tempered and given a slit. Workers using presses and dies could make nibs rapidly. Because the dies were consistent, nibs had a more uniform character from one to the next, something quills could never offer. Much of this relied on advances in steel making and wire drawing and sheet rolling, and on the broader growth of the factory system.
Dip pens in daily life
A steel nib sits in a holder, usually wood, and is dipped into an inkwell. It holds a small amount of ink in the slit and the curve under the point, enough for a few words. Nibs came in many shapes: stiff ones for ledgers, flexible ones for ornamental scripts, broad ones for lettering. Schools commonly issued dip pens, and their use helped define the habits and look of nineteenth-century handwriting. Copperplate-style scripts and, in the United States, styles such as Spencerian were taught with them.
Cheap nibs and cheap paper together contributed to the spread of literacy and everyday correspondence, alongside the growth of postal services.
Limitations and what came next
Steel nibs had their own weaknesses. They could corrode with acidic inks such as iron gall ink, they sometimes scratched rough paper, and they still needed constant dipping. The inkwell was a source of spills, which is one reason people kept looking for a pen that carried its own ink. That search led to the fountain pen, which began taking over from dip pens in the later nineteenth century. Dip pens remain in use today among artists, calligraphers and cartoonists, who value their line variation.