Background
The paper clip is a nearly ubiquitous device, used worldwide to temporally hold papers together. The technology for manufacturing paper clips evolved in the early years of the twentieth century, and has remained virtually unchanged since the 1930s. Paper clips come in several forms, ...

Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite Valley on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown person. Shortly after this the first pencils were made in the same area.

The breakthrough in pencil technolog...

Background
A paintbrush is a handheld tool used to apply paint or sealers to paintable surfaces. The brush picks up paint with filament, includes a ferrule that is a metal band that holds the filament and handle together and gives the brush strength, a spacer plug within the ferrule which helps...

Background
A coiled piece of steel wire, sharpened at one end with a catch plate at the other, the modern safety pin is a device that can be traced back to New York City in about 1825. An indebted inventor named Walter Hunt sought a way to repay a $15 debt. He designed a "safe pin&quo...

The key to a ballpoint pen is, of course, the ball. This ball acts as a buffer between the material you're writing on and the quick-drying ink inside the pen. The ball rotates freely and rolls out the ink as it is continuously fed from the ink reservoir (usually a narrow plastic tube filled with...

A fountain pen is a pen that contains a reservoir of water-based liquid ink. The ink is fed to the nib through a "feed" via a combination of gravity and capillary action. Filling the fountain pen reservoir with ink involves replacing a disposable ink cartridge, filling the pen with an eyed...

A pen is a tool used for writing or drawing with a colored fluid, such as ink. A ballpoint pen is a pen that uses a small rotating ball made of brass, steel or tungsten carbide to disperse ink as you write. It is very different than its pen predecessors -- the reed pen, quill pen, metal nib pen, and...

While a student in Paris, the Romanian inventor Petrache Poenaru invented the world's first fountain pen, an invention for which the French Government issued a patent on May 25, 1827. Lewis Edson Waterman, a New York insurance broker invented the capillary feed fountain pen in 1884 producing a m...