The genus of this idea was the Fisher Space Pen. I discovered them years ago, in the early 1980s, and I liked them.
The beauty of Fisher pens was not just that they wrote upside down, which was the main feature mentioned when they were the unnamed subject of two 1991 Seinfeld episodes. It's that their cartridges are so durable. Look through an old drawer and find a pen that's been sitting around for four years or so and try to write with it. I bet it won't. You'll see see ink in the tube, sure, but it'll be dried up and it won't flow. If it were a Fisher cartridge, however, it will write after five years and even after a hundred years from when it was produced.
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| Four pens cold day. Which ones will write? |
Imagine that.
Someone could find that pen eighty years from now, lost among papers filled with meaningless scribbles, pick it up, do a few swirls on a blank piece of paper, and it will leave its trail of ink.
Will anyone write with a pen in 2098? Probably not. Even artists will have moved on, excepting an eccentric few. But think about what a powerful thing it is, being able to put your thoughts down in words, on a surface that takes ink, and all you need is a pen, the surface, and any light source, moonlight, even. Those words will remain for others to read or for you to edit, refine, change. And even if you do nothing with them, even if you just throw the paper or whatever you wrote on away, just translating your thoughts into written prose has helped you think of the ideas you've expressed on a deeper level than before, in a different way than when using a keyboard. Doing it made you refine your ideas.
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If you research Fisher pens you may find something about how the American space program spent millions of dollars to develop a pen that would write in zero gravity while the Russians just used a pencil. Search a little more and you'll find out that it's not true, about the funding. Besides, who got to the Moon first?
