BECAUSE YOU'RE MINE, I WALK THE LINE [364]

Most of what I write will start as half-thoughts recorded on a scrap of paper, or even a couple of words scrawled on my right hand. This is borne from a belief, made many years ago, that I had forgotten more good ideas than I had written down, so therefore all ideas must be caught, with a paper and pen – the finished work can then be typed up later.

To that end, when I write – when I am actually in the headspace of writing – I use a felt-tip pen, specifically the Paper Mate Flair, introduced in 1966. Their current advertising makes big mention of fun and expression, selling in a range of bold and expressive colours of ink that won’t smear or bleed through the page. I don’t really doodle or draw, or write bullet journals, so the appeal is purely functional: I avoid the mess I always end in when using a fountain pen, and I avoid the extra force required to write with a ballpoint pen. Instead, it is just me, and essentially a very stiff brush soaked in ink, and I love how that looks on the page.

There is no accounting for how people wind up with what they need to work. Pinned up at my workspace is a copy of David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics to “Fashion”, because it showed the process where he attempted to rewrite the end of the line “we are the goon squad and we’re coming to town, beep beep”, proving that sometimes the first idea you have is the best one. Like other Bowie lyrics I have seen, these were written with a felt-tip pen, red on this occasion, on squared paper. I did wonder if he also used the Flair pen, and the recent biopic “Moonage Daydream” confirmed it for me in a photograph of Bowie writing, the distinctive Flair shape blown up to fifteen feet long on a cinema screen. It was a happy coincidence for me.

With felt-tip pens most often found in packs for children, and adults, to colour between the lines, I forgot that felt-tip pens became popular enough for Parker, maker of higher-end fountain pens, made a felt-tip version of their Big Red pen in 1970, itself a copy of the Duofold pen that dated back to the 1930s, and oddly marketed as “a glorious handful of solid pleasure”, so faithful to the old design that you have to unscrew the lid, rather than just take it off. Withdrawn in 1981, Parker never made another felt-tip pen, keeping to ballpoint and fountain pens, but like Paper Mate, they are part of Newell Brands, formerly the delightfully-named Newell Rubbermaid, so there is still time to share some ideas around.

NEVER SPEND YOUR GUITAR OR YOUR PEN [70]

It is hard to confirm which single product has been manufactured the most in human history, but the ubiquitous Bic Cristal pen, with over ONE HUNDRED BILLION made since 1950, but be up there. After that, we may then be looking at food and drink items, and components of bigger pieces, like bolts, nuts and screws.

Like television, the ballpoint pen is the culmination of the work of many people. The wonderfully-named John J. Loud first patented such a pen in 1888, but that patent expired through lack of interest. However, the Hungarian inventor László Bíró. with his chemist brother György, are credited with inventing the “biro” because they overcame problems others found with keeping the writing ball in place. Instead of just trying to fix it in position, they coupled it with the viscosity of the ink – with the right consistency, the ink can continue to flow without drying around the ball, and without leaking. The Biros’ invention, and the Second World War, took them to Argentina in 1941, where the first “Birome” pens were made in 1943. 

However, of all the companies to make ballpoint pens under licence from the Biros, only one was successful enough to buy the patent from them, and that was Société Bic, based in the town of Chichy, just outside of Paris. Already makers of parts for writing instruments, and well before they started making disposable lighters and razors, the Bic Cristal pen, originally known as the “atomic” pen, appeared as deceptively simple as the original 1948 Citroën 2CV, while using the same thorough, forward thinking in its design.

Firstly, the hexagonal barrel of the pen makes it as easy to grip as a pencil. Making both the barrel and inkwell from see-through plastic made it cheap, while providing a rarely-seen, for the time, guide to how much ink is left. The hole found half-way down the barrel ensures the air pressure inside the barrel remains the same as the outside, while the stainless-steel writing ball, held within a tip made from a brass / nickel compound, was milled to a diameter of one millimetre, with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimetre. This formula has only changed a couple of times – as of 1961, the writing ball was made of a harder-wearing tungsten carbide, used in Parker’s Jotter pens since 1954, and the top of the cap was cut off in 1991, in case anyone chewing the end of their pen accidentally swallowed it.

The success of the Cristal was sealed by the time it went on sale in the United States in 1959, with Bic having bought the Waterman pen company the year before. Bic were able to offer a pen for 29 cents, when Parker were offering their Jotter for two dollars - Jotter refills costed more than an entire Cristal. It was Bic that introduced the idea that pens could be disposable, with ends broken off, or chewed out of all recognition, or used to clean out people’s ears, or just thrown away. The joke that no Bic pen has ever been “finished” was used in a 2015 promotion, with Bic giving £10 to customers that could send an (untampered) empty pen. Mind you, no-one dares speak of the tone-deaf “Bic For Her” much now, but I can’t say anything that wasn’t said better by Bridget Christie.

The Bic Cristal pen became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, and of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006, preserving it for ever more… but you can find them everywhere…