Wow, Joy, thanks for inviting me to your college homecoming.
No sweat.
My time at UPenn was the best time of my life.
You know, this isn't what I expected the University of Pennsylvania to look like.
Pennsylvania?
No, not that UPenn.
I went to UPenn, the University of the Penn.
You went to a university to study pens?
No, it's University for Pens.
Silly.
Uh, Joy, you're not a Penn.
Oh, right.
Well, okay, here it is.
I spent my junior year there through this amazing exchange program, met the most amazing pens.
Man, I can't wait to introduce you to all my pen pals.
But hey, can we pick up the pace a little bit?
The big game is about to start.
What big game?
Every year we face off against our arch rival in the annual information communication showdown.
Look, it's starting.
All right, all right, everyone.
Classmates alumni, honored guests.
We're so glad you're here because in the blink of an eye you're going to see a truly penanimal display of talent.
I've never seen the stadium this packed.
It's practically pen-demonium in here.
See down there?
That's Penny, our school mascot.
You know, I tried out to be a mascot my first semester here.
I even rented the pen costume and everything, but I just couldn't nail the back flip.
Still can't.
Wait, the school mascot is a pen?
Dressed up like a pen?
Yep.
Ooh, and here comes Teller.
Are you talking about that giant mouth?
Yep.
He's from our rival school, Talks More College.
They think talking is better than writing.
We're here to debate which is the better way of conveying information.
I say that speaking is the best.
Here's how it works.
I see something, and then I go home and tell my wife.
And she tells her sister what I told her, and then her sister tells her family and they all tell their friends and before you know it, the whole town knows exactly what happened.
Did that talking about just say you had a wife and family?
And how?
Thank you, Teller, for what I'm sure was your very best effort.
But the truth is, your way never turns out exactly right, does it?
Am I right, folks?
Once you tell a story to one person, that person never remembers it quite right.
So when they tell the next person, it's a little different and it gets more and more mixed up each time it's passed on.
Ever played a game of teller phone?
The joke is, it never works.
Ideas need to be written down to make sure that they capture the message accurately.
Yes, Penn's rule, talking stinks.
You literally talk for a living, Joy.
Shh, don't embarrass me, buddy.
Welcome to Forever Ago.
I'm Joy Dolo.
And I'm Buddy.
And today, we're at the UPenn Homecoming, where we'll be meeting Penns from throughout history.
Buddy, I got a question for you.
Do you like to write?
I don't like writing.
No.
You don't like writing?
Nope.
Why?
It's really boring, and my hand gets tired very quickly.
Okay, so you don't like physically writing with like a pen or a pencil.
What about like texting?
Yeah, I'd rather do that.
Are there other ways that you write?
The only reason I would like to write is like if I'm doing bubble letters or something.
What's bubble letters?
Basically drawing letters.
I don't really know.
Letter shaped like bubbles?
Yeah.
Like drawing?
Yeah.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Okay, so like sketchy.
I get it.
Okay.
But like, do you have like a favorite?
I guess if you don't like writing, you probably don't have a favorite kind of pen or pencil or anything, huh.
I like pens more than pencils.
You like pens more than pencils?
Yeah.
So do you draw with pens?
I draw with pencils, but when I do bubble letters, I use pens because they look a lot cooler.
I don't know why.
Yeah, can you use different colors for it and make them look gnarly?
Yeah.
What's your favorite kind of pen to draw with?
I would like using those metallic pens sometimes.
I would like using metallic pens sometimes.
And I would use red pens.
If I see one, yeah.
They look really cool.
And my favorite color is red.
Oh, that's really cool.
Yeah.
You know, I never thought this much about pens.
I mean, they're kind of boring.
And we have so many new ways of writing, like texting or typing.
Boring?
Boring?
Pens are wonderful.
Think of all the things they help us do, like write grocery lists, love letters, doodles, drawings, even those little notes that your parents sneak in your lunchbox that you pretend are embarrassing but you actually kind of love.
You're right, but that's more about the writing, right?
Not the thing that wrote the writing.
Wrong.
We wouldn't have the right writing without the right writing thing.
Right?
Sure, today you get free pens at your dentist, your dermatologist or your doggy daycare, but that wasn't always true.
Pens were once revolutionary.
They not only helped us record history, they changed who could record it.
And without the development of pens and other writing tools, we might not have had written language.
Okay, I need to know more.
School me, Joy.
You got it.
Class is in session.
It turns out the desire to record goes way back.
Even our oldest ancestors wanted to share their daily lives.
Thousands of years ago, when saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths still walked the earth, early humans would use sharp stones to scratch out pictures of their daily lives and activities on the cave walls.
I've seen some of these, like the cave of swimmers in Egypt.
Right, from the episode we did about swimming.
Yeah.
Over time, those cave drawings evolved into symbols and eventually into the first alphabet.
Today, we communicate with each other in a bunch of different ways.
Texting, social media, and of course, good old pen and paper.
But for most of history, that hasn't been the case.
Hmm, yeah.
Having the ability to write things down has helped us understand human history and how much of it we remember.
If someone wasn't able to write their story down, it would be harder for it to be remembered by someone else.
That's a great point.
Oh, wait!
Is that...
Oh, boy.
What is it?
It's just, you see that guy over there next to the cotton candy machine?
I just see his stick.
No, that's Reed.
He's so ancient.
I honestly didn't even think he was going to be able to come to homecoming.
He's really nice, but he's always telling the same stories over and over.
Joy!
Joy Dolo, is that you?
Reed, what a delightful surprise to see you.
How have you been?
What's the latest in Minneapolis?
And oh, who's this young whippersnapper?
This is my friend, Buddy.
He's tagging along at homecoming today to learn about the history of pens.
Ah, the history of pens.
Why, how lucky we are we ran into each other.
Bunny, did you know I was perhaps the very first pen?
Joy, have I ever told you the story of my birth?
Oh, maybe once or twice or a dozen different times.
It was more than 3,000 years ago before the Greeks built the Parthenon.
And before the Great Wall of China.
The pharaoh that's what the ancient Egyptians called their kings was about to make an important announcement.
Attention, palace staff.
I have a decree to make, and I want to tell everyone in my vast kingdom.
This is going to be a really long decree, so I hope you all have really good memories.
Actually, Your Fairness, I have a better idea.
You have a better idea than the decree I'm going to make?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Decrees are your department.
I have a better idea about how to spread your announcement far and wide.
And no one will forget a single word.
Hmm.
I like the sound of that.
Not a single word you say?
Okay, what's your idea?
Quickly now, I have a lot of peeled grapes to eat today.
Okay, you know those strips of papyrus that we use for mats and ropes and baskets?
Well, it turns out, if you cut them into very thin sheets, you can actually make impressions on them to record all your decrees.
But how do you make such impressions?
Okay, first we use burned wood mixed with water to make a black liquid that will stick to papyrus sheets.
And we call that ink.
Then we take one of those long reeds that grows down by the Nile River.
We hollow it out, make a tiny little slit up the middle and then sharpen the tip of that reed at the narrow end.
And finally, you dip the reed into the ink and it sucks it up inside.
Here, here, watch this.
And with that, your pharaohness, I have written down your decree.
Those were the days.
Reminds me of the time when the Roman Empire was just about to get underway.
But the important thing was Oh boy, would you look at that?
You Penn's flock of geese has escaped again.
Buddy and I better go round them up.
We'll have to hear that story another time, Reed.
Nice meeting you.
That guy can talk.
Great timing, geese.
Okay buddy, if you hold your arms out wide like this and walk behind them slowly, we can herd them back to the quad.
Ew, they're leaving little goose presents in the grass.
Almost there.
Just shoo the rest of them in here.
Nice work, buddy.
High five.
Okay, but why are they here?
I thought geese were wild.
Oh, not these geese.
UPenn keeps them for their feathers.
I bet my favorite professor could explain.
Professor DeVille.
Joy Dolo, it's been ages.
Is that a talking feather?
Hello there.
I'm Professor Jill DeVille, the quill.
Professor DeVille taught some of my favorite classes at UPenn and she knows all about a big innovation in Penn history the quill.
Oh, a feather pen.
I've heard of those.
Quite right.
Quills can be made with the feathers of any large bird, but geese are some of the most commonly used.
The quill was the must-have pen for hundreds of years, starting in the 6th century.
In fact, the word pen comes from the Latin penna, which means plume or feather.
So that's why they are geese.
Yep, we make quills from their feathers.
Quills were a big improvement over reeds because they're thinner and bendier and Buddy grab her before she blows away.
Phew.
Okay, thank you.
Don't worry.
Haha!
Happens all the time.
I once rode a gust of wind all the way to Tulsa.
Fun times.
Anyway, quills are a lot lighter than reeds, which means the writer can write much faster.
That was important because in the Middle Ages, people started making a lot more books.
Books about religion, history, medicine, and more.
This meant knowledge could be kept and shared like never before.
But printing machines didn't show up until much later.
So for hundreds of years, the only way to make a book was for a person called a scribe to write it out and copy each page by hand.
Wow, so nearly all the writing was done with quill pens for hundreds of years?
Did a quill sign the Declaration of Independence?
Yep.
And the Constitution?
Of course.
And the Emancipation Proclamation.
And probably lots of medieval birthday cards.
Ahem.
Okay, so much of what we know today about this long period of history is thanks to quill pens, like me and the scribes who painstakingly wrote from dawn until dusk every day.
And boy, was it a pain.
The quills were hard to write with.
They'd leave ink splotches or break, and you had to constantly dip them in a little pot of fresh ink.
Writing with one was a whole thing.
What can I say?
You gotta have skill to handle a quill.
But most people alive during this time couldn't read or write.
They were sharing and receiving information by word of mouth, or by having it read to them.
Uh-oh.
There's a point for that giant mouth guy.
You mean Teller?
That guy.
You know, I told him I didn't like the cafeteria food a few weeks ago in confidence, and the next morning half the campus knew.
What a big mouth.
But you know, Buddy's right.
Historians think that for most of the Middle Ages, less than one out of every five people in Western Europe could read or write.
That's a lot of stories that didn't get written down.
So we couldn't learn about them.
Very true.
But us pens, we helped change that too.
Oh, I gotta run.
I'm late for an ink gulping contest.
Oh, guess I'll just have to waft over there on a breeze.
It's the fastest way to travel.
All right buddy, there are lots more pens I want you to meet, but let's take a break for a minute and play.
It's the game where we try to put things in order from oldest to newest.
Today's items are whiteboards, rubber erasers, and Crayola crayons.
Now we have to guess which one came first, which came second and which came most recently in history.
What do you think?
I think that erasers came first.
Okay.
Because it's just rubber.
Rubber is again one of those natural resources, huh?
Yeah, and like pencil is, I think that came out a long time ago.
Yeah, yeah, they seem like they've been around for a long time.
Yeah, so I think that erasers are definitely made first.
So if rubber erasers are first, then we have whiteboards and crayons.
Which one do you think is most recent and which one do you think came right after rubber erasers?
I think that Crayola came before whiteboards.
Oh, okay, okay.
Okay, so we have erasers, Crayola crayons, and whiteboards.
So I understand rubber erasers because I think rubber has been like a part of the earth forever.
Yeah.
And so what are crayons made out of?
Uh, what is it?
Uh, I forgot.
How did I forget this?
It's like wax?
Wax?
It's made out of wax.
Good job, buddy.
Thank you.
You do get a million dollars.
I was like, I'm going to find a million bucks and I'm going to give it to you.
So it's made of, I guess that makes sense.
So we have rubber and then wax, which, you know, candles and stuff were probably around too.
And then I bet somebody just put dye in a candle and they started drawing with it.
And they're like, here, color this.
And then whiteboards must be made out of White boards.
I don't even know what that is.
And they would have to come up with ink that you can erase.
So I think that that would take a while.
Yeah, just the science of it seems like it's something that's a little more modern.
Those are great guesses.
I'm around that.
Rubber erasers, Crayola crayons, and white boards.
That's awesome.
We'll hear the answers in just a bit.
We love it when you send us ideas for this show, because it turns out there's cool history all around us.
So we're going to explore some topics picked by you, our listeners.
It's time for Did You Know?
History is everywhere, even in your favorite games and TV shows.
Did you know that most Pokémon characters have different names depending on where you live?
Pokémon, short for Pocket Monsters, was a game created by a Japanese game designer named Satoshi Tajiri in 1996.
Two years later, kids all over the world were playing with the Pocket Monsters.
A big part of getting Pokémon Ready to Go International was translating the names of the characters.
Translators had to figure out ways to take the original names from Japanese to a new language, while still describing the character.
Like Girafarig.
The name of this giraffe-like Pokémon is a palindrome, which means it's the same spelling front to back, like radar or kayak or poop.
In Japanese, his name is Kirin Riki.
Kirin is the Japanese word for giraffe, and when this name is written out in Japanese characters, it's a palindrome too.
Or Charmander.
His name is always a combination of words for burning and salamander.
In Japanese, his name is Hitokage.
In Spanish, it's Quemandra.
One notable exception, though, is Pikachu.
Pikachu's name is the same in every language.
Pikachu's name comes from the Japanese word for sparkling and the squeak mice make.
Sparkly Mouse just doesn't have the same ring to it, though.
Thanks to our listeners for sending in great suggestions.
Keep them coming.
We'll be right back.
All right, buddy.
Let's reveal which of our first things first is actually the oldest.
Drum roll, please.
Buddy, I have to tell you I might have to give you 2 million, because I think you got them all right.
You got the right order.
Round of applause.
All right.
First up, rubber erasers.
It was not until 1770 that someone figured out that a natural rubber made from plants could be used as an eraser.
Before, people used pieces of white bread.
Yum.
The story goes that an English engineer picked up a piece of rubber instead of breadcrumbs and discovered that rubber could erase pencil markings.
The name rubber came from rubbing.
Before that, the material was called gum elastic or kauchuk.
They put kauchuk on their pencils.
This kind of eraser didn't work too well.
When it got cold, it broke apart.
The solution to that problem came in 1839 when inventor Charles Goodyear invented the method of drying the rubber, vulcanization.
This process made rubber more durable and allowed for the eraser to become a household item.
It used to be bread.
What?
That's what I eat with my mouth.
We were eating rubber erasers.
Anyway, Crayola Crayons was second.
The crayons most of us are familiar with.
Crayola, launched in 1903 with eight colors red orange yellow green blue violet, brown and black.
They had your favorite color in there, buddy, red.
But using colored wax to draw is a much older technique.
It's believed Leonardo da Vinci used crayon-like pastels way back in the late 1400s, and artists began using Conte crayons something between a pastel and a modern crayon in the 1700s.
And finally, as you predicted, buddy, whiteboards.
The earliest whiteboards date back to the 1950s and 60s, but they weren't an instant hit.
These ones didn't have special erasers.
You had to use a wet rag to clean the ink, which is what we were talking about the science of actually getting it to go away.
But an inventor came up with dry erase markers in 1975, making it fast and easy to wipe a whiteboard clean.
After that, they started replacing chalkboards, since they were easy to write on and didn't create all that nasty chalk dust.
Wasn't that interesting?
You were right, too.
I wonder how much times I've been right in a row.
You've been right a lot.
Not just in this, but just in life in general.
You've been right a lot.
We're back with Forever Ago.
I'm Joy.
And I'm Buddy.
So before the break, we were talking about the feather quill.
It was used for over a thousand years.
But things were about to change.
The Industrial Revolution was coming.
That's when things started to be made in the factories in the 1700s instead of by hand at home, and it meant we could make more stuff way cheaper and way faster.
By this time, machines were being used to make all kinds of things, including really big, really thin sheets of metal.
At first these were used to build parts of steam engines for trains, but then people figured out the metal sheets could also be used for.
You guessed it, pens.
Instead of going through the long process of cutting feather quills with a knife, they could quickly make tons of pens with stamped metal tips.
Right.
And metal tip pens were a big deal.
They didn't break as easily.
They could be much more precise.
And overall, they made life easier.
Like, think about a classroom.
Before these metal-tipped pens were invented, a teacher would have to cut quills from feathers for every student in the room.
The feathers bent and got dull quickly, so the teacher had to fix them constantly, on top of everything else they were dealing with.
Students, line up at the front of the classroom and bring your quills.
Josephine, is that a hamster in your pocket?
I told you, no hamsters in class.
No, no chameleons either.
Oh, they do not pay me enough to do this.
But with these new pens, suddenly things got a lot easier.
The pens didn't need as much upkeep and they were much cheaper.
So you could just pass out pens to everybody.
You get a pen and you get a pen.
But even then, writing still had to be done at a desk.
Because you still needed to dip your pen in a jar of ink over and over again for each line you wrote out.
So you couldn't just whip out a pen and notebook from your pocket anytime you had an idea or wanted to send a postcard from the top of a mountain or draw a picture of a really cool spider you saw on a walk.
Drawing spiders is very important.
Very.
But still, thanks to these metal-tipped pens, more people were writing and more stories were being written down and saved.
So how did we get from there to... Cowabunga!
Nice one, bro.
Hey, take this.
Oh, yeah.
Well, what are those pens doing in that fountain?
Those are the brothers of Phi Epsilon Nu.
That's a fraternity with some real big pen on campus energy.
What's up, bros?
Hey, Jammin' Joy Dolo.
You thirsty?
Check this out.
What are they doing?
They're fountain pens.
They're filling up their ink reservoirs.
And these were the next big thing in pen technology after those metal-tipped ones.
In a fountain pen, the ink is stored inside the pen itself.
This means you don't have to constantly be dipping it.
When it's empty, you just refill it.
That's right.
We made it possible to write on the go.
No more desk, no more jar of dipping ink.
Pretty impressive, huh?
The key was designing an ink reservoir that allowed ink to flow out slowly so it wouldn't spill out all over the page and make a huge mess.
Uh, most of the time.
I remember that one night we were cramming in the library and you got a little too excited when you had a breakthrough on your chemistry assignment.
Just ink everywhere.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing me with another pen.
Joy, you're gonna ruin my crud with these guys.
Oops, sorry.
Anyway, fountain pens were a huge improvement over even the metal-tipped ones.
Right on.
When we hit the market around the early 1900s, you could snag one of us for about $2.50.
Today, that will be about $75, buckaroos.
That's a lot of money for something that would still sometimes leak all over your homework.
Hey, man, I don't know who you've been talking to, but I've never leaked in my life.
Guys, no, I haven't, really.
And, yeah, we were a little pricey, but we were meant to be kept, treasured, cherished.
We were keepsakes.
Family heirlooms, even.
Yeah, but no one really uses fountain pens anymore.
Who is that?
I think... Wait, is that a pen in your backpack?
Oh, yeah.
You know, just in case you want to play tic-tac-toe later.
Wait, you can talk?
Of course I can talk.
Oh boy, oh boy.
I've always wanted to attend a university.
And now here I am at UPenn.
Oh no, not a ballpoint.
Fountain pens had barely been around when the ballpoint showed up.
Look, it's not my fault your forefathers were such a leaky mess.
Yes, I showed up in the mid-1900s, a time full of life-changing innovations like passenger jets, credit cards, hula hoops and I was a big deal too.
You see, instead of an open tip or a nib, like all the pens of the past had, I have a tiny stainless steel ball at the end of my ink reservoir.
Oh yeah, what's it for?
Well, when you're not using me, the ball sits tight against the end of the ink reservoir, kind of like a cork stopper in a bottle.
It keeps the ink from leaking out or any air from getting in.
And when you press the pen to paper, gravity and force smear the steel ball with ink that makes it onto the page.
Wow.
But if you guys were such a huge improvement over fountain pens, why are ballpoint pens so cheap today?
Well, originally, ballpoint pens were much more expensive.
When the first batch launched in New York City in 1945, they cost $12.50.
Whoa, that would be like...
More than $200 today.
That's a pricey pen.
Yeah, that's right.
At first, we were marketed as extra, extra fancy pens.
But that all changed thanks to a Frenchman named Marcel Bic.
In the States, we pronounce his company Bic.
Oh, big pens.
Exactly.
He designed a much cheaper plastic version.
He realized that people didn't need glitz and glamour when it came to pens.
Just an affordable way to write things down.
He was a visionary.
Wow, so suddenly even more people were able to share their ideas by writing with pens.
I bet people loved this invention.
Well, sure, lots of people did, but not everyone was on board.
A statement published in the journal Federal Teachers claimed 'Ballpoint pens will be the ruin of education in our country?
Students use these devices, then throw them away.
The values of thrift and frugality are being discarded.
Businesses and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries.'"
Ooh, harsh.
But plastic waste is a pretty big issue.
If we only use pens for a short time, we throw them away.
And then they end up in landfills or oceans or other places where we don't want pens to be.
On the other hand, because of ballpoints, way more people are able to use pens to jot down funny jokes, sign yearbooks, doodle in the margins of their school assignments, kind of like your bubbles.
Yeah, we do it all.
Could have been me.
Should have been me.
Hey, hey, we're all on the same team, guys.
Team Pens, right?
Let's all sing the You Pen Fight song to fix the vibe.
And then we'll walk over together to get seats for the Pen Capella concert.
Oh, man.
Do we have to?
We're climbing every mountain.
Whether ballpoint, quill, or fountain.
We're full of ink.
We don't stink.
You Pen.
All right.
That's better.
Yeah.
Let's get going.
You know, I didn't think much of pens when we got here, Joy.
Shh, don't say that around here.
I mean, I didn't think about them.
I took them for granted because they're just kind of everywhere.
And they're pretty cool when you think about it.
They help people write down and remember so much information.
Right, from ancient texts to handwritten books to diaries and notes and so much more.
Yeah, the better the pen technology got, the easier it became for people to write down their own thoughts and experiences.
Ooh, the concert is about to start.
I love the note takers.
Excuse me, are you Joy Dolo, the host of Forever Ago?
Oh, hi.
I am.
Can I have your autograph?
Oh, I don't have anything to write with.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Oh, my God.
This episode was written by Nico Gonzalez-Whistler and Beth Perlman.
Our editors are Sandin Totten and Shayla Farzan.
We had help from Molly Bloom, Rosie Dupont, Ruby Guthrie, and Anna Wagle.
Sound design by Rachel Breeze.
Theme music by Mark Sanchez.
Beth Perlman is our executive producer.
We had engineering help from Jess Berg.
Special thanks to Amanda Jackson, Vernon Neal, and Lulu.
The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavadi, Joanne Griffith, and Alex Schaffert.
If you have an idea for a topic that we should explore on Forever Go, send it to us at forevergoorg slash contact.
It might be featured on our Did You Know segment.
We'll be back next week with an episode all about the first women who wanted to be astronauts.
Thanks for listening.
