Ballpoint pens? Heck yes, ballpoint pens!

I love ones like this where you just like, this sounds so dull that I want to actually pop my eyes out with it by a ballpoint pen, not listen to anything, But now it turns out to be interesting. Like Grass. Remember our episode on Grass you could forget the great debate over whether you should flood your lawn with a quarter inch of water or not? Yeah? Answer, you should not? Uh so, Chuck? Yes, to begin, I have a question for you. Have you ever seen a

ballpoint pen? They have them? That's become one of your great, long time running jokes. I don't know what you mean, Chuck. Have you ever breathed air? Ah? Yeah? I mean I was using my black Bick ballpoint pen. Yeah, I remember today. I even remember because blue pins are for dopes. You, my friend, are out of your mind. You like blue pins. Blue pen is the only way to go, my friends. And as a matter of fact, the pilot G two point seven millimeter pen ink gel pen in blue is

the only way to go. That's my favorite pen on the entire planet. Well, I will say today I'm using the standard Bick black. Uh, like the one that in elementary school you could take a part and make into a great spitball shooter. Oh yeah, that was. It was an off off label prescription for that. Yeah, it's the clear one, not the white plastic case, but the clear case or the you know clear pinbody. But h and

I do love that pen. But I know the pin that you speak of, and I do love it because I love there's nothing like a pen that just takes to the paper perfectly. Yeah, it's immagical. That's what gel ink pens do their beautiful things. And the thing I like the reason I like blue and it comes in black. If that's your thing, you know, I'm not gonna hate

on it. But if when you underline something printed out like our notes, um, and then you go back over it with highlighter, like I do, the blue really stands out. The black just kind of like blends in with the printed out words. All right, Well, here's what I used to do is and you probably remember the days when I would be looking at my highlighted text with red ink things written down because the red really popped. But then I just sort of got tired of it, and

I'm just a black ink guy. You're you're sticking and picking. I'm sticking and picking. You're picking and sticking. That's what I mean. Uh So, should we talk about writing over the years. We should, as anyone listening still if you are, we're going to continue on just in case. So let's let's start about writing over there, because this is pretty interesting, right, yeah,

tuk tuk. That's where we should start, tuk took. And we should shout out to Mary Bellis, who wrote a thought co little um brief thing called A Brief History of Writing that kind of ran down some points that will cover. But she points out the tuk Tuk. She doesn't call him tuk took, but that's really what she means. That's because I've trademarked it. Sure, um tuk Tuk started writing with basically sharpened stones by carving things on the size of cave walls. Easy PC. That was probably our

first writing in pliment. Yeah, like no ink by this point. Um as with the Greeks when they started writing, they had a little stylus made of bone or metal or something and they would mark things on wax coated tablets and it would take always. It seems like it's the Chinese who come up with the great innovations in ancient

times and still who knows. We're not allowed to read Chinese websites though, No, but they invented and really crafted Indian ink, Yes, which is pretty clever little mixture its soot um, specifically from pine smoke. Vellas says, it's pretty pretty on the nose if you ask me. And then some oil, lamp oil, and then you take a donkey and squeeze gelatine from it, which I'm wondering, like, does that mean that you have to kill the poor donkey or can you just come up and milk of gelatine?

I think the donkey loves that well, I wonder because I think gelatine is actually made from hooves. I think you're right, And usually if you start making things from hooves, the animal, the hoof used to be attached to is no longer with us. So it's a sad way to make ink. But that's how they made ink for thousands of years. Actually, yeah, there was a philosopher, Chinese philosopher name Tien Chew and his inc. Was the one that that really sort of became the go to inc for

for many, many many years. Yes, he called it chewink. We called it what chewink? Really? No, No, I'm making stuff up at this point. I can't tell he had the he had the idea. This was I think back around BC that he started mixing natural dyes and um things from berries, different kinds of plants um to make different colored ink. So ink went from just black two colored, and as a result, um they started attaching different meanings to these different colored inks. He admitted the four color pin.

But oh yeah, I remember that. Oh I forgot all about us. Didn't they go up to like eight colors too? Yeah, they got They got pretty out of hand. And the thing that stunk about those is they never wrote really well, no, they definitely didn't. There. The gimmick was more that you could write at all in different colors in the same pin. You know, they were for elementary school kids. So one of the things that um that happened as the writing implements.

And I hadn't really realized this, but as our writing implements became more and more refined, just better and better. And part of that was not just like the implement but also the types of ink way were using and how they were delivered, and then the paper whatever substance

we were putting them onto. These the original things which started out is basically drawings on cave walls, got more and more um refined, and actually it grew more and more abstract, and they became our system of alphabets, letters and at first the so from what we from what we know, the first alphabet ever created was created in ancient Greece, classical Grease, by a scholar named Cadmus. And all of the um the original written alphabets that were invented,

we're all upper case. Nothing about upper case. Everybody's just shouting to one another constantly. Right, And I didn't know this, but there's another word for upper case and lower case. It's magiscule and minuscule, or the actual technical terms for upper case and lower case. And the story goes that

the reason they're called upper case and lower case. Is that in the days of um UH type set printing, you would keep your your magiscule letters in a different drawer, usually higher up out of reach, because you didn't use them as often than you would the minuscule letters. You keep those in the lower case. And that's where the term comes from from what I understand. Very interesting. I thought so too. Maybe the fact of the podcast, I don't know, we'll have to just keep going and find out,

has nothing to do with pens. The Romans actually created a reed pen, and this makes a lot of sense. It would use stems from marsh grasses, like bamboo type of stuff, which made perfect sense because it's hollowed out already. All you do is sharpened the end of it, uh, you know, to come to a point like a little nib. Then put the ink in there, and you've got a

very rudimentary pen, which you know worked pretty well for them. Yeah, apparently these things were so tight that you had to like squeeze them to squeeze the ink out of the end, so it wouldn't just like dribble out constantly, although I'm sure it's still would. It's not a perfect system. It isn't a perfect system, and there's there's still room for improvement. Um. And that came in seven hundred CE, right about or so years go, when somebody thought to use a quill

from a bird feathered animal. Yeah, and that was a big one. It says in here that the longest period in history as far as writing implements goes, was the quill pen. Yeah, pretty amazing a thousand years. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, it was the best They basically got to the quill pen, or like until some somebody invince a ballpoint pin. This bird feather is

about the best thing going. Yeah, And I mean they used so you could use a bird feather as a quill pen for about a week before it would get gummed up and you'd have to have another one. And they actually um figured out that the bird from a or the feather from a living bird plucked in the spring provided the optimal quills. And even more than that, depending on whether you're right handed or left handed, you wanted to pluck the feather from the left or the

right wing. Yeah, Because if you're right handed and you're writing with a quill from a right wing, then that that guy's gonna be tickling your nose every time. And it may be fun for a little while, but what you really want is a feather from the left wing and that way, if you're right handed in that way, that feather swoops to the outside of your face. Yes, it would have having the wrong the wrong feather quill would have like just been another excuse not to balance

your checkbook, you know. Yeah, and these things lasted for about a week. Um, you needed a special knife to sharpen them. Uh, took a long time to to get it kind of prepared. And they were, you know, like I said, about a week old and they were done, so they were fairly disposable, but they still held down the fort until early fountain pins for over a thousand years. Yeah,

and fountain pens are their own thing. They are, um, surely you know or remember from time to time, I'm will get like a letter from somebody who's like a fountain pen enthusiast. It's like a whole thing. You remember that, Yeah, Or you get a graduation gift that's like a nice fountain pen and you're like, jeez, really, but I'm saying you and I have gotten like letters from face to like write these beautiful letters out and fountain pens. I think at least one of one person has sent us

an actual, like really good fountain pen um. And I've never caught the bug, but there there is, like there's a subculture people out there are so into fountain pens that they expressed that by writing letters to one another using fountain pens. Obviously it's really cool. I mean I have never like you've never taken to it. I'm a ballpoint man through and through, but I get it. You know, sure, it's it's cool, it's classy. You're not gonna yuck their yum.

In other words, no, And I don't have very nice penmanship anymore either, so it would just, you know, I kind of tie those things together, Like if you're writing a letter in a fountain pen, you don't write like I do because that would just be dumb. Right, I write like a serial killer in an insane asylum holding a cran with a fist. That's how I write. Uh. Should we take a break and jump over to the ball point Yeah, let's all right. So a ballpoint pen. You say that word over and over and it's you

never really stopped to think about what that means. But in the end of that little pen and it's impossible to not just sort of obsess over this after you've maybe listened to this episode or or researched it like we did. But when I was writing today, I was just constantly thinking about that little ball. You know, it haunted you. How undersung it is? Okay, I see, I thought you were just like you. You felt like it was eavesdropping on you. You could feel it like king

at the atoms in your hand or something weird like that. No, just thinking of the simple genius of this invention. It's you know, at the end of that pin is a little, small, tiny rotating ball A lot of times just steel or brass, maybe tungsten carbide. And it was revolutionary and completely different

than anything that came before it. Yeah, and and to go back to the fountain pen to kind of put a button on that, Like, Yes, fountain pens are pretty awesome, and when you master using a fountain pen um you probably do like it. But if you're just an average mom who's like, look, just give me a writing implement. I want to write something down and not getting any

jollies from this looking at it. From that perspective, the ballpoint pen is an improvement in a number of ways over the fountain pen, and specifically, one of the ways that it's an improved it is that you can use it up in an airplane much more easily. Yeah, the ink, there were problems with the ink at high altitudes and fountain pens, yeah, and just problems with the ink at

any altitude. You know, it doesn't flow super evenly. I mean if you have a really nice pin and know how to use it, but like a cheap fountain pen, it was no good. The ink is very slow to dry and smudgy. It uh would clogg a lot. And once it's kind of clogged and gummy, then either have to be really good at cleaning it or it's just junk. Yes, so um. One of the ways that the ink comes out of a fountain pen is through air, through capillary

action and air. And so since you have air in a fountain pen, that means that since ink dries in the presence of air, which is what you want when it touches the paper, it will also dry inside the pen, which is how it gets gunked up like you were talking about. But in an airplane too. When you take a fountain pen that's been down on on planet Earth for a while, that air that's in the fountain pen

gets trapped in the air. So when you take it up in an airplane in a pressurized cabin, it's still like the cabin's pressurized, but it's still much less pressure than it is at sea level, which is where the pen just was. And because of this, the higher pressure air inside the pen wants to move to where it's lower pressure. Higher pressure always moves to lower pressure, I think, unless there's some Rando exception. I'm not thinking of that

we're going to get a thousand emails about. But like high pressure stuff wants to move to low pressure stuff, So that high pressure air tries to move out of the fountain pen, and as it does, it pushes the ink out. So fountain pens tend to flood on planes, which again is not that big of a problem these days, but if this was the nineteen forties and you were a pilot for the Royal Air Force or a navigator or something, it was a big problem. Yeah, for sure,

which is one of the reasons why ball points came along. Yeah, and the the ballpoint idea had been around since the eighteen hundreds, but it never really took like, they can never figure out how to make a good working pen that actually was able to go to market. It was I didn't see that. It was it's been around since the eight hundred times that the original idea for the ballpoint pin. Yeah, but they could never fashion a pin

that really worked well. Yeah. I would think also it would really depend on the technology of the ink, for sure. I think that was a big part of it. But it would take a journalist to Hungarian journalists named Laslow b r Oh to take a tour of a newspaper facility when he was like, wait a minute, these newspapers are coming out and they're being stacked on each other right after printing, and it's not smudging around like my

my dumb old India Inc. Does. And he said, why don't we use that kind of ink put it in a pen? And not only that, why don't we take a pen that has a little time metal ball at the end that rotates. It also seals that tube so the ink doesn't come flowing out. It does double duty, double duty. And then the rotation is what draws that inc out that in a little gravitational pull and I think I might be onto something here. Yeah, and he

definitely was. And this this article hilariously says that he vowed to make a pen that used fast drying ink because at the time that was a real problem. Like the the ink that you had in a pen to keep it from drying out in the pen had to be super watery. Right, So the idea of making a pen that wasn't a fountain pen that used fast drying ink, that was it was quite a vow. I'm sure the person giving him the newspaper tours like, are you sure. Yeah, he said, I'm I just vowed it, I'm gonna do it.

So he did. He got together. Luckily I had a brother, George, who was a chemist. Yeah, that that was very helpful. Um. In June three he got that patent with a European Patent Office made bureau pens. It was the first ballpoint pen to be brought to market. And the British government you were talking about the Air Force, their Royal Air Force went crazy for it. So they just bought the rights. Okay,

So I couldn't find that anywhere else. Really, I saw that the Royal Air Force ordered thirty thousand of these, but not that they bought the rights. Well, let's say this, they either bought the rights or all but bought the rights by being their number one customer. Right. I like how you married the two facts. Yeah, so I mean they were not only did they right well at high altitudes, but they were just sturdy. And it was a pin

that you could take into battle with you. Yeah, so it wouldn't flood as they call it at high altitudes. And yeah, it was pretty a pretty durable pen um and so Bureau he patented it with his brother, George founded the the Bureau Pen Company, right, And I think that's so cute. He named it after himself, even though he and his brother did it, and he very easily. No Bureau was his last name. I'm sorry he could

have named right, that's what I thought he'd done. His last name is Bereau, Okay, so that makes way more sense. I thought he'd been like, George, thank you, but I'm naming this pen after myself. But it was it was a pretty big hit. I don't think it was a commercial success right away. Um, but that big order or the purchase by the Royal Air Force, Um, definitely helped

the Bureau company established itself almost simultaneously. Well, a year or two later, there was a guy in America named Milton Reynolds, and he said, I just found some of these bureau pens on a business trip I think in like Argentina or somewhere, and um, he said, I'm going to totally rip this off. And he did, and he founded a company, UM and created the Reynolds pen, which is basically the Bureau pen. Yeah, and these were really successful. Um.

I saw articles as ten bucks. But I found an article from the New York Times from the nineteen forties that talked about at Gimbals uh in New York, you could buy one for twelve fifty, which was super expensive. I mean twelve fifties expensive for a single pin today. Sure you know, like a point pinoa be a real jerk to pay twelve fifty for a pen these days, with this economy. But this little article said that people all but trampled one another to get ahold of these pins.

Gimbals ordered fifty thousand of them and sold thirty thousand of them in week one. Eventually there would be a lot of lawsuits, UM, back and forth about the patent. Basically, those never went anywhere because what they were essentially saying is the idea for the ball bearing, which is kind of what makes us all possible, has been around for so long that no one can really claim this to the point where like you can sue one another. That's how I could not find how Reynolds got away with it.

My um my idea was that they had just filed the patent. George in Laslow had filed the patent in Europe, and um Reynolds was doing it here in the Undy. But it was that I didn't realize that there was actually a patent battle. Yeah, and then there was a battle, like Favor came on board. I mean everybody started making pens like crazy all of a sudden. Favor then eventually sued uh Reynolds because they just sued them for a

shoddy product. Really, I didn't. I'm not sure how that quite works because it wasn't like they were a consumer. They get that off of the market. But uh, they were kind of right, I don't think. I don't know if they won that lawsuit, but a lot of these returns UH pins were returned. H these initial Reynolds pins were returned because they didn't work, but children with burns on their arms because the pen just suddenly caught fire.

But he made almost six million dollars in nineteen five dollars in the first ti months of his company, so he was set. So by the way, Chuck, I'm on the west Sig inflation calculator. Yeah, you have it app twelve dollars. I should just have it as like an app in my brain, you know. Maybe, oh, that is the first thing I'll do, and we start adding apps to our brains. But um, twelve dollars and fifty cents and would be a hundred and seventy three dollars in

sixteen cents here. Yeah, that's a little crazy for a brand new pen. If people have been living with fountain pens and they were sick of them, the idea of something that improved on that much would I could see running and droves the gimbals being like, you're you're gonna go out of business eventually, and Macy's will stick around, so tell me all your pen They also did you know it was a lot of advertising hullabaloo, Like they called them the pen of the Atomic era and sort

of all that futuristic stuff. People went wild for healthy glow. But as far as my own big pen, uh, this was a revolution because, like we said, twelve fifties, a lot of dough back then in a Frenchman named Marcel. Uh would it be beache b I c h I think it's big is bi. That's why he dropped the h is so people could pronounce it. Yeah. He developed a process for making these things really cheap per unit, and all of a sudden, you could get a pen for twenty nine thirty five to thirty five cents. Uh,

and he called it the big pen. And that really changed thing because Uh in ten ten years later he came to the United States and everyone was like, man, we've been buying all these credit expensive pens for twelve fifty Yeah, Mr Bick comes along. These aren't great early on, but they only cost you know, cents. Yeah. But the so these big pens were, I mean, they made quite a splash. And one of the ways that they did

was the lower prices. Not only offered these pens for much lower prices than the other pens, they they they created competition among all the ballpoint pen manufacturers, and all of a sudden, you could get a ballpoint pen for like ten cents when three years before you would have paid twelve fifty. And it really changed the industry. And as as it just kept going and going and manufacturing got better and better, and so did two did these

highly disposable, cheap ballpoint pens thanks to Bick. Have you ever like taken a good look at the big logo. It's freaky, man. It's like a little school kid with a ball head, right, yeah, ball point head. Yeah, And there's like a light reflecting off of the sphere of the ball. But it also just kind of, you know, looks like a cyclops and he's holding a pen behind his back to like, what are you gonna do with that pen? Kid? I wonder if that's how young Marcel

Bick's himself. Maybe so, I don't know, he's uh into data art. So let's talk about the design of these things. The brilliant andlicity of the ballpoint pin design. Like we mentioned that the little ball there is a buffer between the paper and the ink. Uh, it rolls around it. It fits very tightly in this socket, but not so tightly that it can't roll. Because there's nothing more annoying than a ball that's stuck in place, which happens from time to time. It means your pen is toast probably

probably so. But this little socket, like, I'm glad this article pointed this out. It's it's really small and it

might be hard to sort of imagine it. But if you if you get in the time machine and go to your dad's bathroom, you might find a deodorant called a roll on deodorant band band roll on, And it's the same exact thing, same technology, and that you have a ball keeping that fluid inside in the reservoir, you know, from leaking out, and then as it rolls around your your disgusting armpit, some of that juice goes onto your disgusting skin. Yeah, and burns a whole clear through it.

Yeah yeah, yeah did you No, I was never into roll on because it burns a hole in your skin. Spray No, I don't think I ever had in a spray. Um. No. I've always been like a solid stick, dude. I can't even use like the speedsticks stuff that's like, yeah, it's gotta be like solid. Yeah, if it's not white, great, but I mean it can't be like gel. It has to be solid like that. Yeah. See, I can only use the unscented gel stuff. I can't find unsented sticks anymore.

I used to use sure because that was the only uncented stick you could find. Use men an unscented gel. Wow, well, I might have to give that a try, because it's been a while since I really gave my under arms a chemical burning. But all that stuff is not supposed to be great for you, you know, like Emily gives me the natural stuff, and you know you know what that means. It means chuck stinks. Tom's makes this great one. Um it's I think Apricot sent it. It's wonderful. Human

uses it. Sometimes you use it. I've used it before, but it's hard to find the uncented natural stuff. Yeah, that's true. And then I don't know, man, you know, I just I need a little extra now. Same here, man, I need powerful chemicals to overcome the stink from my under arms. I use um acts because I'm in eighth grade. But it's the only stuff that's like a good solid stick that works with a minimum amount of application. Isn't

that the stuff that just stinks to high heavens? Well, I mean, if you really slather it on or you use the body spray, it's gonna smell, but um, it has a has a scent to it. Yeah. Um, I'm using black sugar right now. Um. And just we've either gotten three new sponsors or we will never be sponsored by We're doing a lot of buzz marketing right now. It's true. But anyway, roll on any persprint technology and ballpoint pen technology are the exact same. I think that's

the point we're trying to make exactly. Oh so with this ballpoint pen ball, Um, the the it's extraordinarily small, like on my pilot G two, since I use a point seven millimeter, the ball is so small that it makes a line that's just seven tenths of a millimeter wide. Yeah, that's what that means. I never knew that. It's a very very tiny, tiny little ball. Like when you look at the end of a pen, you don't really see the ball the the ball in the ball point. It's

that small you have to really look. And that's a point seven. Yeah used the point one. No I haven't. I'm not crazy, Chuck. Come on, I don't want to line that unless it's like something super specific I'm trying to do, like a nice point five. Yeah, I've tried point five. I like it a little thicker than that, so I go with the seven. It's not like I'll never use a point five, but foot point seven's my

my favorite for sure. Blue point seven point one would be if you're doing like cross hatching on an illustration or something, I could see it for that. I don't even know what that means. You know, when you make

the lines for shading drawing, that's cross hatch. So I want everyone to go to YouTube and type in close up of a ballpoint pen, and somebody went to the trouble of doing like an extreme close up it must be through some sort of microscope video camera of a ballpoint pen making a mark on a piece of paper, and it's really fascinating interesting. So what you're talking about getting back to the way that these work. The ball holds the ink above it keeps it from spilling out,

also keeps it from drying out. But when pressure is applied to the ball by pressing the pen to the paper or whatever you're writing on, it releases the ball or spins the ball so that the backside of the ball that's covered in ink spreads across the paper and that same part of the ball that just spread ink on the paper rolls back up into the socket where there's more ink to be spread onto it, and for this process to be continued on again and again wherever

you're rolling the ball on the paper, Because when you're writing, what you're doing is rolling a tiny ball with ink on it all over a paper. I love it. That's it. That's a ball point pen. All right. Well, let's take another break here and we will talk more about INC and space pens right after this, Chuck, let's talk inc. Baby.

All right, you're a blue man. Yep. Black. It means I like iron, you like carbon basically, So when you're talking INC in a ballpoint pin, uh, you've got a pigment or some sort of a dye that's dispersed in a liquid called a vehicle. So it's not like you can just take a bunch of pigment and throw it in a pin. It needs to be it needs to have some juice that it's mixed with, right, Uh. And that's called the vehicle. Yeah, and it can be any

number of things. I actually found this really really confusing, and I looked all over the internet and just got even more confused. But tannins, which I thought were pigments, apparently are vehicles, and something you want to look for in a vehicle, like a tannin, which is something you would get from fermenting leaves or something like there's a lot of tannins in your kombucha or your wine. Right. Um,

those tannins it basically adhere. They carry the ink from the writing instrument to the paper and as the as the ink dries, the tannins bind the ink to the paper, making a permanent mark. That's what you're looking for. So you've got your pigment, you've got your dye, you have your agent. Whatever it is that's coloring the ink. It can be anything from like a chemical um, an inorganic chemical like cadmium or uh. It could be carbon, or it can be iron and it would be dissolved in

that vehicle tannins. And then you might also add additives, which are things that create um other properties of ink that you're looking for, Like they use gum arabic to kind of um increase the viscosity of the ink and to make it so that once it dries, it doesn't crack as much as stays kind of bendy on the paper. Yeah, and these vehicles. So does that mean like if you have a vehicle, a plant based vehicle, it's like linseed oil,

does that mean linseed oil is a tannin? That's what I'm saying, Like, there's not a lot of specific information that explains this out there. I don't know. In other words, we're gonna have to do a show on tannins as penance. Please say no, no, okay, good by this. But like you were talking about the organic pigments you mentioned earlier, I'm a carbon man, you're an iron man. The carbon

is the black, the iron is the blue. Other inorganic compounds like chromium is where you get your yellow greens and oranges, and then or maybe cadmium red and yellow. It kind of just depends. So the thing that what you're looking for, though, if you if it's a pigment, it won't dissolve in water, but it will dissolve in some other stuff like maybe alcohol or something like that. Agents will dissolve in in solvents like alcohol, but also water.

And then you have lacquers where you actually take the coloring agent and marry it to powdered aluminum that's lacquer. So those are like the three color ways of delivering colors that you can you can use. But so with this vehicle, whatever it is that you can dissolve the coloring agent and that will deliver this coloring agent from the pen to the paper. That's what you you want.

So maybe the tannin is an additive, or maybe the tannin just pulls dual duty and it will deliver that stuff and dissolve um something like iron salts in it and bind to the paper as well. Who knows, we'll never know. We're gonna die not knowing what the beauty of this show is. Someone smarter than us will clear up what tannins are. I hope so, because I mean I really looked this up, man, I looked up like I looked at on like um like I think a UK Chemical Society's blog post on inks, and they didn't

explain it very well. I just don't. I don't get it well. Regardless of what a tannin is or is not, what you're doing with a ballpoint pen and the ink is, you know a lot of R and D goes into that dance between thick and thin because you want it to be thick, but you also want it to dry quickly and you want it to work with You can't be so thick that it doesn't respond to gravity, because that's not a pin anymore. No, it's it's really and the reason why, uh, you can't write upside down as suppose,

because it responds to gravity. If you're laying in your bed as a fourteen year old writing a love letter, uh, you know, holding the pad above your head, staring at the ceiling. You know, if you think about that pin rolling around that inc, you know there's an air pocket in that cartridge and it's gonna reverse itself, and that air is going to be at the top, and you are not gonna be able to write very long upside

down right exactly. And yeah, you might be able to make as like a mark for just a moment, and then it just turns into a scratch and what you've just done is used up whatever inc was on that roller ball for a second, and then now there's no more inc. Which is I've never really thought about it. But yes, of course that's why you can't write upside down with a ballpoint pen. Yes, but we got space pens, and uh, they're pressurized and that's kind of pretty cool.

Do you have one of these? No? Have you? Yeah? I got one of the gift once. Oh boy. So do you remember our Space Race episode? I cannot, for the life of me, remember, Chuck, if we continue this legend or debunked it. Do you? I don't know if we even mentioned it. I am almost certain we talked about Yeah, hopefully we said that it was apocryphal. But there's this this legend from the Space Race that UM,

the American Um Space Age. See, NASA spent years and years and years trying to figure out how to get a pen into space UM because they wanted to for the astronauts something to to be able to write within space. But because of zero gravity, because you need gravity with a ballpoint pen, if it's in zero gravity or micro gravity, that inkin't gonna flow downwards and you've got a problem. So NASA spent so much money on funding and years

of research trying to come up with a pen. And one day some American astronauts were talking to some of their Soviet counterparts and we're just telling them how much trouble NASA was having, And the cosmonauts said, well, we just use pencils, and the NASA astronauts are like wah wah, and NASA looks stupid and the Soviets look good, and um,

America just did a big face palm. It's it's totally bunk bunk because the Russian used our pens, right they did, and initially everybody used pencils, but there was there there was something where you can find like a kernel of truth to that, like there's always a kernel of truth on any urban legend um and this one is NASA spent a lot of money on some mechanical pencils, not years of research or anything like that, but I think back in the early sixties they ordered like, um forty

pencils mechanical pencils from a company out of Houston that charged them the modern equivalent of a thousand dollars each.

And the public found out about this and was not very happy, right, so there was a big there was a big to do about how to replace these pencils because they didn't want to use regular pencils because the Apollo one UM launch had had gone horribly or I think a test had gone horribly and some of the astronauts had burned to death in the capsule, So they didn't want anything that could burn a forward their capsules, right, So they but now mechanical pencils were out, so they

needed some sort of replacement. Well, they didn't spend any money on looking for a new pen or any years of research, because in nineteen they were approached by a guy named Paul C. Fisher and he said, I gotta pen for you. It's called a space pen. Have a look, and they went, it's almost as if you had have made this just for us, because you even called it the space pen. And did he actually name it the Fisher space pen? He named it the a G seven

Anti gravity space pen. Yeah. And like I said, at the at the onset of this little part, these were pressurized and it was that kind of solved all the problem. Their pressurized to the reservoir that is to about forty pounds per square inch. And there's also a special inc. It's what you would call a Visco Elastic inc. And they liken it in our own article to like a

thick rubber cement. And it actually still need to that ball though that ball point in this case, uh is necessary to liquefy it and kind of get that action going, and they say you can even write underwater, which I'm not sure how that would come into play, but maybe it's just a fun little advertising point. Yeah. But the fact that it's pressures overcomes micro gravity, so it actually works and it will work here on Earth upside down too. Yeah.

And there's also uh no hole in these reservoirs, like there are regular fountain pins, so not only are you not wasting any ink, but there's no chance of leakage. Yeah, they're they're um very widely touted as lasting a hundred years. The air the air is not going to get in and dry them out. Remember the erasable pin? I do, man, I'd totally forgotten about those until this article came along. Yeah, like I and I'm sure you do too. Remember when

they came on the market. It was the early nineteen eighties, and all of a sudden you could have a little uh eraser mate, like the paper mate became the eraser mate, and you could write stuff and pen and as long as you got back to it within and chances are it was usually right away. But supposedly about ten hours, uh is how much time you had to go in there and erase the inc and you could erase it like the way yet it was. It was definitely not a perfect thing. But pencils are sort of the same

well there, sort of the same way. Uh yeah, I guess so. Well, I mean it kind of depends, like you can definitely erase a pencil better, but it depends on the kind of paper, whether or not you want to leave no trace that anything had been written. Right, But it's definitely better than pens. But the so the trick with eraseable pens, the way that they were eraseable is that they weren't actually using ink, so there wasn't

something to bind them to the paper. I mean there was, but it took a very long time to be bound, about ten hours. And the ink that they used was actually liquid rubber cement, and so when you would write in this we rever cement, you had that said amount of time before it really bound and you could conceivably erase it to totally forgot about those, but it said it's not made from dies, Like how did they color it?

You know, I don't know. I would say that it was probably one of the top ten wonders of modern chemistry. Uh yeah, I'll buy that, Okay, Why not. Somebody's got to They're still out there too. I don't. I don't think people are is knocked out by them as I used to be. But it's not the eighties. Everybody was really coked up back then, and it was really easy to impress people, including me as a twelve year old. You were cooked up as a twelve year old. I've

got one last one. Have you heard of rollerball pens? Yeah? What are those? It's basically like my pilot would, it's considered an ink jail pen. But you could also make the case that it's a rollerball pen, but a rollerball pen it sounds like something different. It's actually just a type of ballpoint pen. The difference between a rollerball all in a ballpoint pen is the ink. So a roller rollerball pen has slightly more liquid inc whereas a ball

point pens inc is going to actually be paced. Um that kind of like that space pen is activated and liquefied a little more when the ball starts rolling on it. But they're they're both ballpoint pens. It's just the ink inside that differentiates the two. Yeah, well I do like those. My god, I cannot believe we got as much out of this episode as we did. And sometimes it's the paper too that you're writing on, Like have you ever gone to sign for a check at a restaurant and

it's the smoothest, most like wonderful writing experience of your life? Yeah, I think it's the the you know that I don't even know what it's made out of, but that kind of shiny receipt paper in some restaurants like Golden Corral, combined, oh yeah, combined with the kind of spongy uh check book what you call those things carbon paper? No? Well, yeah, but I'm talking about the thing they deliver your your check in the little chick. I don't know what that's called.

I'll bet there's a name for it. That the little pad like you know, like writing on a piece of bare paper on a wood table is not nearly as pleasurable as if there's a stack of paper. No, no, certainly not. So there's something to all that combination of all those things with the right uh, the right check from the right restaurant. But the girl the little check book though, can't um it can't be too puffy or else then you risk poking through the paper if your

pens agreed. So since I can't remember. I don't know the name of what they deliver the check in the little booklet. I will say that the little things on the ends of the shoelace are called egglets, just in case anyone out there didn't know that. And if you go to you know, some farmed a table hipster restaurant, they may deliver your check a clamshell. You know, I've

not seen that one. People get all cute with it, like here, we're gonna We're gonna deliver your check in an old eighteenth century wooden clothes pin and and clip it to your tie and pinch your cheeks. Yeah, just just give me the check, clip it to your tie. I'm not wearing a tie, you will be. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about ballpoint pens, there's nothing less to know.

So just go out, find your favorite, buy a few of them, and use them happily and in good health, or maybe give fountain pens to try to see if that's your thing. Uh. And since I said if that's your thing, I think I said something like that, it's time for listener mayl. They call this Colorado sar Follow up search and research, search and rescue. That's what we do,

search and research. That's true, Pete and repeat. Hey, guys, Colorado's population has been growing by roughly seventeen percent every decade, which is pretty amazing. Actually, when I wasn't we were out there for those shows, I remember Den Brights talking about the population boom of the past, like twenty years. Uh,

that's me talking. By the way. He said, there are a lot of new residents now wanting to experience are awesome mountains that, combined with the health renaissance across the country, has created a lot of interest in fourteen ers. Uh. And he goes on to explain as follows, Colorado has fifty eight peaks that are over fourteen thousand feet, so that's what he's talking about the fourteen ers. Some of them are easy and only a few miles with a

trailhead already at eleven thousand feet. Others are brutal hikes of twenty plus miles, extremely loose rock, ropeless climbing, and death if you fall. Sometimes it's really easy to research information on the routes. But in spite of all this information out there, the allure of the mountain calls and many people had out unprepared. Every year people are rescued or died due to dumb mistakes that many websites will blatanty tell you not to make and teach you how

to avoid because of the easy availability of information. And I think he there's like fourteen or dot com or something that's what he recommended. There's a healthy debate taking place among the hiking community as to whether or not Colorado should begin charging for search and rescue. Your podcast at the Nail on the Head with the pros and cons thought you might be interested in a little insight.

Capital Peak is the deadliest and most dangerous of the fourteen ers, and has killed six people in the past year alone. However, five of them made an obvious mistake by taking what they thought was a shortcut that doesn't exist. Oh god, yeah, man, I'm planning on attempting it in two weeks, as I have done thirty eight of the fifty eight peaks That is from Tyler Nesbar and he went to Mike two of the Denver shows. Oh nice, Tyler, thanks a lot for coming out. I hope you liked it. Yeah,

be safe out there, dude, for sure. Um. Yeah, Actually, it's a matter of fact, drop us a line f you're done to let us know you made it backsafe, and we'll tell everybody. Okay, yeah, it sounds like Tyler is doing it right. Okay, but just in case, you know, in case, thanks again Tyler for getting in touch. If you want to be like Tyler, well, then buy goodness.

Go to our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com, look up all of our social media links, or do it the old fashioned way and send us an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com