Go to Life in the fast lane--where's the on ramp?
- Add a comment
- Go to The first time I saw a
It's neat to read of pieces of technology that were new and expensive for the time...Ballpoint pens are a revolutionary part of handwriting.
posted by
FormerStudentIntern
on April 17, 2020 at 7:49 AM
| link to this | reply
What great memories. I remember seeing fountain pens in grade school. They were a novelty. Some kids had cartridges and others bottles of ink, which always spilled. I got to use both kinds for a while. Ballpoint was so much easier. Yes, stock in those companies would have been good to buy.
posted by
Sea_Gypsy
on April 16, 2020 at 7:30 PM
| link to this | reply
We certainly couldn't afford anything like that when they first came out but i do know that when I finally was able to buy them for cheap, my writing improved immediately.
posted by
Kabu
on April 16, 2020 at 1:45 PM
| link to this | reply
When the students were at college in those days they usually wrote with gold nibs >
The fountain pen being the usual method. Of course at time the nib would get crossed or damaged by a fall. The students would go to the local jeweler and buy an exchange nib of course the jeweler's assistant kept the old nibs and it was a wise thing to do.
posted by
C_C_T
on April 16, 2020 at 10:07 AM
| link to this | reply
Seems to me, everything new becomes cheaper as copycats find shortcuts to make the item with less expensive materials, of less but adequate quality. Then inflation kicks in to raise prices again. And by then, all the effort and expense that went into creating the first ones, research and development stuff, has been pretty much forgotten.
posted by
Ciel
on April 16, 2020 at 8:41 AM
| link to this | reply
Fun post. It reminded me of my fountain pen with the little bulb of ink inside that one had to refill, and how we kept a big blotter on the desk, and had little ones to blot what we wrote. The first ballpoint pen I had was a $15.00 pen and pencil set I won at a special program held at the old A's Stadium as a seat prize. I had to walk all the way down to the playing field where they had all the prizes to show my ticket and get it. Fun memories.
posted by
TAPS.
on April 16, 2020 at 7:27 AM
| link to this | reply
That was a seriously steep price for the time.
Although I wasn't around during the 40s, last year gave my mother a birthday card from 1948 that had various prices and statistics from her year of birth. You could buy a new car for around $1,500 and gas was $0.26 per gallon. Only the most wealthy of families could afford to buy that new pen.
posted by
Sherri_G
on April 16, 2020 at 6:42 AM
| link to this | reply