As early as 4,000 B.C., ancient peoples used crude pens consisting of hollow straws or reeds that supported a short column of liquid. During the 500's B.C., people began to make pens from the wing feathers of such birds as geese and swans. The shaft of the feathers was hardened, and the writing tip was shaped and slit to make writing easy. These feather pens were known as quill pens, and they were widely used until the development of steel-nib pens in the 1800's.
By the late 1800's, inventors had perfected an early version of the fountain pen. This pen represented a major improvement over previous pens, because it featured an ink reservoir and a capillary feed. Earlier pens held only a small amount of ink at a time and had to be repeatedly dipped in ink.
The First Fountain Pen In 1883



The earliest pencils date back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used flat cakes of lead to mark faint black lines on papyrus (an early form of paper) to guide writers. In the Middle Ages, people used thin rods of lead or silver for drawing. The marking ability of graphite was discovered in the 1500's, and the first modern pencil-that is, one consisting of a wood case glued around a stick of graphite-was made in the late 1700's.
In 1795, Nicholas Jacques Conte, a French chemist, developed a pencil of powdered graphite and clay. His mixture proved to be as smooth and hard as pure graphite. Conte also discovered that a harder or softer writing core could be produced by varying the proportions of clay and graphite.
In the mid-1800's, William Monroe, a Massachusetts cabinetmaker, invented a machine that cut and grooved wood slats precisely enough to make pencils. About the same time, the American inventor Joseph Dixon developed the method of cuffing single cedar cylinders in half to receive the core and then gluing them back to­gether. In 1861, the first pencil-making factory in the United States was built in New York City by Eberhard Faber, an American manufacturer. The first mechanical pencil was patented by the Eagle Pencil Company in 1879.


Answer: The Pen.

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