The point of it all
Asa Briggs
- The Pencil: A History by Henry Petroski
Faber, 434 pp, £14.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 571 16182 0
‘What in its fullest sense is the idea conveyed in the respective words Paper, Pen and Ink?’ asked George Wilson, a future Regius Professor of Technology at Edinburgh University. The subtitle of his article, ‘Paper, Pen and Ink’, published in Macmillans Magazine in 1859, was ‘an excursus in technology’, and he went on to survey all kinds of pens including, by a convenient extension of the word ‘pen’, ‘printer’s type, the pen of civilisation’, ‘the electric telegraph, the world’s shorthand pen’, and the chisel, ‘by which cathedrals and Sebastopols are written in granite, and gods and men in marble’. The pen for Wilson represented ‘every graphic tool by which painting, writing, printing, carving, inscribing or imprising is affected’.
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