When Did Ball Points Replace Real Pens In Schools?

[Kataphract]

The school supplied dip pens and ink in inkwells for those who didn't have their own fountain pens.I recall having a nice grey and chrome Platignum cartridge pen with a hooded nib (presumably loosely modelled on the Parker 51) which doubled as Fireball XL5 when the teacher wasn't looking !

 

Supermarionation Pen! My heart would be a Platignum...

Edited November 6, 2014 by Kataphract

[PaperDarts]

I started first grade in western Canada in 1957 - for two years we used pencil, then graduated to fountain pens in Grade 3. I still remember our principal of the time ranting about these new-fangled ball-point pens and how sticky and unreliable they were. But in Grade 4 we were all using ball-point Eagle stick pens, so I remember the switch in 1960.

[Princeps Anglorum]

I was in a private school in the midwest in the 1950, and they taught cursive with dip pens and ink wells. When I went to a public school in the 60s, they didn't care and I kept using fountain pens until I got into business where they just wouldn't cut it with carbon copies.

I could manage 2 readable carbon copies using a Parker 61 with a medium nib. I still have that pen.

[chas0039]

I could manage 2 readable carbon copies using a Parker 61 with a medium nib. I still have that pen.

Four carbons, just too much.

[John54green]

We were required to use fountain pens into the 1970's in my high school in Colorado.

[______Zaphod_Beeblebrox]

I am not that old, even tho I may feel it, but I honestly can not remember that far back. I know there were not fountain pens in general use but for the most part I just remember being required to have a #2 pencil throught my school career. Of course being an up and coming draftsman I always used a mechanical pencil while in high school. It was the seventies and eighties. 19 not 18.

[Mike 59]

UK again, and in school during the mid 60's to mid 70's. I can remember using up a lot of BIC Crystal ballpoints, and trying the PaperMate fiber pen,( was it called the 'Tempo' ?) but isn't that the same pen as the 'Flair' today? It looks like the same design to me.

I might have tried a Platignum fp, but the main reason for ballpoints being used was the poor quality paper in our exercise books, fountain pen ink would feather badly, and so we would be left with no option but to use pencils and ballpoints. I did use Staedtler coloured pencils for charts and maps etc.

I can still remember the start of each new term, being given our new exercise books, and the first thing to do was modify the 'road safety' information box on the back cover, (Look right, then left, then right again), but even then I thought the quality of paper was rough, obviously school funds were tight.

Our desks had an inkwell hole right through the fixed part at the top right, with a a groove running right across the width of it to stop your pen rolling off.

But I can't remember anyone using a fountain pen as their first choice 'writer'.

[JotterAddict62]

For me in middle school '72 - '76 in 6th or 7th grade if you used a ball point pen it had better have been a Parker Jotter. The Jotter was the first ball point pen that I used and if you did not used a Jotter you were not in the in crowd. All other ball points were looked down at. Come on now, living 20 miles east of Janesville WI in Delavan WI You had better been using a Jotter as a kid.

 

On another insight during that time period I remember when I was in Boy Scouts we would travel to Galena IL every spring to march in the big parade for Ulysses S. Grant's birthday the last weekend of April and either it was in Monroe WI or Galena IL in a small store I still can see the image in my head of a table 4ft x 4ft 4in high just full of loose Parker Jotters for sale with the chalk marks on them for the price tags [ $1.98 ]

 

Ken the Jotteraddict62

[OregonJim]

Ball points are real pens.

 

But as for the rest, ballpoints are less messy, less fussy, easier to refill and replace, and hardier with youthful hands.

...and they were also the leading cause for a universal decline in penmanship skills.

 

We never used fountain pens in school ('60s), but we did use dip pens - the desks had built-in ink wells, which also worked well for coloring the ponytail of the girl sitting in front of you.

[asdf1234]

I was in secondary school in the UK from 2000-2007, the vast majority of my peers used fountain pens but so long as you wrote in blue or black there were no rules outlining how you had to do it.

[ANM]

My class was the first one in our school in Kansas City to have BP's required for class instead of Fountain pens. The year was 1955 if I recall correctly. I remember being disappointed that I wouldn't get to use the grown up kids fountain pen. When we returned to school that year after summer vacation, the ink wells on the 'big kids' desks were missing and just holes in the desk top where they used to be remained.

Edited February 12, 2015 by ANM

[welch]

I started kindergarten in 1953.

 

- my "report to school" notice was signed using a fountain pen, bright blue ink that is still bright blue

- we used pencils through third grade, then shifted to ink.

- ink meant fountain pens...most of us used Sheaffer school pens, although some kids might have had lever/sac pens. Teachers did not want us using ballpoints, and our parents liked cartridge pens. Easy to refill and easy to wash off the ink.

- by the time I graduated high school, in 1966, about half of us used ballpoints and half used various fountain pens.

- we tended to have one pen, just like our parents

- another important change: through the '60s, more and more families got a typewriter at home. We typed our papers...no longer wrote them out "long-hand". By 1966, almost everyone in my college had a portable electric typewriter...I remember many kids with a Smith-Corona. We took notes and wrote exams in ballpoint, soft-tip, or fountain pen (not considered retro or unusual), but used a typewriter for anything prepared in our dorm.

 

As much as anything, the typewriter killed off fountain pens and good handwriting...and then the micro-computer plus word-processor plus printer killed off typewriters. I got my first programming job in 1981...would not touch a typewriter after I had used TECO, a primitive text-editor available on DEC mini-computers. Imagine: we could back up, delete, move text around...what freedom! Then I found BRIEF, a programmer's editor that had an "un-do" command...perfection! My typewriter jammed in the early '80s, and, even though it was a classy (and heavy) Hermes, I did not take it to be repaired. Threw it out.

 

(I think 1960 is a good year to describe as the change from the classic fountain pen. Sheaffer had released its ultimate pen, the PFM: big, snorkel filler, no "user-serviceable parts". It didn't sell. Parker was selling the 51 and 61, but there were fewer and fewer pen counters that could repair your top-line pen from either of the Big Two US pen makers. The Parker 45 was released in 1960; an all-component cartridge/converter pen. About 1960, Parker briefly made a c/c version of the 51, but legend says that the company thought buyers would associate a c/c with inexpensive school pens. By 1963, Parker had re-thought the c/c, and released the P-75...an all-component c/c high-end pen.)

[innovativeman]

I was in the 5th grade [1954] , when my teacher allowed us to use the ball point pen. I recall this so well because I'm ambidextrous. Before the 5th grade, I did all my penmanship classes using the classic inkwell and pen with my right hand, and mid-year we were allowed to use the ball point pen and I was also allowed switch to my left hand. Now, I usually write with my left, but I must say my penmanship is best with my right. But if I write left-handed like Leonardo, scripting from right to left, my penmanship looks just as neat. - Most people need to hold a mirror to reads this reverse writing by viewing it in the mirror . Now, I'm very thankful for this strange school mandate that required me to learn to write with my right hand. I never saw an inkwell in junior high or high school. But I continued to used these pens at home, I just loved the feel of writing with these pens with the various nibs - and still do!

Edited September 29, 2016 by innovativeman

[pajaro]

I started to use ball points in the seventh grade, 1960 to 1961. Apparently the change was all over the decades of the fifties and sixties.

[Monbla]

I was in grade school in the early/mid '50s and it was in the third grade when we started using fountain pens for our Cursive classes. I went to a parochial grade and Junior Hi and Hi school . By the 5th grade, around the early '60s, we all started using Ballpoints. That was when I got my first Jotter. We had to use Schaefer Skrip washable Blue ink as I recall. I still used my cartridge filling Schaefer fountain pen till around the 7th grade when I switched to using my Jotter full time. We always used Pencils though for all Math work. I got my first mechanical pencil in Hi School when i took drafting .

[thudthwacker]

I went to public school in Queens, New York, starting in 1975, and I never even saw a fountain pen in school. We used pencils up until, I believe, 3rd grade, at which time we were learning cursive and received special dispensation to do our work in pen (all ballpoint; the cool kids had erasable ballpoints, if memory serves).

[virgilio]

I grew up in Pickens, South Carolina in the 60s. My sisters, born in the 40s, ALWAYS used fountain pens thru the 60s at least. I found one of their old, leaky fountain pens (had a bad bladder) in the Old House dating back to the 19th century, that we used for storage, and played with it as a boy in the early 60s. I would write 'letter' to my sisters away at college consisting of wavy lines, long before I knew my letters. At that time my sisters still used fountain pens exclusively for private correspondance, mainly becasue they were so much easier on the hands. Mother tho used a ballpoint already, but she didn't write much.

 

In 1964 my first-grade teacher tried to insist on every pupil having a fountain pen, but the prinicpal overruled her, and we used mainly pencils, with an occasional ballpoint owned by one of the rich kids.

 

By the 70s when I tried to buy a fountain pen of my own, I couldn't find one anywhere, not even in Greenville, at least not at a price I could afford. The Parkers I tried were extremely expensive, and wrote very poorly in the shops; the salesman knew nothing about fountain pens, and told me that fountain perns really didn't write very well, and were meant only for signing your name... I knew this to be untrue, but didn't try to argue with him.

 

It was not until I went back to college in the 90s that I rediscovered fountain pens, altho the Sheaffer cartridge pens I bought didn't really write all that well, apart from maybe one in ten of them that happended to come from the machine just right. Well before however I gave up ballpoints and used the felt-tip pens that were available back then; they were not nearly as hard on the hands as the ballpoints, altho of course a poor substitute for a good fountain pen.

 

I have read that the ballpoint took over the world in the mid 50s, but that was NOT the case in the rural South, where people kept using their fountain pens until at least the 70s, especially for long correspondance. As the personal letter died out, so has the fountain pen, which makes it so much more comfortable to write for periods at a stretch.

 

But writers have never forgotten about fountain pens, and I write every day with mine. The only time I write with anything else is when I need to make notes in a book whose paper won't tolerate a fountain pen. Then I use a Generals soft art pencil. Of course I also occasionally also write at my mac, but not that often; it is too hard to make corrections at a computer, and when you write by hand, you have an automatic record of alternate words and lines, in case you change your mind as you revise. It is just easier to use a fountain pen.

 

I have never understood sy people deliberately adopted a writing instrument so hard on the fingers as the ballpoint. Sometimes people are just stupid.

[virgilio]

I also recall that as late as high school in the early 70s there were some teachers who tried to encourage students to use a fountain pen, but it was a losing battle. By then people who used a fountain pen were considered old-fashioned. I remember also that in the third grade, circa 1967, I had a teacher who again tried to insist on pupils buying a fountian pen; she said that no one could ever learn to properly write long hand without a good fountain pen. But she too was overruled; society seems to have made a collective decision for the ballpoint pen in the course of the 60s. But there were many holdouts until the 70s.

[virgilio]

Sorry for the multiple posts, but I forgot to say that when I finally started using fountain pens in the 80s Sheaffers and Osmiroids whenever I pulled one of them out to write with, the people around me went into shock. In the 90s almost all of my professors would come up to my desk, where I had my Sheaffer cartridge pen stuck in the hole in my clipboard (that is what the hole is really for, of course) and would want to hold it and even write with it. One asked me where on earth I found it, and was flabbergasted when I said: "In the college bookstore." There were however a few fountain pen users even then among my professors. One of them had a wonderful old vintage Waterman, smooth as silk, that frizzled ink across the page. I felt suddenly ashamed of my lowly Sheaffer cartridge pen.

[Stephen2020]

Ballpoint pens are definately real! Early ones were known as ballpoint fountain pens.