Fountain Pen

A fountain pen is a writing instrument that uses a metal nib to apply water-based ink to paper from an internal reservoir, freeing the writer from repeatedly dipping the pen into an inkwell. Its origin is genuinely gradual and contested rather than owed to one inventor: a 10th-century account describes a reservoir pen made for the Fatimid caliph al-Muizz li-Din Allah that could be held upside down without leaking, Leonardo da Vinci sketched working fountain pen designs in his notebooks during the Renaissance, and the first English patent was granted to Frederick Folsch in 1809, followed by the Romanian inventor Petrache Poenaru's French patent in 1827; the modern fountain pen only took shape through this long accumulation of separate efforts.