STEEL PENS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 739, 16 June 1876, Page 3

STEEL PENS.

It is computed, according to Cassell’s Technical Educator, that there are no fewer than 15,000 steel pens made in Birmingham everyday. Ifthe “gray goose quill” were still the universal instrument for recording the written thoughts of men, what a stupendous army of geese we should require to maintain, in order to furnish a like quantity! This consideration sets us speculating on what would have been the possible consequence if that nameless artisan of Sheffield, who, it is said, made the first steel pen, had not hit upon that ingenious and happy expedient. There is a story of an impecunious Irishman, who, having been fortunate enough to find half-a-crown, immediately expended it in comforts for Biddy and the “childher,” he was gleefully expatiating on his good luck when he was cut short by his better half “Luck is it—ye omadhoun ! Sorra’ the luck that’s in it—what should we have coal, gas, and railways, and lucifer matches, and the penny post ? Somehow, these discoveries have seemed to fit in so exactly with the successive stages of modern progress—the invention helping the advance, and the advance making the invention a necessity—that we are struck with the same sort of admiration as that which led the simple youth to wonder why great rivers always flowed past populous cities. . . Birmingham consumes fifteen tons of steel per week in the manufacture of steel pens, probably a larger quantity than is used in that armoury of the world for the making of warlike weapons; so that, in this sense, “ the pen is mightier than the sword.