science · 11 October 1799 · 225 years ago
birth
Born 11 Oct 1799; died 5 Jan 1877 at age 77.
A pioneer of the steel pen, born in Sheffield. An English engineer Bryan Donkin patented a steel pen point in 1803 but did not commercially exploit his patent. In 1830, steel makers (William Joseph Gillott, William Mitchell, James Stephen Perry) mainly in Birmingham, England developed the machine production technique for cheap long wearing steel pen nibs. Tempered steel sheet was stamped to produce the basic nib then shaped, slit and the tip formed. More than most other metals, stainless steel has the elasticity needed to give the variety of penmanship styles available from the quill pen. By 1850 quill pen usage was fading and the quality of the steel nibs had been improved by tipping them with hard alloys of iridium, rhodium and osmium.
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