HOW THE PEN GOT ITS INK

Have you ever wondered if what are looked on as modern inventions had an earlier existence in the dim past? If so, wonder no more....

If I were to ask who invented the ball-point pen most of you would struggle, consult Google and then come up with the name László Bíró, and most people in the world would agree with you, but not me. Oh no I wouldn't!

You see, the ball-point pen is much older than Mr Bíró, but not many people know that.

It all began with an ancestor of mine. Owongo lived so long ago he didn't know which brand of hominid he was or what to call his tribe, so he called it Owongo's tribe every time he found himself writing on the wall, which was more often than you'd think.

It happened like this.

Owongo went out of the village with his second-best blow-pipe (his best one was in for servicing) on the look for prey to poison. Sometimes the judicious use of one of the many plant toxins that grew in his neighbourhood made hunting relatively easy, but he did have to make sure it wasn't one of those that would kill the eater of the meat as well as the meat itself. But he knew stuff like that, and so far nobody had died as a result of eating the meat he brought home, though there had been some cases of nasty upset stomachs that were put down to disagreeable gods getting revenge for something or other, usually to do with sex.

The idea was to soak a small cherry in a preparation made by him and known only to him. The cherry, when launched from the blow-pipe, would stick to the animal he was stalking, the animal would feel it and spot that it was a cherry and decide that this cherry, being nutritious as well as delicious, was a gift from the gods and eat it. Within minutes the creature would be lying unconscious on the ground and dreaming of its own concept of Heaven, and Owongo would slit its throat, thus relieving it of the embarrassment of any further life, and drag it home to his cave.

One day, though, it started raining when Owongo was out on the hunting trail, and he took refuge in a cave that he hadn't seen before because he was some way from home. Inside that cave was a pot of thick black sludge left by somebody who wasn't there, which made it Owongo's, and he poked one finger into it to see what it was. Then he sniffed the finger and, truth to tell, the sludge smelt almost delicious, so he licked the finger and he discovered that it not only smelt delicious, but tasted delicious too.

What he didn't know, though, was the thick black sludge had made the entire contents of his mouth go thick and black. Even his teeth were black, and any passing stranger might have thought he'd lost them all in a desperate battle with the tooth monster. It was as if he'd been sucking one of those old-fashioned coloured gob-stoppers.

And at that precise moment a stag came by.

Owongo reached for his second best blow-pipe and a cherry and spat it towards the stag, but this time the stone got stuck in the pipe. This happened sometimes, and it could be quite infuriating. The stag heard the commotion (well, if not a commotion it was more a shuffling sound accompanied by prehistoric cursing) and ran off.

In order to unjam his blow-pipe Owongo banged it on the ground, swiped it on a rock, did all manner of things to it, but the cherry was firmly stuck at the business end of the blow pipe, and a thick black goo (from Owongo's mouth) was oozing past it.

You can see what was going to happen next, surely.

Owongo banged his second best blow-pipe on the rocky wall of the cave, and it made a thick black mark.

“This better than scorched wood,” muttered Owongo to himself, not knowing the word charcoal.

And it was. The mark was blacker and indelible and because he'd done a great deal of spitting into his blow-pipe in order to remove the cherry obstruction and filled it with black goo from his own mouth, it marked the rocky wall of that cave and he could draw with his blow-pipe for ages without the goo running out. It even allowed Owongo to draw a portrait of the escaped Stag, paying particular attention to its genitals. Stag genitals were a delicacy back then.

And that, my friends, is how the ball point pen was invented, and don't let anyone tell you any different.

László Bíró indeed!

Author's Note

This is one of several very short stories about Owongo, written a year or so back and reworked by me for this site.