Was you there Charlie? (That's a radio meme from the 1920's.) My father used fountain pens, good ones, but sooner or later there'd always be a mess. Ballpoint pens weren't practical until quite small ball bearings could be made very, very smooth and spherical. That didn't happen until the mid to late 1960s, when my father finally switched. Before then they were outrageously expensive and gave poor results. They really were very different from the ballpoint pens you can buy today, even if the basic principles are very similar. Mechanical pencils got used a lot, say for drafting, back then. Creating a nearly spherical ball bearing on a planet with gravity, electrostatic effects, noise, etc, etc, out of steel, the most elastic substance known, is no small feat.