>Ink?! When I was in school we wrote on clay tablets with reed styli. We had to maintain the styli with copper knives. Later, even the most reactionary teachers would let us use the new fancy bronze knives.
Copper? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down.
JFYI:
Re:Glass Dip Pens (2022)
by stoneman24 on Saturday July 29, 2023 @06:00AM
(#36918603)
See you and your fancy metal technologies.
Chalk on slate was good enough for me and my father and his father before. That were tradition and we were glad of it.
Heh, kidding aside I have all the writing implements: glass dip pens, metal dip pens, quill, even some home-made experimental pens (the one made from a plastic drinking straw is actually pretty good).
Glass pens are okay and great to clean but of course there's zero flex in the nib so it's not one that I reach for very often.
A calligrapher in the BBC series on the history of writing makes one out of a Coke can. Some day I'll get around to trying that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUuPq3mWaU&t=3666s