The pens that made it to space.

One man, his own money, a problem NASA couldn't solve.

 

Floating in zero gravity, the ink cannot flow out of the point. The ball rolls around, and there is no gravity to pull the ink down, so nothing comes out. Use a pencil, then. But pencil tips break, and the broken pieces float around the cabin. A piece can get into someone's eye or into the electronics, causing a short. And graphite catches fire easily, which was a real problem in a capsule full of oxygen, especially after a fire killed three astronauts on Apollo 1.

 

So pens don't work, and pencils are dangerous.

 

A man named Paul Fisher decided to fix this. He had been making pens since 1948, and he was bothered by how they failed. They leaked. They dried out. They stopped writing when you turned them upside down. He wanted to make one that didn't, and he spent years on it, with his own money, trying one design after another until he got it right.

 

His idea was to seal the ink in the cartridge and apply pressure, so the ink is pushed toward the ball rather than relying on gravity to bring it down. He also had to change the ink. He made it thick, so the pressure couldn't push it out on its own, and so it only turns to liquid when the ball rolls over it.

 

 

It worked. This was the same problem NASA was trying to solve, so he brought the pen to them. They didn't take his word that it worked. They tested it for a year and a half, because it was going somewhere nothing can be fixed, where a pen that failed was a pen an astronaut couldn't rely on, and they had to be sure. Then it went to the moon.

 

 

When a switch broke in the lunar module, the one that fired the engine to lift the astronauts off the surface, they used a Fisher pen to push it back into place. It got them home.

 

 

It's in the Museum of Modern Art now. And more than fifty years later, it's still on the space station, in orbit over our heads.

 

He spent decades of his life on a pen. Most people will never think about it once. It's flying over you right now, and almost no one who has used one knows his name.

 

 

We use his refill in the pen we make. I think of him every time I write with it.