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HISTORY Early technical pens consisted of a small pair of calipers, having one flat and one bowed leg holding ink between them. By adjusting the gap between the legs the width of the line drawn by the pen could be adjusted. Such pens, kept at a constant angle to the paper, were used for ruling lines, but not for Cursive handwriting, nor for off-hand flourishes. The 'Graphos' technical pen introduced in 1934, miniaturised the caliper principle and made the points easily interchangeable. In the 1960s pens with cylindrical points became available, but they were complex instruments with tubes holding a tiny shaft. To release ink the shaft is depressed and a line of about the width of the inerior diameter of the tube can be drawn. Such pens came in sets, often with three "fountains" or tubes for ink and several pen points which would be screwed into a filled fountain, which in turn would be screwed into a handle, before use. The drawback of such pens was that they had to be carefully cleaned to remove all ink from the tubing, otherwise it would set and could not be removed. In the United States, several firms this kind of technical pen: WRICO, Leroy, and Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph. Each had its own proprietary sequence of line widths, meaning that the widths were not standardized across the industry, and each companies terms for the widths did not match up. Such pens have now been surpassed by developments in the field of felt-tip pens, which are cheaper and disposable. In Europe, the sequence of technical pen widths was rendered in metric: 0.1 mm, 0.2 mm ... 1 mm, and so on. This became quite handy when photocopying became prevalent, because a technical drawing (or portion thereof) could be doubled or halved in size and a technical pen of double or half the size used in the original could readily be found to modify the copy. In the US, some standards are a 0.25 mm pen for thin lines, 0.50 mm for thick ones and 0.80 mm for extra thick ones. In general the development of technical pens has involved a gradual sacrifice of line and ink quality in favour of ease of maintenance and use. RELATED TECHNOLOGIES Drawingboard instruments, such as set squares, shape templates, text stencils and french curves are used to make consistent marks on the paper. A technical pen can be attached to a pair of compasses to produce circles. REFERENCES
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