An Inventor Finds a Life’s Work Perfecting the Writing Pen

From a Wall Street Journal story by Ngai Yeung headlined “An Inventor Finds a Life’s Work Perfecting the Writing Pen”:

King Charles III was caught in a viral moment last year, cursing a leaky pen while signing a guest book.

Many people focused on his temper. Leighton Davies-Smith focused on the pen. “There’s nothing more frustrating,” he said, sympathizing with the king. “You want it to be 100% reliable every time it touches the paper.”

Davies-Smith has made his mark in a field even older than the monarchy. Over a decades-long career, he has developed hundreds of pens—metallic Sharpies, Colorific coloring pencils, Parker Pen gel refills for ballpoint pens. His name appears as inventor on dozens of patents. He uses a microscope to examine how ink flows from the tip of prototypes.

The digital age has people questioning the point of writing pens. Unit sales have fallen by nearly 20% in the past five years, market-research firm Circana found. Birthday cards have given way to Instagram posts. Laptops supplant notebooks. Electronic signatures seal business deals. Even students rarely practice penmanship. In a YouGov poll released this year, 30% of respondents said they had never used a fountain pen.

Yet rather than accept obsolescence, Davies-Smith sees opportunity. Heard of teeth-whitening pens? He develops them.

People who take pens for granted don’t realize all that goes into them, said Davies-Smith, who lives in New Jersey. “The word pen is too small a word for the technology that’s involved,” he said.

The ballpoint pen was first patented in 1888, but didn’t catch on until after World War II. For many people, they were the final word for writing until challenged by the spread of home computers at the dawn of the digital age.

People who take pens for granted don’t realize all that goes into them, said Davies-Smith, who lives in New Jersey. “The word pen is too small a word for the technology that’s involved,” he said.

The ballpoint pen was first patented in 1888, but didn’t catch on until after World War II. For many people, they were the final word for writing until challenged by the spread of home computers at the dawn of the digital age.

People who take pens for granted don’t realize all that goes into them, said Davies-Smith, who lives in New Jersey. “The word pen is too small a word for the technology that’s involved,” he said.

The ballpoint pen was first patented in 1888, but didn’t catch on until after World War II. For many people, they were the final word for writing until challenged by the spread of home computers at the dawn of the digital age.

That was around the time Davies-Smith entered the field. In 1989, after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Brighton in applied electrochemistry, he interviewed for a job as a material scientist at the Parker Pen Company in East Sussex, England. He was hired instead as an ink chemist.

Company founder George Safford Parker had said a century earlier that “it will always be possible to make a better pen,” a mantra that made an indelible impression on Davies-Smith. He was first enraptured by the nib—the tip where ink flows to paper. His interest quickly spread to all parts while working a line of R&D roles at Newell Brands, which bought Parker in 2000.

He ran his own consulting firm for a couple of years, which took him around the world, troubleshooting for companies. Davies-Smith would talk to people on the assembly lines and design rooms to solve production problems. Clients hired him to document similarities between pen designs and provide expert testimony in patent lawsuits. It isn’t uncommon to see copycat products at office-supply trade shows, he said: “It’s a very incestuous industry.”

Davies-Smith, who now works as a senior technical director at Colgate-Palmolive, doesn’t confine his professional interests to workday hours. He dreams up custom designs for people while watching them handwrite, he said, whether at restaurants or in the office. At parties, he sometimes asks to see the pens people carry. “I live a sad, sad life,“ he joked.

Among the few people who share Davies-Smith’s passion are collectors. Some spend thousands of dollars on artisanal pens and such luxury brands as Montblanc, said Nicky Pessaroff, editor in chief of Pen World Magazine. Unlike Davies-Smith, he doesn’t care much for mass-market pens.

Davies-Smith’s favorite is the Uni-Ball Rollerball with a micro tip, which sells for around $2. The fine point brings out details in strokes that suit his writing style, he said. He enjoys strolling the aisles at Staples or Walmart to see the everyday pens he has worked on. “I wouldn’t like to work in an industry where no one has an opinion about the products that I make,” he said.

Davies-Smith’s dream is a digital pen that doesn’t make any marks but instead transmits pen strokes to digital devices. “I’ll give you an example. I was driving and stopped at a traffic light. I needed to capture a note and had this pen in my hand,” he said. “What if I wrote on my trouser leg, and it appeared on my phone?”

The technology already exists, said Gilad Lederer, who has been working on such a pen for years. His startup, OTM Technologies, raised more than $1 million via crowdfunding in 2016 for its digital stylus Phree, which can transmit written notes via Bluetooth to digital devices. None of the 20 or so consumer electronic companies he pitched was interested in producing it.

Like Davies-Smith, he sees a bright future. “A lot of the way in which we create, express ourselves and interact is not through keyboard, not through voice” but with a pen, Lederer said. He is working with universities to use Phree’s motion-sensing technology to measure hand tremors while handwriting—a way to diagnose patients who may have Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases.

Davies-Smith doesn’t care for the Apple Pencil, the tech company’s digital stylus. Its diameter, length and balance are ill-suited for his writing style, he said. New pen technology, which has the advantage of no leaking-ink stains, needs to accommodate the human hand, in his view.

“You’ve got to be able to hold whatever this new digital pen is going to be in a way that you’ve learned to hold a traditional pen and still be comfortable,” he said.

Ngai Yeung is a Dow Jones News Fund reporting intern and part of the summer 2023 newsroom intern class at The Wall Street Journal. Ngai is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California, where she studied journalism and political economy.