Discover Top Posts Tagged with #electric pen

This pen has conductive ink that can power motors and small LED lights!

#electric pen #circuit #led lights #green lighting

#paper town #electric pen #art #innovation

Above:

Fig. 1: 1877 patent for Thomas Edison’s electric pen (second revision),

Fig. 2: 1891 patent for Samuel O’Reilly’s electric tattoo machine.

Images from the Thomas Edison papers, digital edition (link)

Edison’s Electric Pen: Mediating Changes in Gendered Authorship

Presented at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), Montreal/Longueuile 2015

In 1876, Thomas Edison began marketing his “electric pen” to offices and white-collar businessmen. The pen was meant to enable easy reproduction of business documents. Users would apply the pen to a stiff sheet of paper, puncturing the surface with a moving needle tip. The needle would create a design in the surface, producing a stencil, which could then reproduce images when rolled over with ink.

The product was generally deemed a failure. Office-workers complained that the tool was noisy, difficult, and messy. Beginning in 1891, however, the electric pen was re-fashioned into an electric tattoo machine.

In histories of writing that privilege formal education, commercial publishing, and literary texts, the electric pen appears as a mere footnote. Expanding from the history of authorship toward a more general history of inscription, however, this paper suggests that the electric pen was actually quite successful.

“Success” is a socially constructed category. In the case of the electric pen, received historical notions of “success” are tied to gender, class, and race stratifications formalized in education systems, beginning at least as far back as medieval manuscript culture.

This project is a part of some ongoing research concerning the afterlives of failed technology.

#edison #electric pen #tattoo machine #book history #inscription #success #dead media #tattoo history