Originally Posted by jpthequilter

Used to be long years ago all of the ink used to come in short squat bottles, we bought at the store for 10 or 15 cents. Some of them had a little inside curved extra glass cup just under the lid to hold a small part of the ink for dipping straight pens into or for refilling lever type fountain pens. It was tricky to pour the ink from those bottles into these inkwells!
Everybody had an inkwell something like this in their desks at school.
It was so easy to splatter ink out of those steel pens when we wrote with them, because there was a drop of ink clinging to the underside of the pen.
However, people made beautiful designs with these pens, similar to, but more ornate than the quilting designs we use today.
When they invented ball point pens we were not so sure they were going to work at first, because the teeny balls in the points fell out easily, and the ink was awful messy if that happened.