The main purpose of the first space flights was to prove that they are possible in principle. Each flight was a great event. But as space flights became more and more trivial, astronauts started thinking about minor problems. One of them was how to make notes in space.
The piston-type fountain pen that was popular at that time wrote well on the earth. Because in a fountain pen, ink is supplied to its point by the gravity force. It is not easy to write on a wall with such a pen, and quite impossible to do this on a ceiling. The same effect occurs under zero gravity. American scientists began research. Considerable means were spent to find the idea of a space pen. A miniature pump was switched on as soon as the pen pressed on the paper. Now the fountain pen could write anywhere – in space or on a ceiling, but the cost of one pen, taking into account the means spent on the research, was fantastic.
Several such fountain pens were in space, one of them was given as a souvenir to the then USA President. And finally, the designers asked the intelligence what Russian cosmonauts wrote with in space?
The answer was simple: the Russians write with pencils.