.@ShreeHistory Contemporary military historians don't think that bastions were developed only after cannons were invented.  As soon as human beings started developing fortifications, they were forced to think about dead zones (areas which the defenders cannot see) in front of walls and the necessity of overlapping fields of fire.

https://x.com/ShreeHistory/status/1958743050328355130

This is the Egyptian fortress of Buhen, constructed circa 2000-1800 BCE (reconstructed circa 1200 BCE).  You'll notice that there there is a double line of defence here, and both lines provide sightlines along the curtain walls and overlapping fields of fire.

Here is an artist's reconstruction of the fortress.  The inner bailey has a double line of defence, with the bastions along the outer wall.  The outer bailey has towers that reduce dead zones and provide overlapping fields of fire.

Here's a drawing of the Semna fortress, which was part of the same string of fortresses.  Again, there is the same careful thinking about dead zones where defenders can't see, and of the necessity of overlapping fields of fire.

The Roman Vitruvius wrote in his famous De Architectura (circa 1st century CE): "The [fortress'] towers must be projected beyond the line of wall, so that an enemy wishing to approach the wall to carry it by assault may be exposed to the fire of missiles on his open flank from the towers on his right and left."

"The towers should be set at intervals of not more than a bowshot apart, so that in case of an assault upon any one of them, the enemy may be repulsed with scorpions and other means of hurling missiles from the towers to the right and left. "

The city walls at Pompeii had 12 towers and seven major gates.  The fortifications date back to 5th-4th century BCE, and these defences were modified by the Romans after 80 BCE.  

The walls were 6-8 metres high.  There were battlements on top to provide defencive cover, but those are now lost.  The towers protruded from the curtain walls about 4-6 metres.  Notice the firing slits and windows on the sides of the tower, which provide sightlines along the curtain wall.

And there is of course the platform on top for other weapon systems like catapults and ballistae.

Smaller fortresses early on had towers built against the inside of the curtain walls.  When towers started being built on the outside of the walls, the protrusions early on were small. And this seemed to vary regionally.  John Peter Oleson: "The greater tactical sophistication of the forces opposing Rome in the Near East, and the character of their offensive and defensive armament, fostered the use of projecting towers."

They started building elaborate bastions in the Western provinces as well. This is Pevensey Castle, built by the Romans circa 290 CE on the coast in East Sussex and modified later.  This is the Roman wall.  Note the bastions.

The fortress at Lugo, Spain, was built to protect the Roman colony Lucus Augusti between 263 and 276 CE.  

This is one of the original Roman gates.  Note the gate bastions.

The fortress wall at Lugo extends for over 1.9 kilometres, and there were 85 bastions, and five gates.  71 of these bastions still stand.  The Lugo fortress is a magnificient piece of Roman military construction.

Gunpowder of course changed fortress defence and attack completely.  Before gunpowder, forts had high walls designed to keep off (mainly) climbing attacks.  But gunpowder cannon could stand off and shoot holes through these walls, which were often made of masonry that shattered when impacted.

Ottoman gunners used iron cannonballs to destabilize and cut the bottom of walls, then big stone cannonballs to bring the walls down.  The walls of Constantinople had stood for a millenia.  Mehmed II's gunners made gaps in the walls with 270 kg cannonballs fired from 1.6 kilometers away.

They took the city in 55 days.  Mining attacks had existed before, but dead zones became even more dangerous once you could mine underneath the walls and set off enormous gunpowder explosions.  

The trace Italienne style of fortification was developed to deal with this new threat environment.  You made the walls much lower, made them thicker, packed the walls with rubble so that they could absorb the impact of cannonballs.  This is Fort McHenry in Baltimore (built in 1798).

In 1814, the British navy attacked Baltimore Harbour, and the fort held off the attack.  The Brits bombarded the fort for 25-27 hours, but were unable to damage the fort enough and cause enough casualties, so they withdrew.

The defenders raised a large flag in the morning (instead of a white flag), and this is what inspired  Francis Scott Key to write "The Defence of Fort McHenry," later known as "The Star-Spangled Banner"--now the American national anthem.

The angled bastions of the trace Italienne style fortifications channelled attackers into ferocious crossfires.  This fire was delivered from blast-resistant chambers, through firing slits.  Fort Elvas in Portugal.

Trace Italienne is a deep rabbit-hole to fall into: fortifications detached from the main works, multi-layered defenses so that each outwork supported the others, etc., etc.

The people who created these designs didn't make them up whole.  These were Renaissance people who were immersed in the re-discovery of the ancient European world, and they also paid attention to the innovations of their rivals such as the Ottomans.

They were immersed in classical military writings, which they often read in the original Latin.  They avidly consumed the work of Vitruvius and other classical writers and took ideas from them.  

The angled bastions that you see above are re-workings and extensions of ideas that date back to the 3rd century BCE in explicit written forms available to Renaissance designers.  And these military thinkers also took liberally from the ideas of Ottoman fort designers.

Trace Italienne fort design is one part of the many-faceted rebirth of ancient Western culture during the Renaissance.

Throughout human history, the same inventions and discoveries have been made independently and in different locations.  Knowledge has been lost and re-created.

The fact that similarities exist across cultures and geographies doesn't necessarily mean one side has "stolen" ideas.  And culture and knowledge usually flow in both directions.  Influence is mutual, even in conditions of inequality.

Evolution of Fortress Defense

Watching the evolution of the Hindu "trad right" over the last few years has been a fascinating exercise.  Here, for instance, is an exemplary moment.  A man embroiled in a vicious marriage dispute commits suicide.  The solution?  Let's legally empower khap panchayats, which are "patriarchal [institutions] and [whose] empowerment is an unabashed affirmation of the glorious tradition of patriarchy."  All of this, of course, with a firm foundation in the ideology espoused in the Manusmriti.

It's important to note that this guy wants to also maintain and maximally empower the caste system (varna/jati). He believes in "the finality of the identity of birth," which is to say that your occupational fate and status is determined at birth by the (supposed) weight of your karma from previous births.  Generously, people who want to marry outside of caste "are free to do so."  Plus: "[We] already have the conceptual framework to make room for outliers and exceptions."

And yet, in another Tweet: "[Caste] can be mapped on to the nature-nurture principle.  Ur ancestry dictates your culture & determines your occupation.  Transgressing boundaries is discouraged coz it compromises the stability of the system... Exceptions expected to reform."

It's clear how exceptions will be forced to reform under this unspecified "framework": the khaps (rooted in glorious, ancient tradition) will enforce compliance through the usual methods of social ostracism (hookah-paani band) and violence (honour killings, etc.).  Women and the lower castes have always lacked influence and power in these contexts, of course.  Even when a khap is comprised of gotras of a singular caste, one gotra typically dominates the khap.  Research shows how khaps have been influential in hardening communal divides and fostering riots.

What is also astonishing here is the firm belief that khaps have no "major monetary angles" and discourage people from playing "zero-sum games."  I've grown up visiting relatives in small villages in North India, and what I've seen is that the people who have power in khaps are the ones with the most money and access to the police and local government.  The big landlords are the people who accumulate most power.  And they use this power ruthlessly for their own ends.  The Indian judicial and crime-enforcement systems are hopelessly corrupt, but to believe that kangaroo-court khaps will be any better is a fantasy.

Khaps are feudal in structure and thought.  Similar systems across the world have had some of the same failings.  For instance, in another Tweet the OP refers approvingly to the Kgotla courts in Botswana, which were assemblies called by chiefs to deliberate policies, etc.  They were supposed to be democratic, but in actual practise lower status men "scarcely have the right, and seldom the temerity, to speak."  And when they spoke, "no one would pay much attention to what they said.”  And of course there were no women at these discussions.  Glorious patriarchy, you see.

In this context, there is a lot of unquestioning glorification of the past.  That is, this current attempt at intellectual and spiritual "decolonization" is firmly grounded in a vision of bygone India as a kind of utopia, in which people lived in communal harmony and full occupational satisfaction and happiness.  The jati/varna system, rooted in "Dharma," was a kind of "social-safety net" that ensured the happiness of all citizens, upper and lower caste, men and women, etc.  The Manusmriti, you see, is a blueprint for a completely successful and powerful society, and human happiness.  Because, as we all know, "For killing a cat, a mongoose, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, a monitor lizard, an owl, or a crow, a man should perform the observance for killing a Shudra (11.132)."

If you question this vision, you are inevitably accused of being "deracinated" and intellectually and spiritually colonized.  There is a lot of talk about only mature men being able to truly understand and discuss this grand effort.

What OP and his supporters want is an Indian, Hindu version of the Taliban's sharia.  In this Utopia, men (who are inevitably savarna) construct unquestionable ideology that promotes the collective, not the individual, which trait belongs to the degeneration and corruption of modernity.  This, while these guys profit from the very fruits of modernity they abhor (tech, capitalism, etc.).  This class of superior beings have the wisdom and the spiritual insight (like the great sages) to correctly understand and utilize whatever is valuable in modernity. The rest of us (women, librandus, immature secular types, spiritual-but-not-spiritual-in-the-correct-way rascals) are incapable, by definition, of manly reflection and strategy.

The problems of modernity are real and numerous.  But to retreat into this kind of dream-construction is  counter-productive, to say the very least.  If one looks around the world today, societies that have retreated into this fantasy-making have regressed economically and socially.  To pick the very worst aspects of Indian intellectual and societal resources from the past to tackle the present is (dare I say) immature.

https://x.com/infinitchy/status/1866521913620627740

The Evolution of Hindu "Trad Right"

I need to build a small desktop utility app--with a UI--for myself.  Kotlin Multiplatform plus Jetpack Compose would be really cool, but I don't want to spend time coding UI.  Is there a Visual-Basic-like drag-and-drop UI builder for JVM languages?  1/N

@dhiwise has something that looks good, but they only have an Android target.  Seems to me that now that Kotlin Multiplatform is stable there's a huge market opportunity here.  And no, desktop isn't dead.  Not all apps can work on mobile platforms!  2/N

There's the Figma Relay plug-in, but again that outputs Kotlin code for Android Studio.  Someone build a Kotlin-Multiplatform-plus-Compose app builder that properly targets all mobile and desktop operating systems!  You'll make a killing. 3/N

Building UIs for Kotlin Multiplatform Desktop Apps

Anthony Trollope counselled writers to "let their work be to them as is his common work to the common labourer." Here, for my tribe of ink-stained wretches, is a thread about tools for our toils.  I'm a writer--I've published four books… https://www.vikramchandra.com/

… three works of fiction, one non-fiction. One of my novels, Sacred Games, was adapted into a Netflix series, to which I was attached as an executive producer. I've done some work on feature films. https://www.vikramchandra.com/publications/sacred-games-the-netflix-series

I teach creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. https://english.berkeley.edu/users/22

I'm the co-founder of a software company, Granthika, that makes a word processor that also manages the elements of the universe you're writing about (people, objects, locations, events, timelines).

Friends, colleagues, and students are forever asking me about what tools I use to write.  So I thought I'd write up something and publish it before Twitter burns to the ground and/or I flee. Apologies--turned into a bit of a mega-mega-thread. #WritingCommunity

If you like, you can read an unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/typingvanara/J82OCJg.

I'll be talking about (with recommendations):

- Word processing (Self-plug: Granthika)
- Making notes, managing web clips, storing photographs (Evernote)
- Making and managing handwritten notes (Samsung Notes)
- Managing and annotating PDFs (Zotero)

- Searching your PDFs and pretty much everything else on your computer, including email (X1 Search)
- Recording interviews and transcribing them (apps on your phone, aliceapp.ai)
- Taking photographs (your phone)
- File backup (CrashPlan)

- Digitizing books and documents (paper cutter, Fujitsu fi-7160 scanner)
- Optical character recognition to make your PDFs annotation-ready and searchable (Abbyy)
- OCR for South Asian scripts (IndSenz)

- Keyboards for wrist-health and efficient typing (Freestyle RGB Split Mechanical Gaming Keyboard)
- Chairs for back-health and general well being (Steelcase Leap Chair V.2)

And also: an engineer who built a working fountain-pen prototype in the 10th century CE; and Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, great man and fountain-pen aficionado.

So, on to the tools...

I've never been satisfied with conventional word processors.  When I used them, I spent way too much time searching for my character notes, worrying about timeline contradictions, and so forth. World-building is hard enough, you don't want to struggle with data management.

So we--my co-founder Boris Iordanov, myself, and our team--built a writing environment that addresses these problems.  https://www.wired.com/story/code-obsessed-novelist-builds-writing-bot-the-plot-thickens/

To make notes and manage web pages I've clipped, I've used @evernote since 2008.  https://evernote.com/

Evernote has a really powerful and easy-to-use web clipper which will integrate with your browser.  Here's my first clip, from @peterbromberg's blog.

And you can type notes, record audio, take pictures directly in the app, etc.

Evernote also provides the ability to make sketchs and handwritten notes, but unfortunately this functionality has been neglected and nerfed over the years.  Evernote really sucks at this.

I like making handwritten notes in some contexts--if I'm not carrying my laptop, if typing would be distracting for the people I'm talking or listening to, etc.  I use Android devices (phone, tablet), so I use Samsung Notes, which is a joy to use. https://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/samsung-notes/

Exporting notes from Samsung Notes to Evernote is a bit of a chore, but it's doable.

There are alternatives.  On Android, I've tested Squid, OneNote, Nebo, and Noteshelf (which integrates with Evernote, sort of).

I'm not a user of Apple devices, but Nebo is cross-platform and is worth trying out.  Nebo will OCR your handwriting and turn it into digitized text, and its recognition engine is very good. https://www.nebo.app/


So, once you've made notes, you need to be able to search for and easily find the information you've stored.  Evernote's search syntax is pretty powerful and lets you do complex searches (AND, OR, etc.).  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-Use-advanced-search-syntax

It's a pretty rich query language.  If you're interested, take a look here.  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-Use-advanced-search-syntax

So, I save web pages and do my note-taking in Evernote.  I've tried all the new kids on the block--Notion, Roam, etc.--and I keep coming back to Evernote, and not just because I've got a vast amount of data stored in the app (19,532 notes as of this morning).

The other apps felt too fiddly, and I spent way too much time playing with table structures and so on.  Evernote lets me store information quickly and find it years later.

George R. R. Martin observed that there are two types of fiction writers, architects and gardeners.

@anthilemoon builds on this typology to describe various kinds of note-takers.  I'm definitely a librarian--I'm a collector of resources, and I prize fast retrieval.  Figure out what type of note-taker you are and use the right tool.  https://nesslabs.com/how-to-choose-the-right-note-taking-app

Sidebar: Evernote has been through a rough patch in recent years because of an ancient codebase and a lack of direction.  They've rebuilt the app from the ground up (damn!)…

...and I very much like where they're headed under @iansmall's leadership.  Kudos! https://www.protocol.com/evernote-reboot-ian-small

They've recently added tasks and task management.  I'm not quite ready to give up @todoist yet, but I like what Evernote is doing.

Next: I use @zotero heavily.  Wonderful open-source, free app that stores and manages every PDF I've read over the last decade.  Its word processor plugins let you cite sources effortlessly, and it'll build bibliographies for you. https://www.zotero.org/

Zotero's browser plug-ins are built to interact seamlessly with many, many online databases.  Here's a thread by @MushtaqBilalPhD about adding files to your Zotero library with a couple of clicks.  https://twitter.com/MushtaqBilalPhD/status/1566339019625140227?t=YVz9Xf-Oyh_X_1V6gUNVlA&s=09

With the Zotero desktop and mobile apps, you can read and annotate your documents. Take a look at this other thread by @MushtaqBilalPhD about notes and annotations in Zotero. https://twitter.com/MushtaqBilalPhD/status/1564522758696013824?s=20&t=nvGfP5PMHbgCLvTr3Sh7-w

I couldn't have written Geek Sublime, which is heavily source-dependent, without Zotero. https://www.vikramchandra.com/publications/mirrored-mind-geek-sublime

Zotero offers cheap cloud storage, with syncing between devices.  This allows me to add documents to Zotero on my laptop and read and annotate them on my tablet.   https://www.zotero.org/storage

They recently released an iOS app.  There's no official Android app yet, so I use Zoo for Zotero. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mickstarify.zooforzotero&hl=en_US&gl=US

Sidebar: Zotero urgently needs easy access to its API so it can interact with the outside world as directed by non-coders, mere mortals.  I don't have enough web API chops to build a Zotero integration with @make_hq or @zapier.  Volunteers?  I'll buy coffees and/or beers.

And, this is a tool I use every day: X1 Search.  You point X1 at your files on your local drives or on the cloud, your emails and attachments (wherever they are), your calendars and contacts, and it indexes them all. https://www.x1.com/products/x1-search/

And then X1 will find stuff for you, fast! X1's search syntax is pretty damn powerful, and it saves me many hours every month. https://help.x1.com/hc/en-us/articles/216097543-Advanced-Search-Commands

I especially like that "medi NEAR/5 insur" will find "medical insurance" and "meditation can help overcome insurmountable obstacles."  Proximity search ("within 5 words of") combined with partial word search gives you search superpowers.

Unfortunately, X1 is Windows-only.  My buddy @fvogelstein is a MacOS guy, but he keeps one Windows machine around just so he can use X1.

Pro-tip: Make sure that X1's indexed folders include the locations where Zotero stores its data. Then you can use X1 to search all your Zotero files. Zotero's desktop app has a visual query builder for advanced searching, but that seems clumsy in comparison to X1 searches.

I often interview people when I'm researching.  In the old days, I used to carry a little tape recorder.  Now you can use an app on your phone.  Some of these apps will auto-transcribe your audio as well (but for a limited set of languages).

I've used Alice and it worked really well. https://aliceapp.ai/

I now use my phone for picture-taking when I'm out in the field (so to speak), instead of a compact camera. But I've been thinking of going back to a camera--taking pictures without a good viewfinder and a hardware shutter button sucks.

I'm not the only one complaining about this, so there are people building phone grips like this one. But I really want something with a traditional viewfinder so I can shoot comfortably in harsh sunlight. Build one for Samsung phones, and I will buy!  https://shop.fjorden.co/

I have vast amounts of gathered information, hence the obsession with tools and information technology in general. My writing process seems to depend on absorbing facts and stories and tales and images and extracting connections that then grow into the stories I tell.

And even when I'm writing fiction--which is most of the time--I like to get the details more or less right.  Fact-checking before publication is a lot easier when you can find your facts.

So, these are useful tools for all this knowledge work you're doing.  But for a good writing life, you need to think about some other issues.  First: BACK UP YOUR DATA!  And repeat after me: DROPBOX AND GOOGLE DRIVE ARE NOT BACKUP.  https://www.prodigyteks.com/dropbox-not-same-backup/

At some point, disaster is going to strike (hard drive crash, someone steals your laptop).  You'll need to be able to get your work files and all your family photographs and your journal back.

A good backup program will also back up versions of your files.  So if you need to look at that version of your manuscript from two years ago in which you remember writing three perfect sentences, a backup program like this will let you incarnate it in the present.

I use @CrashPlanSMB to back up my files to the cloud and to local drives.  I have versions of all my files dating back to 2009.  Being able to retrieve previous manuscript verisons and restore deleted documents has been a life-saver. https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/small-business/

But there are other good backup programs.  Choose one!  Get one like @CrashPlanSMB that lets you back up locally and to the cloud.  Restoring from a local drive is a lot faster than from remote storage.  https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-online-backup-service/

I confess: I pretty much can't read paper books any more.  Much easier to annotate digital books, and they're easier to transport.  If I can't find an e-book version of something I want to read, I resort to drastic measures.  I buy a paper copy...

...and then use my paper cutter.  It'll take off the spine of a 500-page book easily.  It's a no-name Chinese piece of gear I bought on eBay a few years ago.  If you prefer, a local FedEx or copy store will do the spine-cutting for you.

Then, you need to scan the pages.  I use a Fujitsu fi-7160.  It'll scan in those 500 pages in minutes, even when set to scan at high resolution.  https://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/business/fi7160/index.html

Next step: optical character recognition.  The best OCR software, in my opinion, is @abbyy.  It's quite accurate on English and European languages, but has no support for South Asian languages.  Too many ligatures.  https://www.abbyy.com/

I can get Abbyy to work somewhat well on Romanized Sanskrit with IAST or Kolkata diacritics by adding a downloaded dictionary of Romanized Sanskrit.  I keep hoping some generous person will release Abbyy recognition files for South Asian scripts.  http://www.columbia.edu/~ph2046/RnD/Hackett/SktComp.html

OCR programs for some South Asian scripts can be bought here from IndSenz.  I've used the Hindi and Sanskrit ones, and the recognition is top-notch.  http://www.indsenz.com/int/index.php

But Abbyy has a lot of excellent document-processing features I depend on (it corrects image skew, straightens text lines, corrects contrast, etc.).  The IndSenz apps seem much less polished and capable, unfortunately.

So, finally, you have PDFs you can import into Zotero, read and annotate, and so on.  Apologies to those of you who are horrified by my book-destruction.

Some more hardware: good keyboards are vitally important.  A lot of current laptop keyboards are bad, bad, bad.  Your keyboard is your first point of contact with what you are creating.  Good tactile feedback from a keyboard improves typing accuracy, speeds you up.

I started writing my first novel using IBM's legendarily bad Chiclet keyboard, and I still shudder when I remember those days.   It's renowned for contributing to poor sales of the PCjr.  A keyboard that killed a computer! https://www.goodgearguide.com.au/slideshow/214894/10-worst-pc-keyboards-all-time/

The best laptop keyboards I've used were on ThinkPads when the machines were being made by IBM.  There was a dip in quality after Lenovo started making ThinkPads, but I've liked recent ThinkPad keyboards.

I don't know anything about Mac keyboards, except the nausea I feel whenever I provide tech support to my kids on their MacBook Airs.  But please, whatever OS you use, research keyboards and if you can, try them out before you buy.

Sidebar: can't talk about keyboards without a shoutout to this amazing ThinkPad butterfly keyboard.  Someone bring it back, please.  https://www.businessinsider.com/lenovo-thinkpad-701c-laptop-butterfly-keyboard-2017-10

When I'm working with my laptop attached to a dock and large monitors, I use a Freestyle RGB Split Mechanical Gaming Keyboard.  You can separate the modules as far you want, and tilt each side vertically to the most comfortable angle.  Great for your wrists.

Keyboard nerds: I got Cherry MX Brown switches and added O-ring switch dampeners for a 0.4 mm travel reduction and sound dampening.  Have loved this setup for the last four years.

And, you non-keyboard-nerd normals: if you think I'm weird, read this. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-obsessive-pleasures-of-mechanical-keyboard-tinkerers

I do remember my non-ergonomic Northgate Omnikey Ultra with great affection.  I had to stop using it because my wrists started hurting and I am terrified by the faintest possibility of carpal tunnel syndrome.  Had to look for something more ergonomic.

Omnikeys now sell for a lot of money--look in your basement if you remember using one, or you think your parents might have.  Also, note that people mourn the death of their beloved Omnikeys. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/7r74hk/v_my_northgate_omnikey_is_finally_dead_every/

And, please, please, get a good chair.  Like me, many of you spend the majority of your waking lives sitting down.  And your back will pay the price.  This is my Steelcase Leap Chair V.2.

Like the better keyboards, these chairs are bloody expensive.  But surgery for carpal tunnel or back problems is a lot more expensive, and extremely painful besides.

I have an earlier model of the Leap chair that I bought in 2010 that is still going strong, and I have no doubt that that it'll still be alive and working ten years from now.  I invested in a good chair after buying many big-store chairs that disintegrated in a year.

Look online for second-hand chairs from the better manufacturers, and you'll be able to buy one for a lot less than the listed prices.  https://rework-furniture.com/brands/steelcase/

I realize that perhaps I spend way too much on all this stuff.  Some months my credit card statements give me extreme stress.

But I figure all these things are finally worth it if they help me write more efficiently.  I write slowly, slowly--have published only four books in a lifetime of writing, so anything that helps speed up the damn process even a little bit is great.

Use the tools that work for you.  You can write a book using a notebook and a pencil, or--for that matter--a stylus on palm leaves.  As you can see, I obsess about tools, and also think they influence the way we think and behave.

As @roybahat says, "First we make the tools, then the tools make us."

Besides, using a good tool is a joy in itself.  The first fountain pen was built by an anonymous genius of an engineer in the 10th century CE, in response to a spec created by the fourth Fatimid Caliph, Abu Tamim Ma'ad al-Muizz li-Din Allah.

Who proclaimed, regally, "We wish to constuct a pen which can be used for writing without having recourse to an inkholder and whose ink will be contained inside it. Whenever a person wishes to write with it, he fills it with ink and thereby writes whatever he likes..."

"When he wishes to stop writing, and the ink has ceased flowing and the pen has become dry, the writer can then put it in his sleeve or anywhere he wishes and it will not stain it at all, nor will any drop of ink leak out of it..."

"The ink will only flow when he expressly desires it to do so and when there is an intention to write it."

The first iteration built by the unnamed engineer "released a little more ink than necessary." But after some debugging by the engineer, V.2 worked perfectly.

And the Caliph's official historian wrote, "[The engineer]
brought forward the pen and behold, it turned out to be a pen which can be turned upside down in the hand and tipped from side to side, and no trace of ink appears from it..."

"When a secretary takes up the pen and writes with it, he is able to write in the most elegant script that could possibly be desired; then, when he lifts the pen off the sheet of writing material, it holds in the ink..."

"I observed that it was a wonderful piece of work, the like of which I had never imagined I would ever see..."

"There became apparent to me in it a fine moral example, in that the pen does not release its contents except when specifically requested to do so and for some useful purpose which is part of the original reason for asking it to write..."

"This is the same sort of thing which certain of the masses of
people talk about in regard to the Pen: that it was the first
thing which God, He is exalted and magnified, created, then
saying to it "Write!" and it wrote."

Across the centuries, I say: Subhanallah!

And...  Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was the architect of the Indian constitution, a revolutionary against the horrors of the caste system, and an all-round genius.  He is often pictured with pens.

Finding out recently that Dr. Ambedkar was a fountain-pen nerd gave me an unreasonable amount of joy.  U. R. Rao writes...

Dr. Ambedkar was partial to Parker, Sheaffer, and Waterman pens.  Somewhere down the years, the pen Dr. Ambedkar wrote the first draft of the constitution with has been lost. It was probably a thick-nibbed Wilson Vacumatic, like these.

It's improbable that the constitution-drafting pen will be found, but one can hope.

Hope this long thread was of interest and of use.  Happy writing!  Or at least, less effortful and painless writing!
