Bedside Writing

I might not have a Moleskine by the bed, but I do have a Fisher space pen (my 2006 birthday present), and can recommend one such to all insomniac writers. The space pen, so called because it works in zero gravity, will write underwater, over grease, in any temperature between -20°C and +200°C, and, most usefully for the rest of us, it works upside down.

It was developed by Paul Fisher in the early 1960s in response to NASA's need for a pen that would work in space. The urban myth - stating that the Americans spent $1m designing a pen, whereas the Russians used pencils - is (sadly) not true. The Americans had found that broken pencil-leads tended to float into people's eyes, ears, noses and also into electrical circuits. They were also highly flammable in the pure-oxygen environment of a space capsule.

The space pen's ballpoint is made from tungsten carbide. The ink is hermetically sealed in a pressurised reservoir, and is forced out by compressed nitrogen at a pressure of nearly 35psi. I find that all this technology makes it invaluable for writing on the back of my hand at 3am.

See Fisher's website for more information, where, incidentally, they advertise the Moleskine as the perfect space-pen companion.