I was watching one of the lesser-known Peanuts specials on archive.org and noticed that all the school desks had inkwells. I checked the date, and the special was from 1990. Is it just me, or is that insanely late to be using that type of desks? They were completely gone from my schools by the time I started in 1979. How late do you remember them still being used? Why, Why, Charlie Brown, Why, why?
I don’t think any Peanuts movies are set in the present day…
Anyway, my dad talked about there being inkwells in desks when he was a kid. He was in school from 1956 to 1968.
It started kindergarten in 1969 and I don’t recall seeing them. My quick searching showed me that inexpensive ball point pens started in the mid 1950s which would have put a quick end to the need for inkwells.
The need for inkwells was certainly gone before I started school in 1957. Desks with a space for an inkwell lasted for many more years. If you saw one, you’d wonder why desks had cup holders.
Much the same here: I started first grade in 1953, and while the desks didn’t have inkwells they did have holes where the inkwell would go. Much like this. We didn’t get flip-top desks till third or fourth grade. Being a school run by Dominican nuns, it occurred to me later that I might have been sitting at the desk St Thomas Aquinas used when he wrote Summa Theologiae.
I started grade school in 1944, an not only did we have inkwells, we used them, learning penmanship with nib pens dipped in bottles of ink. All the way through grade six, our flip-top desks were firmly bolted to the floor in neat rows.
My dad brought home a ball-point pen in about 1947, which skipped like crazy and was unreliable. It was a two-fer – it was also the first thing I ever saw made of plastic. When I went to college in 1956, I still wrote my hand-in assignments with a fountain pen, mandatory.
Come to think of it, I don’t think that we had individual desks in my Elementary School. We had shared tables with individual cubbies underneath.
I remember inkwells, or the space for them, in the desks in grade school in the 1950’s. We didn’t use them, though; when we started using pens we used replaceable ink cartridges. – huh, they still make them; though I remember them coming five to a little cardboard box, long before blister cards.
I remember seeing the spots for inkwells in elementary school, they lasted until the school was renovated after it was firebombed…
I wonder: the difference is, or was, disposable cartridges or ballpoint pens cost, not a lot, but certainly something, while a quart bottle of ink and a pack of steel pen nibs works out quite cheap, especially if the school gives out supplies to students for free.
It’s true Bics were well on their way into the hands of students by the 1960s, if not before… are there any countries, for instance in Europe, where elementary school students are still made to learn to write with dip pens? Those do at least force you to pay some attention to technique if you are to avoid making a mess.
The elementary school I attended from 1958 to 1966 was built in 1912. It had many classrooms with old desks, most having the inkwell holes that were not used for anything. When we first started using “ink” we were required to buy ink cartridge pens as ball point pens of the day were still quite “smeary”.
Just because the need for them was gone, doesn’t mean they’re going to replace the desks.
I took a few classes at UW-Milwaukee in 2001ish and those desks still had holes like that. I’d always heard they were for ashtrays from back when you could smoke in the lecture halls. There’s no reason to replace hundreds or thousands of desks just because people no longer need inkwells or ashtrays.
I supposed it should be noted that while you couldn’t smoke in the classrooms, even in 2001 you could still smoke indoors in certain areas (or at least one area that I know of). I have no idea when they eliminated smoking in classrooms, but I would have guessed 20+ years earlier.
I finished school in the late seventies and the desks still had holes for inkwells
When I was in elementary school (mid-1960s), our desks had the holes for the inkwells. They weren’t used for that at that time; we used pencils or ballpoint pens. But since every desk had a cubby for your books, we found that they made a great noise if you “buzzed” into them, much like you’d buzz into a brass instrument. Kind of like a cow mooing.
That’s what I remember. We had inkwells in the desks when I was in grade school in the 1950s, but we never had ink bottles in them. I do recall using fountain pens that you had to draw ink into from a bottle, but we mostly used cartridge fountain pens.
Even in my Catholic high school the use of ball point pens, a tool of the devil, was prohibited at least until my graduation in 1969. All my assignments were handed in written in cursive in ink and spotted with ink drips.
I was at primary school in London from 1953 to 1959, and we certainly had them. I was even “ink monitor” for a while, filling up the individual inkwells from the big jar. And yes, we were given metal-nibbed pens to write with - and, oh, the mischief to be had with both ink and nibs. In those days, we were given a fish-oil capsule to swallow with the morning milk, and some children used to put the oil on their neighbour’s pen-nib just to see what happened when they tried to write after the milk break.
We did not have them in grade school in the mid-1960s. I do recall using a fountain pen in the third grade, but only that year. It was ballpoint after that. (First and second grades were pencils only.)
Graduated High School in 1975 and my desk still had a hole for the inkwell.
My elementary school built in 1929 had inkwells in some of the desks when I attended in the mid-70s.
The art teacher we had did have us do a project with “ink and pen” which was the using the old style of writing with a jar of ink and the pen with a nib(?) or quill(?) trying to do calligraphy. Mine looked more like something Charlie Brown was trying to write but one of my classmates was quite good at it.
Maybe the school had a bunch of pens in storage and this was a way to get use out of them?
Had them in the U.K., but not in the US. 60s and 70s.