Why pens have rubbery grips | Hacker News Reader

Why pens have rubbery grips

pnas.org

31 pointslainon45 comments

Most commodity ballpoint pens didn't have rubbery grips prior to the mid 1990's. I remember back-to-school shopping at the end of one summer, and most of the bags of pens were upgraded to have built-in grips. Prior to that, you'd buy triangular slip-on sleeves separately, if you wanted additional gripping traction.

It was a trend that started, and progressed like many other marketing arms races. One stand-out product emerged and out sold the normal offerings, due to novelty, and all other imitators jumped on the band wagon to cash in on that novelty.

>triangular slip-on sleeves separately

As someone who grew up in the 90's, I can almost guarantee you would get the crap beat out of them for walking into school with something like that.

Thank goodness they're integrated into the pen now!

Being bullied for this? Really?

It's a pecking order instinct. I'm sure even lobsters do it. The algorithm goes like this: find someone weaker than you, focus on any difference however small or imaginary, initiate pecking, preserve your place in the hierarchy.

So true. My nephew has a small mole on his nose. I never notice it, nobody in my immediate family notices it, but he gets bullied at school over it, to the point he wants it surgically removed. He’s six.

Worst thing is, the bullies don't care about it either. They just need an excuse. It's hard to believe how ruthless kids can be to each other. School was forever ago, but I still don't miss it.

Yeah. I'm sincerely glad that the majority of people here somehow have never lived in a world where that exists. But I (and many others) were not so fortunate.

I mean, where do people think all those pocket protector nerd jokes came from? Thin air? Or--dare I provoke more downvotes--was it because people were bullied for having them?

I'm not _endorsing_ bullying by simply acknowledging scenarios where it exists. I kind of miss the 90's even more now. Because it was acceptable to talk about, and sing about on the radio; the darker things of life like getting bullied, being a failure, being used in a relationship "I'm just a suck'er with no self-esteeem! ohh wayyy ohhhh", and so on.

Bullies don't typically need much of a reason. Having something that they don't is usually enough.

As someone who also grew up in the 90s, all the cool kids had these things.

Same here. Everyone was envious of the kids with nice writing implements...triangle grips included.

It's really weird to me that you've caught some downvotes for this benign and not innaccurate remark. I've upvoted you to compensate, but to no avail.

I love that even admitting that bullying exists, somehow makes people want to attack you.

As if I somehow endorsed it, or thought there was "logic" behind bullying, or that I wasn't the one on the _receiving_ end of the bullying.

We live in hilariously odd times. Better to pretend bad situations don't exist.

> I love that even admitting that bullying exists, somehow makes people want to attack you.

I love that a downvoting a comment which is construing an anecdotal case as the general case is considered getting attacked. Maybe you should just ask why people seem to disagree with your sentiment rather than jumping to conclusions?

I was a teenager throughout the 90's and was a bit of a bully from time to time, and I don't think bullying has changed much since then. If it wasn't a pen, it was the shoes, t-shirt, or the way someone pronounced a word.

Bullies are bullies, they will pick up on any thing they can and exploit it to belittle another person.

My parents once bought me Mighty Ducks shoes from Payless, without consulting me, when I was in around the 7th grade; suddenly everyone at my school was a bully.

Thank you for your candour, and likely repentance. If you have any insights from that time, that might help HN users' [maybe future] kids avoid your mistakes, I'd welcome your sharing

This seems to be an interestingly generational thing. As someone who learned to write prior to the 1990s, I may attest that the pen used to be controlled by balance and cautiously applying pressure. (Actually, you were punished in school, if you were caught holding the pen with grip.) This is also, why classic fountain pens, art pens and fine liners feature front pieces of a textureless, glossy material (because grip actually counteracted the control of a pen, if held that way).

[Edit] Somewhen in the early 2000s Wacom changed from thin and glossy to thick and rubbery pens for their tablets (i.e., from balance to grip). I'm still failing to become comfortable with those...

This shows the difference between writing with a fountain pen and writing with a ballpoint; the former requires and demands no vertical pressure, while the latter demands that the user push hard down on the paper. So penmanship in fountain pens focused on using the arm to write and using minimal vertical pressure.

I'm left-handed, and [writing] dyslexic. To be able to form any repeatable small pattern shapes with a pen (or pencil) such as letters or words, requires me to grip it with the force of an industrial press. Even then, I have to tense my hand, wrist and arm muscles just to write 'neatly'. As you can imagine, I don't ever write long essays.

Rubbery grips don't help me or hinder me, but I do tend to prefer them over hard plastic pens, not sure why.

I used to think 'Hey, we all use keyboards now, my failure to be able to write words wont be a problem anymore', but no... the world is now telling me 'tablets and pens are the future'. Not for me they are not; I have yet to find any handwriting recognition algorithm that can decipher my scrawl. In fact the lack of traction on the glass tablet screen makes my writing worse. :(

Several of my relatives have this sort of issue (minus being left handed). Some of them have seen some improvement by taking B vitamins and magnesium supplements, a thing that was tried due to information from a study. It isn't a cure, but it has made things more bearable.

It seems to me that research have learned titling from modern journalism.

It is the actual research title and it is clickbaity.

>Without a large true contact area made by our hands, it would be nearly impossible to lift a glass or to hold onto a handrail in a transport vehicle.

As a side note, the reason why usually you don't drop a glass when gripping it with your hand is largely due -besides friction - to the fact that the glass is usually a truncated cone with the larger base on the upper side, and as well handrails have a suitable outer diameter to be enclosed in the hand and allowing to tight your fingers around it - between 40 and 50 mm.

Try holding (in a transport vehicle) onto an 80 or 90 mm handrail (rubber covered) ...

Or even just an upside down glass in the comfort of your own house.

I just saw on a catalog the 20 or 25th anniversary of a certain Bic pen. It was on the cover page

I thought it signified some milestone in printing where component pieces combimed with easy logo/name printing changed the logo game

Thus, more pens made with plastic (rubbery) grips had to do with manufacturing

Now i am enlightened

Are there any smartphones that have a rubber coating? Something akin to the Thinkpad lid coating. I use a rubbery case, buy that's something else.

That got me to thinking. Why doesn't Lenovo cash on Thinkpad brand with a smartphone line that would be branded as such. It could use the same rubber coating and maybe titanium skeleton or something. Maybe I'm just not aware that they indeed have such a thing.

Apple made (makes?) a thin, silicone-coated case for the iPhone. It was monumentally annoying. The extra grippiness of the silicone meant that every time I pulled my phone out of my pants pocket, the pocket came with it and turned inside out. It was also hard to put the phone back in my pocket because it would grip the pocket material instead of sliding in. And finally, the silicone was a victim of its own grippiness and wore out rather quickly.

I've found a textured case like Magpul makes to be far superior to one with soft rubber.

My Moto G (3rd gen or something like that) definitely has slightly rubbery texture, more so than thinkpads I think. So they do exist to some degree. Not aware of current models though.

The Xperia Mini Pro and the Xperia X10 Mini Pro (shit naming scheme) both have rubberised backs, very like the Thinkpad lid covering (but grippier). It works very well at making the phone satisfying and comfortable to hold, but the durability sucks and it eventually peels off under regular use.

That's why I dislike iPhone - 5S was last grippable version, since then it's slippery material PLUS slippery shape.

Miss my HTC M7 - it had a few milimeters larger back than front, and well defined edge, it was the last phone that you could hold really comfortably and safely even without the case.

iPhone SE is just as grippable as the 5S, it's the same design but 2.5 years newer. Unless something changed in the aluminum finish, but it feels fine to me. (Don't have a 5S for comparison)

Because it sucks to hold a plastic pen slipping around in sweaty hands?

Terrible title problems. To save time, here's the outline given when you click on the link: TL-DR: 'Why does gripping a pen, tool, or handle feel more secure when it is coated with a rubbery material? The keratin of the skin outer layer is stiff and rough at a small scale. When encountering a smooth, stiff, and impermeable surface, such as polished metal or glass, the actual contact area is initially small as is the friction. Because the keratin softens when it is hydrated by the moisture secreted from the sweat pores, it requires many seconds for the contact area to increase to the value reached almost instantaneously with a soft material, such as a rubber. This mechanism might be used by our tactile sense to identify materials and has implications for the design of tactile displays. '

How is this a thing that needs explaining?

Try actually reading the paper. The analysis is actually quite compelling.

I did read the paper and I'm not saying the analysis isn't compelling. I'm saying it is obvious and does not need a paper to be explained.

The process by which human fingers gives rise to stable contacts with smooth, hard objects is surprisingly slow. Using high-resolution imaging, we found that, when pressed against glass, the actual contact made by finger pad ridges evolved over time following a first-order kinetics relationship. This evolution was the result of a two-stage coalescence process of microscopic junctions made between the keratin of the stratum corneum of the skin and the glass surface. This process was driven by the secretion of moisture from the sweat glands, since increased hydration in stratum corneum causes it to become softer. Saturation was typically reached within 20 s of loading the contact, regardless of the initial moisture state of the finger and of the normal force applied.

So, nothing to see here, totally obvious?

Many words to say "Moist fingers grips smooth,hard objects better than dry finger". Again, I'm not saying it is useless or uninteresting or that the science is simple, I'm saying you can see the behavior without knowing the science and still understand it.

Then again, what is interesting to one person might not be equally interesting another.

But it's not just a moist finger, initial moisture doesn't matter much. It's the whole process that starts when you touch an object. That doesn't seem obvious.

You can't cite "it's obvious" in other research papers though. Now that this research is published, it can easily be cited as a fact/finding/proof.

Fair enough.

TLDR from the article:

> Because the keratin softens when it is hydrated by the moisture secreted from the sweat pores, it requires many seconds for the contact area to increase to the value reached almost instantaneously with a soft material, such as a rubber.

The most interesting thing from the bottom of the abstract.

This mechanism might be used by our tactile sense to identify materials and has implications for the design of tactile displays.

This is interesting, yes, but it seems immediately ... odd to me.

Do we use rubber to manufacture tires because the frictional coefficient between rubber and asphalt is established rapidly due to asphalt sweating? No, it's because the frictional coefficient is already rather high to begin with. Is this not the case with rubber-keratin as well? Why involve sweat when static friction is sufficiently explanatory?

They are talking about non rubbery surfaces

> When encountering a smooth, stiff, and impermeable surface, such as polished metal or glass, the actual contact area is initially small as is the friction. Because the keratin softens when it is hydrated by the moisture secreted from the sweat pores, it requires many seconds for the contact area to increase to the value reached almost instantaneously with a soft material, such as a rubber.

As compared to rubbery ones.

> the value reached almost instantaneously with a soft material, such as a rubber

The role of sweat appears to be to make the keratin in the finger softer and allowing more of it to contact the hard surface. This is unnecessary when contacting a rubber surface since the rubber surface is already soft. I.e. rubber makes the sweating unnecessary and hence works even against hard surfaces like non-sweaty keratin or asphalt.

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