Writing Underwater And An Urban Legend Bites The Dust: Pt. 2

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23847 – 1286

Dear Bloghoppers, Blogfrogs, Gentle Readers, and New and Old Followers,

I had a little fun with this. This is not scientific by any means. I know that many of you could do a lot better, but you didn’t do it. I did. I did it because it was kind of interesting and sounded kind of fun and is something I’ve always wanted to try, so

Here’s the Haps:

I used the Field Notes Brand FNC-17, The Expedition, notebook, which has a synthetic paper that is pretty much indestructible. If you go to the link, you will find a series of short videos (under a minute) where they did 12 tests of their notebook and used the Space Pen. My setup was not very scientific and I didn’t work too hard on it. Like I said, I wanted to have fun but I was also curious.

Tonight was pizza night:

I tried the pen on a greasy, cheesy paper plate. Many pens don’t write on paper plates that well in the first place, but this was my result:

Now this pen had not been used before, but even with it being new, it still did okay, in my opinion. My next step was to try the empty pizza box, which I think went very well:

Finally, did it write underwater, and was the notebook, in fact, waterproof? I wrote the sentence, “This is a test page, dry.” The two together were a nice writing experience. Next, I put some water in a dishpan and held the notebook under the water and wrote on it. It worked fairly well.

Except that I didn’t wait for the paper to dry. It was dripping water, of course, and my instinct was to wipe it on my shirt, so it smudged a bit. I redid it and this time waited a bit for it to dry out somewhat, and the results weren’t bad at all. Very legible but perhaps slightly smeared this time.

I don’t know if these two products would be everybody’s choice, but I can see where it would be very useful if you work outdoors a lot, like a forest ranger, perhaps a firefighter, or a police officer. Occupations where you could be exposed to the elements. Something I read somewhere mentioned the pen’s usefulness working on an oil rig. I had considered trying the test with a few drops of motor oil, but time was pinched and I had already done the pizza box.

So, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I just didn’t get a chance to try it in outer space. Oh well. It was fun presenting this to you. Not sure how long this current blogging streak will continue but I am hoping to keep it going for a few more days, at least.

Oh, and I have a question. If space is a vacuum, who changes the bags?