The manufacturers of fountain pens apparently have not seen such increase in sales since the year Lewis Waterman made the 3 key inventions that allowed the mass-production of quality writing instruments. While ballpoint and rollerball pens were reported to kill the market of fountain pens, and hi-tech presented by email and cell-phones was to eliminate writing as activity, something unpredicted happened – and changed the world of writing instruments. Know more about fountain pen
I believe this can be explained by several factors.
First, writing made a man, as many of us were taught at school. No technology can replace the art of writing and diminish the value of habit. Spell-checkers in Word make us rely on automatic scripts which, as we all know, cannot guess our thoughts. You never can trust a spell-checker to make your article grammatically correct, and human reviewing is always necessary, be it a term paper, an agreement, or some internal company policy. Typing involves making more errors than writing with a pen, that’s for sure.
Second, email servers for conveying information, and not empathy. Writing involves much of emotional component, changing the style, pressure on the paper, and handwriting. A hand-written letter tells the reader a lot about the writer, while typed email is a pure text lacking soul.