Do you know the story of the Americans and the Russians in space? Granted, there are a few. Many are true. Some are pure inventions. But all the stories came down to one of them wanting to be the first. This story is about a simple pen. We all have the image in our heads. It shows an astronaut in the space station as he’s making entries in the logbook or recording the results of onboard scientific experiments. Writing? A simple process, right? Yes, maybe on earth. But in space? Up there, writing with a pen doesn’t work. It takes gravity. In zero gravity, it can’t work because it takes gravity to get the ink to flow downwards to the pen’s reservoir. Regardless of whether the pen and pencil story really happened this way, it can still be read as an example of a radically different way of thinking. Their message might be put in this one sentence: With the pencil, the Russians had a head start in making things happen.
