the thrill of a quill

To be precise, a quill printer.

So the Palo Alto Research Centre in California (PARC), run by Xerox, has developed a new type of printer with tiny cantilever arms that flip between an ink reservoir and the paper, picking up and depositing a speck of ink powder or drop of liquid ink.

The cantilever arm is around 2 millimetres long and is flipped using electrostatic forces. The main stem of the arm is coated with Teflon, with a bare metal tip that is slit like a fountain-pen nib so that it picks up and deposits a few pico-litres of ink every time it flips.

(This is for you, bro.)