Fables Heard and Seen - I...Space Pen...

I heard this anecdote from somebody or read it somewhere…can’t remember which now… anyway, here it goes…

When the Americans started going to space, the astronauts in the space ships supposedly faced the problem of leaking pens due to pressure related issues…I don’t know whether they were using fountain pens or ball pens…but since both contained liquid…of varying viscosities though… the leaking problem would have existed for both kinds of pens…the astronauts had problems writing in space because of this…and they had to do quite a bit of writing…making notes of their experiments and noting down observations…so, they reported this to their ground staff…and asked the engineers to find alternatives…the ground staff people started in right earnest and commissioned the designing of a new pen that would withstand pressure so that the ink wouldn’t leak…pen experts were consulted…and while all this was going on, it dawned on one of the engineers that the Russians too were sending their cosmonauts to space and they too would be facing the same problem of leaking pens and they too would have found some solution to this problem or maybe are in the process of finding one…so, this person goes to his superior who had enough powers to speak to the Russians directly and told him about what he thought…and suggested that instead of reinventing the wheel, they could make use of the Russian solution in this matter and as this was not a state security issue, the Russians would cooperate… and this American general or whoever called up his Russian counterpart and spoke to him… told him about the problem American astronauts are facing and asked him what Russians are doing about this…the Russian general or whoever replied… “We use a pencil.”

Here endeth the lesson…

This could be an apocryphal story…this might never have happened…this could be a cold war story made up by the Russians…this could be…anything…

Is the ‘story’ about the pen and the pencil, Americans and Russians, or something else altogether…?