Mrs. Spriggs: Why do you leave such horrid ink blots in the letter to Mr. Kimble, when you are asking him for position in his company?

Mr. Spriggs: I wanted him to see that I am enough of a businessman to use a fountain pen.

-Fort Wayne Sentinel June 21, 1890

Explanation for those who do not get the joke:

Early fountain pens were prone to blotting the page. Early users of these tools simply learned to work around them, about the same way that early computer users worked around computer crashes. And these early users liked to make jokes about their pens the same way that we joked about early computers. As the early pens improved at the turn of the century, these blotting jokes seemed to dry up. Come to think of it, computer jokes seem to have fallen off as well as these machines become more reliable and intergrated into our lives.