It’s pretty annoying that we are exhorted at the end of almost every email to ‘save the planet’ by not printing things out -and yet paper is such a convenient, portable, readable medium. Actually, you can’t easily beat pencil and paper for overall ease of use.
Today’s invention is a small printer which moves a printhead about in the usual way but which writes using a small stick of graphite (fed automatically, as in a propelling pencil).
This printer has no paper tray because it uses only one sheet (until it wears out). Once having ‘drawn’ out the required map or shopping list or child’s drawing, the sheet can be reinserted (probably in the oposite direction) and the printhead then applies a small, rotary eraser to the places previously drawn upon.
In this way, we get all the convenience of using paper and we also ensure that many fewer trees get the chop.
