When Was the Sharpie Invented? The Pen That Took Over Autographs

1964. That's the short answer. Sanford put the Sharpie Fine Point black marker on the market that year, and it was the first pen-style permanent marker anybody had made.

The longer answer is more interesting, because the Sharpie wasn't built for autographs and nobody at Sanford was thinking about sports memorabilia. It ended up as the pen every athlete reaches for by accident, and it's still the wrong choice for about half the things people ask us to get signed.

Before the marker: an ink company from 1857

Frederick W. Redington and William H. Sanford Jr. started the Sanford Manufacturing Company in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1857. They made ink and glue. Nine years later the company moved to Chicago, which is a detail we like around here, because our warehouse sits about twenty miles from where they landed. By 1940 the name had changed to the Sanford Ink Company.

So by the time the Sharpie showed up, Sanford had been making ink for over a century. That matters more than it sounds. The hard part of a permanent marker isn't the felt tip, it's an ink that dries fast, doesn't bleed, and sticks to surfaces that aren't paper.

1964: the first pen-style permanent marker

Markers existed before 1964, but they were fat, industrial things. What Sanford built was a marker shaped like a pen, and it wrote on glass, wood, stone, plastic, metal and paper without running or lifting off.

The marketing leaned on television. Johnny Carson and Jack Paar, the two biggest talk show hosts in the country, put the marker in front of a national audience. It caught on in offices, then in classrooms, then everywhere.

How it ended up in every athlete's hand

Nobody decided the Sharpie would be the autograph pen. It won because of what it does.

• It writes on anything. A player at a signing table gets handed a photo, then a jersey, then a football, then a kid's shoe. One pen covers all of it.
• The ink dries almost instantly. At a signing the item is moving within seconds. A pen that smudges ruins the thing you paid for.
• The line is bold. A signature you can read across a room is worth more than one you have to lean in for. That's true at a card show and it's true at auction.
• It fits in a pocket. Or, famously, a sock.

The Terrell Owens moment

On October 14, 2002, Terrell Owens caught a 37-yard touchdown from Jeff Garcia on Monday Night Football, pulled a Sharpie out of his sock, signed the ball in the end zone and handed it off in the stands. He'd planned it. He asked the training staff for the marker seconds before the drive started, and the ball went to his financial advisor, who happened to be watching from the luxury suite of the cornerback Owens had just beaten.

Seattle's coach called it shameful. The league didn't fine him. And a permanent marker became a piece of NFL history, which isn't a sentence anybody at Sanford saw coming in 1964.

Where a Sharpie is the wrong pen

Here's the part most articles about the Sharpie skip. We handle signed items every day, and a Sharpie is the right call maybe half the time.

On a baseball, a Sharpie is a mistake. The leather is porous, the ink spreads into the grain, and a crisp signature turns into a blur within hours. Use a ballpoint. On a dark surface like a hockey puck or a brown-panel football, black ink disappears and you want a silver paint pen. On a glossy helmet shell, a Sharpie works but a colored paint pen holds up better over the years, and a black paint pen is the one thing we tell people never to use, because it smears.

Our full breakdown of which pen to use on every kind of item covers all of it, surface by surface. It's the post we send people most often.

Does Sharpie ink last?

Permanent means permanent against water and rubbing. It doesn't mean permanent against sunlight. Sharpie ink fades in UV, and blue fades faster than black. A signed photo in a sunny room can lose a signature in a few years, which is why how you display a signed piece matters as much as how it was signed, and why UV glass is worth the money. For anything you're not hanging yet, our guide on storing and protecting a collection covers the rest.

One more thing worth knowing if you buy vintage: Sharpies didn't exist before 1964. A 1950s photo signed in fresh black Sharpie is a problem, and it's one of the first things an authenticator checks. We wrote about the other tells in how to tell if an autograph is real.

What we use

Every signing we've run, we've brought our own markers and told customers to bring theirs too. Pens dry out, colors run out, and the one you want is never the one on the table. If you're going to a signing, our guide on how signing events actually work has the rest of the list.

If you'd rather skip the line, everything in our marketplace was signed with the right pen for the item and carries a third-party COA. Same for the pieces that come out of our live breaks, which run every day.