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The modern fiber tip pen was invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company, Japan in 1962.

That's still a year after the miraculous birth. Just because Horie invented a fiber tip pen doesn't mean it was patented and mass produced in '62. It was not until about '78 that the Bic felt tip super fine pen was popular. I know this because my college bf gave me a dozen boxes of them for Christmas because I thought they were the neatest new things on the market. It was amazing how easily it glided across paper and it seemed you could write faster. Before that, everyone used ball point pens. Highlighters were just beginning to be popular then, too.

Yes, there were felt tipped markers before that but they were big fat things that were used to write on cardboard - mainly moving boxes. And they didn't come in more more than black, red, and maybe blue and green.

Still, they existed in the 1950s, and as big and clunky as they were, they were rapidly improved on. My calculus instructor in highschool used a "narrow" far less clunky red magic marker to grade things ~ he was doing that the first week of school ~ in September 1961.

I'm sure there were others ~ but that one is noteworthy.

Then there's

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B0007DZ8M0

That's an ad for a hard cover book telling you how to use felt pens for artistic work in 1959.