History

The manufacture of economical, reliable ballpoint pens resulted from a combination of experimentation, modern chemistry, and the precision manufacturing capabilities of 20th century technology. Many patents worldwide are testaments to failed attempts to make these pens commercially viable and widely available. The ballpoint pen went through several failures in design throughout its early stages. It has even been argued that a design by Galileo Galilei (during the 17th century), was that of a ballpoint pen[citation needed]. The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on 30 October 1888, to John J. Loud, [2], a leather tanner, who was attempting to make a writing implement that would be able to write on the leather he tanned, which the then-common fountain pen couldn't do. The pen had a rotating small steel ball, held in place by a socket. Although the pen could be used to mark rough surfaces such as leather, as Loud intended, it proved to be too coarse for letter writing and was not commercially exploited.
In the period between 1904 and 1946, there was intense interest in improving writing instruments, particularly alternatives or improvements to the fountain pen. Slavoljub Eduard Penkala invented a solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, a German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916. In these inventions, the ink was placed in a thin tube whose end was blocked by a tiny ball, held so that it could not slip into the tube or fall out of the pen. The ink clung to the ball, which spun as the pen was drawn across the paper. These proto-ballpoints did not deliver the ink evenly. If the ball socket was too tight, the ink did not reach the paper. If it were too loose, ink flowed past the tip, leaking or making smears. Many inventors tried to fix these problems, but without commercial success.[3]
László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, and the sharp tip of his fountain pen often tore his pages of newsprint. Bíró had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Since, when tried, this viscous ink would not flow into a regular fountain pen nib, Bíró, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens. Bíró fitted this pen with a tiny ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Bíró filed a British patent on 15 June 1938.
Earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink, and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Depending on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and required that the pen be held nearly vertically. The Biro pen both pressurized the ink column and used capillary action for ink delivery, solving the flow problems.
In 1940 the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, moved to Argentina fleeing Nazi Germany and on June 10, filed another patent, and formed Bíró Pens of Argentina. The pen was sold in Argentina under the Birome brand (portmanteau of Bíró and Meyne), which is how ballpoint pens are still known in that country. László was known in Argentina as Ladislao José Bíró. This new design was licensed by the British, who produced ball point pens for RAF aircrew as the Biro, who found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude.
Eversharp, a maker of mechanical pencils teamed up with Eberhard-Faber in May 1945 to license the design for sales in the United States. At about the same time a U.S. businessman saw a Biro pen in a store in Buenos Aires. He purchased several samples and returned to the U.S. to found the Reynolds International Pen Company, producing the Biro design without license as the Reynolds Rocket. He managed to beat Eversharp to market in late 1945; the first ballpoint pens went on sale at Gimbels department store in New York City on 29 October 1945 for US$12.50 each. This pen was widely known as the rocket in the U.S. into the late 1950s.
Similar pens went on sale before the end of the year in England, and by the next year in most of Europe. Cheap disposable instruments were produced by the BIC Corporation with "Bic" as the tradename (pronounced BiK, not Beak); as with 'Hoover' and 'Xerox', the tradename has subsequently passed into general use. With BIC's expanding product range, the original Bic pen design is now termed the Bic Cristal.
Since 1990, Bíró's birthday (the 29th of September) is Inventor's Day in Argentina.