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The first great success for the ballpoint pen came on an October morning in 1945 when a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States. The ad described the new pen as a "fantastic... miraculous fountain pen ... guaranteed to write for two years without refilling!" On that first day of sales, Gimbels sold out its entire stock of 10,000 pens-at $12.50 each! Actually, this "new" pen wasn't new at all and didn't work much better than ballpoint pens that had been produced ten years earlier. The story begins in 1888 when John Loud, an American leather tanner, patented a roller-ball-tip marking pen. Loud’s invention featured a reservoir of ink and a roller ball that applied the thick ink to leather hides. John Loud’s pen was never produced, nor were any of the other 350 patents for ball-type pens issued over the next thirty years. The major problem was the ink - if the ink was thin the pens leaked, and if it was too thick, they clogged. Depending on the temperature, the pen would sometimes do both.

The next stage of development came almost fifty years after Loud’s patent, with an improved version invented in Hungary in 1935 by Ladislas Biro and his brother, Georg.   Ladislas Biro was very talented and confident of his abilities, but he had never had a pursuit that kept his interest and earned him a good living.  He had studied medicine, art, and hypnotism, and in 1935 he was editing a small newspaper-where he was frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling fountain pens and cleaning up ink smudges.  Besides that, the sharp tip of his fountain pen often scratched or tore through the newsprint (paper). Determined to develop a better pen, Ladislas and Georg (who was a chemist) set about making models of new designs and formulating better inks to use in them.

One summer day while vacationing at the seashore, the Biro brothers met an interesting elderly gentleman, Augustine Justo, who happened to be the president of Argentina.   After the brothers showed him their model of a ballpoint pen, President Justo urged them to set up a factory in Argentina.  When World War II broke out in Europe, a few years later, the Biros fled to Argentina, stopping in Paris along the way to patent their pen.

Once in Argentina, the Biros found several investors willing to finance their invention, and in 1943 they had set up a manufacturing plant.  Unfortunately, the pens were a spectacular failure. The Biro pen, like the designs that had preceded it, depended on gravity for the ink to flow to the roller ball. This meant that the pens worked only when they were held more or less straight up, and even then the ink flow was sometimes too heavy, leaving smudgy globs on the paper.  The Biro brothers returned to their laboratory and devised a new design, which relied on "capillsry action" rather than gravity to feed the ink.  The rough "ball" at the end of the pen acted like a metal sponge, and with this improvement ink could flow more smoothly to the ball, and the pen could be held at a slant rather than straight up.  One year later, the Biros were selling their new, improved ballpoint pen throughout Argentina. But it still was not a smashing success, and the men ran out of money.

The greatest interest in the ballpoint pen came from American flyers who had been to Argentina during World War II. Apparently it was ideal for pilots because it would work well at high altitudes and, unlike fountain pens, did not have to be refilled frequently. The U.S. Department of State sent specifications to several American pen manufacturers asking them to develop a similar pen.  In an attempt to corner the market, the Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the rights to manufacture their ballpoint pen in the United States. Eberhard Faber later sold its rights to the Eversharp Company, but neither was quick about putting a ballpoint pen on the market. There were still too many bugs in the Biro design.

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, a fifty-four-year-old Chicago salesman named Milton Reynolds became the first American manufacturer to market a ballpoint pen successfully. While vacationing in Argentina, Reynolds had seen Biro’s pen in the stores and thought that the novel product would sell well in America.  Because many of the patents had expired, Reynolds thought he could avoid any legal problems, and so he went about copying much of the Biros’ design.  It was Reynolds who made the deal with Gimbels to be the first retail store in America to sell ballpoint pens.  He set up a makeshift factory with 300 workers who began stamping out pens from whatever aluminum was not being used for the war.  In the months that followed, Reynolds made millions of pens and became fairly wealthy, as did many other manufacturers who decided to cash in on the new interest.

The competition among pen manufacturers during the mid-1940s became quite hectic, with each one claiming new and better features. Reynolds even claimed that his ballpoint could write under water, and he hired Esther Williams, the swimmer and movie star, to help prove it. Another manufacturer claimed that its pen would write through ten carbon copies, while still another demonstrated that its pen would write up-side down.  However, the effect of the slogans and advertising wore off as soon as the owners discovered the many problems that still existed with the ballpoint pens. As the sale of the pens began to drop, so did the price, and the once expensive luxury now would not even sell for as little as 19 cents.  Once again, it looked as if the ballpoint pen would be a complete failure.  For the pen to regain the public’s favor and trust, somebody would have to invent one that was smooth writing, quick drying, nonskipping, nonfading, and most important didn’t leak.

Two men, each with his own pen company, delivered these results.  The first was Patrick J. Frawley Jr.  Frawley met Fran Seech, an unemployed Los Angeles chemist who had lost his job when the ballpoint pen company he was working for had gone out of business. Seech had been working on improvements in ballpoint ink, and on his own he continued his experiments in a tiny cubbyhole home laboratory.  Frawley was so impressed with his work that he bought Seech’s new ink formula in 1949 and started the Frawley Pen Company.  Within one year, Frawley was in the ballpoint pen business with yet another improved model-the first pen with a retractable ballpoint tip and the first with no-smear ink.  To overcome many of the old prejudices against the leaky and smeary ballpoint pen of the past, Frawley initiated an imaginative and risky advertising campaign, a promotion he called Project Normandy.  Frawley instructed his salesmen to barge into the offices of retail store buyers and scribble all over the executives’ shirts with one of the new pens.  Then the salesman would offer to replace the shirt with an even more expensive one if the ink did not wash out entirely.   The shirts did come clean and the promotion worked.  As more and more retailers accepted the pen, which Frawley named the "Papermate," sales began to skyrocket. Within a few years, the Papermate pen was selling in the hundreds of millions.

The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of penholders and pen cases.  Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens he had seen and he was also shocked at their high cost. But he recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market.  He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent.  Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope.  By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, non-leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic."  The ballpoint pen had finally become a practical writing instrument.  The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors. 

A ballpoint pen is a writing instrument with an internal ink reservoir and a sphere for a point. The internal chamber is filled with a viscous ink that is dispensed at its tip during use by the rolling action of a small sphere. The sphere, usually from 0.5mm to 1.2 mm in diameter, may be made of brass, steel, tungsten carbide,^[1] or any durable, hard (nondeformable) material.

istory

An authentic "birome", made in Argentina by Bíró & Meyne

The manufacture of economical, reliable ball point pens arose from experimentation, modern chemistry, and the precision manufacturing capabilities of 20th century technology. Many patents worldwide are testaments to failed attempts at making these pens commercially viable and widely available. The ballpoint pen went through several failures in design throughout its early stages.

The first patent on a ballpoint pen^[2] was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud,^[3] a leather tanner, who was attempting to make a writing instrument that would be able to write on his leather products, which then-common fountain pens could not do. Loud's pen had a small rotating steel ball, held in place by a socket. Although it 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, particularly alternatives or improvements to the fountain pen were invented. 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.^[4]

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 the paper. Bíró had noticed that inks 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.^[5]

Earlier pens leaked or clogged because of incorrect 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 original Biro pen used capillary action and a piston that pressurised the ink column, solving the ink delivery flow problems. Later Biro pens had a spring that kept pressure on the piston, and still later the Biro pens used just gravity and capillary action.^[6]

In 1940 the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, fled Nazi Germany and moved to Argentina. On 10 June they 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 RAFaircrew as the Biro; they found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude, the latter being prone to ink-leakage in the decreased atmospheric pressure.

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, Milton Reynolds, saw a Biro pen in a store inBuenos 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$9.75 each. This pen was widely known as the rocket in the U.S. into the late 1950s.

Description

Ballpoint pen rolling over a paper surface, leaving behind a trail of ink.

There are two basic types of ball point pens: disposable and refillable.

Disposable pens are chiefly made of plastic throughout and discarded when the ink is consumed; refillable pens are metal and some plastic and tend to be much higher in price. The refill replaces the entire internal ink reservoir and ball point unit rather than actually refilling it with ink, as it takes special high-speed centrifugation to properly fill a ball point reservoir with the viscous ink. The simplest types of ball point pens have a cap to cover the tip when the pen is not in use, while others have a mechanism for retracting the tip. This mechanism is usually controlled by a button at the top and powered by a spring within the pen body, but other possibilities include a pair of buttons, a screw, or a slide.

Tip of a ballpoint pen highly magnified

Rollerball pens combine the ballpoint design with the use of liquid ink and flow systems from fountain pens;

Space Pens, developed by Fisher in the United States, combine a more than normally viscous ballpoint pen ink with a gas-pressured piston which forces the ink toward the point. This design allows the pen to write even upside down or in zero gravity environments.^[7] A graphite pencil can also be used in this way but produces graphite dust, requires sharpening, and is erasable, making it undesirable or unsuitable for use in some situations.

Standards

The International Organization for Standardization has published standards for ball point and roller ball pens:

ISO 12756

1998: Drawing and writing instruments – Ball point pens – Vocabulary^[8]

ISO 12757-1

1998: Ball point pens and refills – Part 1: General use^[9]

ISO 12757-2

1998: Ball point pens and refills – Part 2: Documentary use (DOC)^[10]

ISO 14145-1

1998: Roller ball pens and refills – Part 1: General use^[11]

ISO 14145-2

1998: Roller ball pens and refills – Part 2: Documentary use (DOC)^[12]

In everyday life

Ballpoint pens are ubiquitous in modern culture. While other forms of pen are available, ballpoint pens are certainly the most common and almost every household is likely to have several. The fact that they are cheaply available and convenient to use means they are often to be found on desks and also in pockets, handbags, purses, bags and in cars — almost anywhere where one could conceivably need to use a pen. Ballpoint pens are often provided free by businesses as a form of advertising — printed with a company's name, a ballpoint pen is a relatively low cost advertisement that is highly effective (customers will use, and therefore see, a pen daily). Businesses and charities may also include ballpoint pens in direct mail mailings in order to increase a customer's interest in the mailing.

Some people,^[13] also create art on themselves with the pens; this is sometimes known as a ballpoint tattoo. Because of this and of the widespread use of ballpoints by schoolchildren, all ballpoint ink formulas are non-toxic,^[14] and the manufacturing and content of the ink is regulated in most countries.

As art medium

Ballpoint pen drawing

In recent years, the ballpoint pen has become a popular medium for both professional and amateur artists. The instrument offers immediacy of results with little or no preparation required, along with portability and relative low price. Point size and ink characteristics such as lightfastness and opacity are considerations in choosing a make and model of pen.

Characteristics

pixuri - gel
pixuri - roller