EVER WONDER: Ball Point Pens

By Jacque Scott

Ball Point Pens

Let’s see what we can find out about the everyday taken for granted item we call a ball-point pen.  Why was it such an important gadget?  The consumer society of post World War II America was issued in not by new shiny automobiles and air conditioners but by the small item that changed a part of our lives forever.  The ball-point pen cost $12.50 in 1945. And that was a lot money.

Milton Reynolds from Chicago began to mass market them immediately after the War using an adaptation of a ball-point pen invented a few years earlier by a Hungarian living in Argentina.  We actually had an American patent a similar object as early as 1888.  When they first came to the stores in October of 1945, 25,000 pens were sold in the first week.

A Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro invented the first ballpoint pen in 1938. The Hungarian brother’s, Laszlo and George Biro, made the first Ball Point Pen in 1894.

However, the first ball-point pens were flawed and didn’t write well.  The chromium-steel balls stuck, the ‘leak-proof’ cartridges leaked into many pockets, and the ink itself tended to smear on paper.  Eventually, the flaws were worked out and prices fell to a reasonable 19 cents for the everyday variety.

We can find ball-point pens everywhere today —- even underwater.  They are worthy descendents of the first pens developed in ancient times to inscribe signs, symbols, hieroglyphs, and letters on clay, wax tablets, and papyrus.

     These very first pens were sharpened reeds and quills and styluses.  Reeds and quills, both shaved to a fine point, remained man’s primary writing tool until well into the 19th century.

As early as the mid-17th century, however, the forerunners of the fountain pen made their appearance.  They even had built-in ink tanks.  By the early 1800’s metal tips instead of quills, were becoming popular.  But in America’s 1850’s, school children were still expected to make their own pens by sharpening goose quills.

In 1884 an American named Lewis Waterman invented an effective fountain pen.  This first model was filled with an eye dropper and had a feed bar to insure a steady flow of ink on the writing surface.  With a few improvements, the fountain pen remained the writing tool of choice and a favorite gift for graduations and birthdays.

A ballpoint pen, is also known as a biro, or ball pen.  It is a pen that dispenses ink over a metal ball at its point, hence its name “ball point”. The metal commonly used is steel, brass, or tungsten carbide. It was conceived and developed as a cleaner and more reliable alternative to dip pens and fountain pens, and it is now the world’s most-used writing instrument.

Today we even have felt tipped pens in many colors with points ranging from very fine to thick and broad.  And our ball-point pens have come a long way.

From the needs of astronauts, we have ball-point pens that can effectively write upside down or in any angle in gravity-free environments.  The space pen uses a nitrogen pressured ink cartridge to push the ink out at any angle as you write.

Sooo, we now have a pen to use while we are floating around freely in our own personal space satellites… Hmmm… Very interesting…  God bless you.

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