Ballpoint
pen
Two Hungarian brothers,
Ladislao J. Biro (1899-1985) and Georg Biro (1897-19??), invented
the ballpoint pen in 1938. Ladislao was a sculptor, painter, and
writer, while his brother was a chemist. The two brothers applied
for patents in 1938, but during World War II they moved to
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Argentina. There
they formed a company to produce the pens, and they patented
several improvements that allowed the ink to be fed by capillary
action rather than by gravity, reducing leakage. A British
financier, Henry Martin, manufactured Biro pens for use by Royal
Air Force pilots, as the pen did not leak with the changes in
pressure of high altitude. Biro pens were in use throughout Europe
by the end of the war. In France, Baron Marcel Bich produced
extremely cheap ballpoint pens in Clichy, outside Paris, achieving
a production rate of 7 million pens a day in the late 1940s. Bich
bought out the Waterman Company in the United States and imported
the Bic. The Biro pen was licensed to Eversharp and to the Eberhard
Faber Company in the United States. However, in 1945, an American
businessman, Milton Reynolds, visited Buenos Aires and brought back
several Biros to the United States. Consulting a patent attorney,
he found that an earlier ballpoint system for a marker had been
patented in 1888 by John J. Loud. Working
from that expired patent and developing an improved flow system,
Reynolds developed a gravity-feed pen. The ink remained a problem,
with early inks skipping, clogging, or fading under sunlight. In
1949 Fran Seech, an Austrian chemist, developed improved ink that
dried quickly, and Frawley Corporation introduced a system
employing his ink as the Papermate pen. Other variations were
introduced, with Pentel bringing out the felttipped ballpoint in
1973 and a ceramic nib in 1981. Gillette introduced an erasable
ballpoint pen in 1979.<?xml:namespace prefix =
o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Community
ballpoint pen
