Author: Ye Kefei
One year while traveling in Hungary, I signed the hotel guest confirmation and returned the ballpoint pen to the hotel front desk. He took the ballpoint pen and said "We invented it" with a smile, and I was stunned only to realize that I had learned a trivia - the ballpoint pen was invented by a Hungarian.
Hungary, a small country geographically, is a veritable country of invention and innovation. The Hungarian has won the Nobel Prize 15 times. Safety matches, vitamin C, sound movies, electricity meters, soda, needleless syringes, telephone exchanges, sedatives, automatic coffee machines, BASIC language, transformers and Rubik's cubes...... These things, which more or less changed history, were discovered and invented by Hungarians or Hungarians.
As early as 1888, the ballpoint pen had its prototype, and an American journalist named John Lauder designed a pen that used a rollerball nib, but it was just for his own amusement, and neither the technology nor the durability was enough to support mass production.
After that, both the British and the Germans designed new pens similar to ballpoint pens, but the same quality was so poor that they could not use it for a few days, let alone mass production.
The man who invented the ballpoint pen in the true sense of the word was a Hungarian journalist named Ladislo Bíró. There is also a saying that Biro is a proofreader. However, regardless of his profession, Hiro was a writer, so he was well aware of the inconvenience of traditional fountain pens. What inspired him was also related to his profession - the newspaper company had to print the newspaper, and the ink used to print the newspaper made Biro fall into a deep thought: can ink, which dries almost instantly and does not leave a smudge, replace traditional ink? Could there be a new writing instrument that could take advantage of a new type of ink like this one?
After experimenting, he found that when a thin steel tube was filled with ink, he could write indelible handwriting, and the ink was not easy to spill. However, compared with fountain pen ink, the quick-drying ink is too viscous, it is easy to clog the nib, and because the outflow is not uniform enough, the words are thick and thin. So, he came up with the most important part of the ballpoint pen – attaching a small metal ball that can rotate at the end of the barrel containing the ink, which on the one hand prevents the ink from drying out when exposed to air, and on the other hand, through pressure sensitivity, the ink can flow out at a controlled and average rate.
In June 1943, Biro and his brother Georg (a chemist) applied for a new patent with the European Patent Office to produce the first ballpoint pen that could be mass-produced and commercialized, the Biro ballpoint pen.
There is such a saying: the great inventions of human beings are often first used in the military field, and then from the military to the civilian use, gradually popularized, electronic computers, GPS are typical, a small ballpoint pen actually took this road.
Biro sold the rights to use the ballpoint pen to the British government after owning the patent for the ballpoint pen. The British government bought it mainly for the use of the Royal Air Force crews. This is because ballpoint pens are not only stronger and more durable than traditional fountain pens, but they can also be used at low pressures and high altitudes, unlike fountain pens that spill ink as soon as they reach high altitudes. During World War II, ballpoint pens also contributed a lot to the British military system.
Interestingly, many years later, in the sixties, when the technology of ballpoint pens had matured, an important branch of the ballpoint pen was born, and it was also first used in the national arms race: the space pen.
The space pen is a pressurized ballpoint pen, the refill is pressurized, and the ink is also a special viscous ink. For viscous ink to become liquid, the balls must be rotated so that the ballpoint pen can write smoothly on most surfaces, even underwater. A normal ballpoint pen relies on gravity to supply ink and has an opening above the refill that allows air to replace the used ink. The space pen has no small holes, which avoids ink evaporation and waste, as well as ink leakage from the back of the refill. Space pens can last up to 100 years, compared to ordinary ballpoint pens, which do not last long even if they are not in use.
Because of the writing characteristics of the space pen, it became a part of the "space race" in the 60s of the last century. American astronauts used space pens during manned space flights such as the moon landing, and the Soviets, of course, did not lag behind, and when they went to space, they also carried space pens with them.
After being widely used in World War II, ballpoint pens successfully turned to the commercial world. In 1945, American Milton Renault introduced a new ballpoint pen and successfully put it into commercial production for the first time. This ballpoint pen uses small beads to release a large concentration of gelatin-type ink onto the paper, and is known as "the first pen to write underwater". This kind of pen is extremely expensive, even 10 dollars each, and Renault actually sold 10,000 at once.
Some people make their first pot of gold, and some people think about how to reduce costs. Soon, the first inexpensive ballpoint pen was born, and the Frenchman Marcel Bich developed an industrial process for manufacturing ballpoint pens that significantly reduced costs. In 1949, he officially launched the ballpoint pen in Europe. Named "BIC", a shortening of its name, BIC is now the world's second-largest pen maker. Ten years later, BIC sold ballpoint pens to the U.S. market for the first time, and although there were already many ballpoint pens on the market in the U.S. by this time, consumers did not buy the new products from France, but BIC used the new medium of television to promote it and sell it at an ultra-low price of 29 cents. The BIC TV commercials were also creative, with ballpoint pens shot out of rifles, strapped to skates, mounted on electric drills...... The price of pens has also dropped sharply in the competition, falling below 10 cents within a year, a hundredfold drop from the earliest $10 per piece.
Ballpoint pens have also undergone an important revolution in Japan. In the early days of Japanese ballpoint pens, the refill was filled with dry ink, which was enough to write 20,000 words, which was quite durable. But then it turned out that it was not necessarily a good thing to be able to write more, because the more you used it, the larger the gap between the steel ball and the steel tube, and the ink could easily leak out of the gap. As a result, a small Japanese business owner came up with a trick: make the refill short, fill it with less ink, and write more than 10,000 words to use it up, and the problem of oil leakage in the refill will be solved naturally. He also applied for a patent and specialized in the production of short ballpoint refills and ballpoint pens.
Some people may notice that the elderly in the family (especially those born in the 20s and 30s of the last century) tend to refer to ballpoint pens as ballpoint pens. After World War II, the ballpoint pen was introduced to China, and shrewd businessmen used the anti-Japanese war to make propaganda, using the residual power of the atomic bomb to call it a "ballpoint pen".