Ballpoint Pens

These days almost everyone has used a ballpoint pen and dont really think about where they came from well im about to tell you all that information today

The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud, a leather tanner it seems that the then-common fountain pens could not write on leather, his pen had a small rotating steel ball, held in place by a socket it was fine to write on leather and rougher surfaces but to rough to write on paper.

In the period between 1904 and 1946, improvements to the fountain pen were invented. 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 though these proto-ballpoints didn’t deliver the ink evenly.

László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, 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.

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.

With the new design licensed by the British, ball point pens where produced for RAF aircrew 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.

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