How old is biro pens

Loud invented the first ballpoint pen and patented it in in America. This pen had a small steel ball which was placed so it could not fall out nor fall in but it still could rotate freely. This invention was not commercially viable and could not be used for writing. Because of that patent lapsed in time. After that, many tried to improve on the design but did not deliver the ink evenly or overflow and clog the pint.

They combined viscous ink and ball-socket mechanism to make a ballpoint pen that would not allow for an ink to dry out in pen but it would still leave the mark behind when used. The first working ballpoint pen was presented at Budapest International Fair in For our American readers, a pen is usually just a pen. The first ballpoint pen , utilizing a steel ball bearing held in place by a socket, was developed in the late 19th century by a man named John Loud.

He apparently felt that fountain pen ink took too long to dry and was easily smeared when taking notes at the fast pace of a journalist. But, Biro noticed that the ink that was used to print the newspaper dried very quickly. He tried the ink in a fountain pen, but it was too thick to flow properly, according to the European Patent Office, so he began experimenting with other delivery methods.

He and his brother Georg, a chemist, eventually settled on the ball bearing system. The Nazi occupation of Hungary forced the Biro brothers to flee to France, where Laszlo applied for and received a patent. The brothers then moved on to Argentina and continued to tinker with the pen until they had a workable model. Those first pens were expensive. Unfortunately for Biro, his invention began to attract the attention of competitors. Since there was no patent preventing him from copying it, he immediately began manufacturing his own version of the ballpoint pen for sale in the States.

From a Reynolds Pen ad in a issue of the Chicago Tribune. What made it craziest was the fact that nothing could stop people from buying ball-points by the thousands, despite the fact that they 1 often failed to work Reynolds alone got back , defective pens in his first eight months or 2 oozed ink all over hands and paper. One of their contacts, an English accountant named Harry Martin, realized that the ballpoint solved a problem faced by Britain's Royal Air Force: Conventional pens were unsuitable for writing aircraft logs, because they leaked, were too sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and wouldn't let you write on a vertical or overhead surface.

Martin eventually flew to Washington and London, convincing both the U. Air Force and the RAF to adopt the new technology. By the time the Allies won the war, the ballpoint shared the luster of victory. When the pens went into commercial production in , they were a sensation. Yet people swarmed a New York department store to buy 8, of them on the first day of sale.

People lining up to be the first to buy new technology? Where have we heard that before? You mean, it happened in the old days, too? Some of the earliest versions of commercial ballpoints leaked and smudged, but manufacturers eventually worked the bugs out.