History of the pen 

A short history lesson about how the pen came into existance and how it became a day to day item and promotional wonder.

Ancient Egyptians had developed writing on papyrus scrolls when scribes used thin reed brushes or reed pens from the Juncus Maritimus or sea rush it is even possible that the reed pen might well have been used for writing on parchment as long ago as the First Dynasty or about 3000 BC. Reed pens continued to be used until the Middle Ages although they were slowly replaced by quills from about the seventh century.

The first great success for the ballpoint pen came on an October morning in 1945 when a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States. The ad described the new pen as a "fantastic... miraculous fountain pen ... guaranteed to write for two years without refilling!" On that first day of sales, Gimbels sold out its entire stock of 10,000 pens-at $12.50 each!

Actually, this "new" pen wasn't new at all and didn't work much better than ballpoint pens that had been produced ten years earlier. The story begins in 1888 when John Loud, an American leather tanner, patented a roller-ball-tip marking pen. Loud’s invention featured a reservoir of ink and a roller ball that applied the thick ink to leather hides. John Loud’s pen was never produced, nor were any of the other 350 patents for ball-type pens issued over the next thirty years. The major problem was the ink - if the ink was thin the pens leaked, and if it was too thick, they clogged. Depending on the temperature, the pen would sometimes do both.

The next stage of development came almost fifty years after Loud’s patent, with an improved version invented in Hungary in 1935 by Ladislas Biro and his brother, Georg.   Ladislas Biro was very talented and confident of his abilities, but he had never had a pursuit that kept his interest and earned him a good living.  He had studied medicine, art, and hypnotism, and in 1935 he was editing a small newspaper-where he was frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling fountain pens and cleaning up ink smudges.  Besides that, the sharp tip of his fountain pen often scratched or tore through the newsprint (paper). Determined to develop a better pen, Ladislas and Georg (who was a chemist) set about making models of new designs and formulating better inks to use in them.

One summer day while vacationing at the seashore, the Biro brothers met an interesting elderly gentleman, Augustine Justo, who happened to be the president of Argentina.   After the brothers showed him their model of a ballpoint pen, President Justo urged them to set up a factory in Argentina.  When World War II broke out in Europe, a few years later, the Biros fled to Argentina, stopping in Paris along the way to patent their pen.

Once in Argentina, the Biros found several investors willing to finance their invention, and in 1943 they had set up a manufacturing plant.  Unfortunately, the pens were a spectacular failure. The Biro pen, like the designs that had preceded it, depended on gravity for the ink to flow to the roller ball. This meant that the pens worked only when they were held more or less straight up, and even then the ink flow was sometimes too heavy, leaving smudgy globs on the paper.  The Biro brothers returned to their laboratory and devised a new design, which relied on "capillsry action" rather than gravity to feed the ink.  The rough "ball" at the end of the pen acted like a metal sponge, and with this improvement ink could flow more smoothly to the ball, and the pen could be held at a slant rather than straight up.  One year later, the Biros were selling their new, improved ballpoint pen throughout Argentina. But it still was not a smashing success, and the men ran out of money.

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, a fifty-four-year-old Chicago salesman named Milton Reynolds became the first American manufacturer to market a ballpoint pen successfully. While vacationing in Argentina, Reynolds had seen Biro’s pen in the stores and thought that the novel product would sell well in America.  Because many of the patents had expired, Reynolds thought he could avoid any legal problems, and so he went about copying much of the Biros’ design.  It was Reynolds who made the deal with Gimbels to be the first retail store in America to sell ballpoint pens.  He set up a makeshift factory with 300 workers who began stamping out pens from whatever aluminum was not being used for the war.  In the months that followed, Reynolds made millions of pens and became fairly wealthy, as did many other manufacturers who decided to cash in on the new interest.

Today it is as standard a writing implement. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors.