The Humble Ballpoint Pen

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A few weeks ago, my spouse and I did something we've been putting off for almost a decade, which is getting a will in place. Nothing's wrong, it's just something we've been meaning to do forever, and whenever we have traveled together for the last few years, I've had kind of a background anxiety of what if something happens to us on this trip and everything's a mess and our friends and family have to clean up the mess. We went to a lawyer to do this, and we had a scheduled signing day with the law practice arranging for things like the witnesses and the notary. And when we got there, everything was very neatly laid out with a pair of ballpoint pens at each seat at the table. We had a pair of them in case one of the pens ran out while we were all signing these very many documents that needed to be signed. So this is another episode that was inspired by a random thing in the world catching my attention, which is ballpoint pens. Who thought of these things? Turns out that just requires kind of a basic history of pens in general. People have of course been making marks on things for millennia, going back to Paleolithic peoples using their hands and natural pigments like heematite, ochre, manganese, and charcoal to create cave art. The earliest known writing system that used some kind of tool or utensil is Sumerian cuneiform, made by pressing a reed stylus onto clay. The first inks were made roughly forty five hundred to five thousand years ago, when people in both East Asia and Northern Africa started mixing carbon with some kind of glue or gum and then mixing that with water. This carbon based black ink is often called India ink today. The first pens were made from things like reeds and bamboo, with one end sharpened into a point or a nib, which was then dipped into a well or a pool of ink. Reeds and bamboo are both hollow, and the pen making process typically involved further hollowing out and cleaning the interior, as well as making a small slit to help draw the ink up into the pin and let it flow out again. Through capillary action. This hollow structure of the pens stored enough ink to allow a person to write for a little bit before they needed to dip it back into the well to refill it. In China, people likely started making and using brushes as writing implements around three hundred BCE, and at some point, and it is not clear exactly when people in parts of Europe started using quills or the hollow shafts of bird feathers as pens. The word pen comes from words that trace back to the Latin penna, which means feather. The first written references to quill pens are in the work of seventh century writer and historians Saint Isidore of Sevilla, although they were probably being used long before that mention. Today quill pens are sometimes depicted as huge, ostrich like plumes, but they were usually made from the long flight feathers of geese and swans, and after Europeans started traveling to the America's turkeys, some other feathers too. Those are the big three. The barbs or the flat feathery part of the feather would be stripped off of the shaft, which would be cured and hardened before use. At some points in history, it was fashionable to leave some of the barb at the top of a quill pen, but this was a relatively small kind of decorative bit. Even if a lot of that barb was left on the shaft, it would not normally look anything like a gigantic ostrich plume. So when you go to the party store today, if you can find one and you buy a pen like that for an occasion, it's just for show. It's a modern invention. Yeah. Reed pens and quill pens had a lot in common. They both started out as hollow objects from the natural world that had to be shaped and sharpened to be used for writing and drawing, and they also had similar downsides. They had to be maintained. The tips of quills and reed pens dulled as they were used, so they occasionally had to be sharpened with a pen knife, which does require some skill, and eventually they just wouldn't be usable anymore. A well made quill pen might last just about a week while they could hold some ink. Writing involved repeatedly dipping the pen back into the ink to refill it, and these pens were also just messy, leaving stains on people's fingers and drips of ink in places that they were not wanted, both on and off the page, famously Marie Antoinette's signature on her wedding day. They could also be really cumbersome. If you were traveling and you needed to write while you were away. You couldn't just drop a pen in something to write on into your bag and then go. You had to take an ink well with you, and that was a bottle of liquid ink it could easily spill in transit. You also needed extra pens and a pen knife, and a pounce box, which was a shaker full of sand or bone also called pounce to absorb the extra ink from the page to try to keep it from smearing. Some people had whole portable writing desks that acted both as a writing surface and as storage for all the various writing tools and accessories. While most people were using reed pens, quill pens, and brushes, there were also experiments with making pens out of other materials. A pen nib made of bronze was found in the ruins of Pompeii, which was destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine CE. More than one thousand years ago, people also started experimenting with making pens that had a reservoir that could hold more ink than a reed or quill could. Calif Al muis Le Dinalla of the Fatimad dynasty reportedly commissioned and received a pen like this, which also would not stain in his hands and clothes, although we don't know the details of what this pen was made of or precisely how it worked. Leonardo da Vinci, who died in fifteen nineteen, drew diagrams that seemed to represent a reservoir pen, but it isn't clear whether he actually made one of them. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though, people were definitely using a variety of metals to make reservoir pens. One of the first was patented by French engineer and instrument maker Nicholas Bion in the sixteen eighties. It had a metal nib and the body was a hollow brass tube. The word fountain pen was first used in writing in seventeen twelve, and soon that term was being used to generally describe various styles of reservoir pins. This term probably comes from the idea that the ink flowed from these pens like a fountain, rather than having to continually be replenished by dipping the pen into an ink well. By the late eighteenth century, people were using sheets of steel rolled into a tube to make reservoir pens. Those were also called barrel pens. Samuel Harrison made one for chemist Joseph Priestley in seventeen eighty. People were also still working on ways to improve on the quill pen. In eighteen oh nine, English inventor Joseph Bramo was awarded a patent for a machine that could cut one quill into multiple nibs, which could be attached to the end of a reusable ink holder. So instead of continually using a knife to sharpen the end of the quill, you could just swap out a dull nib for a fresh one. People were also making steel pen nibs by the early nineteenth century, which were of course a lot more durable than the points on reeds or feathers. We will get to how fountain pens started to become more sophisticated than just essentially a tube and a nib after a break, but first let's take a quick detour to talk about pencils just for the sake of completeness. The word pencil traces back to the Latin word for paint brush, and the first pencil like devices were wires made from metals like silver and lead, which could leave marks on paper. The first graphite pencils were probably made in the sixteenth century following the discovery of large graphite deposits in the Lake district of England. People incorrectly thought these deposits were lead, thus the term pencil led. This graphite could be cut into rods, but since it's very soft, it also had to be wrapped in something to actually use it as a writing utensil. The first wrappings were made of things like string or animal skin, and eventually people started using hollow wooden rods to hold the graphite. Wooden pencils were being mass produced within about a century of that sixteenth century graphite fined. We'll get back to fountain pens as promised after a sponsor break. As we said before the break. By the eighteenth century, people were using the term fountain pen to describe pens that had some kind of reservoir so they could hold more ink than a simple read or quill. These might have removable nibs that could be cleaned or replaced, and people were also tinkering with various nib designs that changed the way the ink flowed or what it felt like to write with them. By the nineteenth century, people had invented machines and developed techniques to allow mass production of metal pens and their nibs. Steel pens and nibs became more popular than quills, and people also started to experiment with making them out of different metals, especially metals that would be more resistant to corrosion from ink, which is often acidic. This included making pens from gold alloys, with nibs made from iridium alloys. When people use the word fountain pen today, they're usually talking about something a little more sophisticated than what was basically a metal to with a nib at the end. Those are still the basics, but today's fountain pens are more reliable and less leaky than the reservoir pens of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A lot of people applied for patents on pen innovations during these decades, and we're not going to try to talk about every single one, but these are the highlights. Sometimes Frederick Fulsch is described as the first person to patent a fountain pen. That was a British patent that was awarded in eighteen oh nine, but it was really a patent on improvements for the pens that already existed, which people were already calling fountain pens. In an ideal situation, a fountain pen worked through capillary action, with the ink being drawn out of the nib only when it was in contact with the writing surface. But air also needed to get into the pen to fill the space that was left as that ink was transferred out onto the page. Without enough air taking the place of the ink, the ink could just stop flowing. But too much air into the pen could also cause the ink to just rush out in leaks or drips or blobs. Fulsh's design tried to control this airflow and to cut down on the skips and the drips quote, chiefly by the addition of a valve at the top by pressing down, which a small quantity of air is admitted on the enclosed ink so as to let it descend as required. The valve was formed by a button covered in leather, which could close off an aperture at the bottom of the tube. A spring returned the button to its original position when the user let go. This aperture allowed air into the interior of the pen, which helped keep the ink where it was supposed to be. The lower part of this pen was removable so that it could be taken off and cleaned. Remarks that were printed alongside one publication of this patent red quote, these pens seem very in their construction to common fountain pens, and would be found very serviceable to those who were much pressed in time when writing. It is, not, however, likely that the metallic pens which terminate them will be found equally pleasant to write with as pens made of quills, the particular elasticity of which no art has yet been able to imitate effectually in metal. A Lonzo T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island worked for at Cross Company, which his father had founded in eighteen forty six. In eighteen eighty, Cross was awarded US patent two three two eight zero four for what he described as a stylographic pen, which was another attempt to deal with a sometimes unpredictable flow of ink. This patent described, quote, a centrally arranged air tube closed at its upper end by means of a removable plug and having a side aperture made near the bottom of the plug for the proper admission of air to the ink chamber under the control of a vent cap. It also consists in providing means for the passage of air from the air tube into the ink chamber to control the flow of ink to the point of the pen by slotting the lower end of the air tube or an extension thereof, and connecting loosely there to the cylindrical upper portion of the vibrating spindle, so that the vibration of the spindle in the act of writing may assist in passing the air into the ink chamber. So, where Fulci's design had used a button and a valve to try to control the airflow, Crosses relied on the vibrations caused by the act of writing, idealing with those vibrations letting little bubbles of air into the interior of the pen so that the ink flowed smoothly and consistently. But this still had the potential to release way too much ink or not enough, depending on exactly how the pen was vibrating and how those air bubbles flowed. The person who is usually credited with resolving this unpredictable ink flow situation is Lewis E. Waterman of New York. According to a story that has a possibly apocryphal vibe, Waterman was working as an insurance salesman and he lost a big client after his pen ruined an important contract with a big blob of ink, and in the time it took for him to get a new contract drafted, that client took their business elsewhere. Waterman's US patent number two nine three five four five, simply titled Fountain Pen, described a pen that was fed through three very fine grooves or fissures. It still used capillary action to move the inks through the nib, but those three fissures balanced the airflow through the pen. Here's how Waterman described it in his patent quote, it may be observed that the tendency to a heavy an excessive flow of ink caused by amplified motion of the pen or otherwise will be compensated by an increased influx of air through the groove to fill the vacuum tending to be produced within the reservoir, thus retarding the flow and automatically regulating the same. It may also be stated that air bubbles, which usually form within and greatly impede the discharge of ink through the ink duct, are in my admention pressed to one side of the duct, and their outward movement greatly accelerated by the outflow of current of ink. This pen's ink reservoir had to be filled with an eye dropper, which was often the case for reservoir pens of this era, but this use of fine grooves to control the flow of air and ink did indeed seem to work. It's often described as the first truly reliable fountain pen, providing far more writing time than quills or reed pens, and more predictability and reliability than most earlier fountain pens. Waterman established his own pen company, and in nineteen hundred his pens were awarded the Medal of Excellence at the Paris World Exposition. Fountain pens are obviously still around today, and Frederick fulch at Cross and Watermen are all making fountain pens still today. Some of those brands also make other types of pens, including ballpoints, and today ballpoints are way more popular than fountain pens are. We will get to how that happened after another sponsor break. While fountain pens were becoming more reliable and sophisticated in the nineteenth century, there were still people using quill pens and other writing devices, and one reason had to do with what it felt like to write with them and what the resulting writing looked like. That the nib of a quill pen was flexible and a last, while the metal nib of a fountain pen was not. Some inventors worked on this by trying to find metals and designs that would allow for a more flexible pen nib. Another issue with fountain pens had to do with what a person needed to write on. That Capillary action through the nib meant that fountain pins often didn't work well on surfaces that were rough or irregular. John J. Loud of Weymouth, Massachusetts found a possible solution to this in eighteen eighty eight with an early version of the ballpoint pen. Loud needed to mark materials like wood and leather, and he found the marks from pencils to be too light for this purpose, and then fountain pens. Because of the texture of these surfaces, they were erratic and sometimes messy, so he developed a pen that had a quote marking sphere or a ball down in the tip. That ball was positioned below smaller balls that provided friction for its role against and then all of this was held in place by a conical cap that was connected to a rod and spring. In the words of Loud's US patent number three nine two zero four six quote, when the ball is pressed against a surface, the spring yields, allowing the ink to flow out of the tube around the ball on all sides to the point in contact with the surface to be marked, the amount of the flow and the width of the line being determined by the amount of play of the ball inside the contracted mouth, which is in turn regulated by the distance between the opening and the lower end of the screw. This invention seems to have worked well enough, but Loud did not turn it into a commercial product. He did patent some other inventions, though, including a firecracker cannon. Quote. My invention consists of an improved breech loading cannon adapted for firing cartridge, ignited by a fuse inseparably connected therewith I preferably use for my cartridge the ordinary firecracker, and the cannon being adapted for the purpose here and set forth is so constructed as to be perfectly safe for children and careless persons, to whom accidents frequently occur using firearms. I'm just gonna giggle about it. I love children and careless persons. This has nothing to do with pens. But when I read that, I was like, that's going in the episode. We all know exactly who he's talking about in our friend group too, or maybe it's us. Loud's patent on his pen eventually expired, and other inventors patented various improvements on it, as well as other pens that used a ball in the tip instead of a nib. They didn't necessarily differentiate these ball points from fountain pens, though. For example, in nineteen sixteen Van Vechten Riisberg of Philadelphia was awarded a patent for quote a new and improved fountain pen in which the flow of ink shall be constant when the pen is in operation, which shall be cheap and simple to construct, and which may therefore be sold at a low price, which shall present a neat and attractive appearance, which shall have no tendency to clog up, which may be readily cleaned, and which shall be void of complicated or intricate mechanism or parts. The tip of this pen ended in a cup which cradled a ball. It also had a reservoir for ink. Quote. The fluid will now be conducted when the pen is maintained in a position suitable for writing, to the surface of the ball by means of the duct, and from thence to the surface of the paper by the rotation of the ball when the pen is in operation, the friction between the surface of the ball and the paper being sufficient to rotate the former. Like loud, Risberg did not turn this invention into a commercial enterprise. One of the ongoing issues in all of these pens was the time that it took for the ink to dry. In the nineteen thirties, Hungarian journalist Las l Biro was inspired by how quickly the ink dried on printed newspapers and thought something similar might be possible for pens. He tried putting printing ink into fountain pens, but that did not work because that ink just did not have the right consistency to flow through the pen. So he worked with his brother Georgie, who was a chemist and a dentist, on creating a formula for a dense, fast drying oil based ink that could be used in a pen. They also worked with Machinist and Orgoy on the pen itself. In some versions of this story, Laslo Biro was also inspired by seeing a child's marble leave a trail behind it after rolling through a puddle, which is why this pen had a ball point. A prototype of this creation made its debut at the Budapest International Fair in nineteen thirty one. It was patented in Hungary in nineteen thirty eight, and unlike Loud and Reisberg, Laslo Biro did try to make this into a commercial product. More patents followed in other countries, including in the United States in nineteen forty five. By this point, these pens were commercially available in much of the Americas and Europe. US patent two three nine zero six three six Writing Instrument describes this pen as quote, a handy instrument provided with a reservoir for ink, which is capable of being fed by simple gravity and capillarity. The main feature thereof being constituted by the feed conduit, which is so combined that the flow of ink, instead of being stopped at the ball, extends against the surface. Thereof to the vicinity of the ball setting. The conduit for this ink is quote branched by means of channels or grooves extending to the sides of the ball setting, and thus the ball is kept practically covered with ink, so that on rolling out the inner surface thereof the ink will mark the paper with well defined strokes. By the time Bureau's ballpoint pen was patented in the US, he and his brother were living in Argentina. They had met Argentinian President Augustin Pedro Justo while on a vacation in Yugoslavia, and when the Bureau brothers needed to flee from Hungary in nineteen thirty eight, Housto invited them to Argentina. The Bureaus were Jewish and Hungary was adopting policies that were similar to those of Nazi Germany. They left Hungary ahead of a law that would have made it illegal for them to take their patented invention out of the country. In Argentina, they worked with Juan Jorge Meena to open a pen factory in nineteen forty three. They combined their names, calling their pen Biromeh. Ballpoint pens quickly became popular. Some of this was because of the ways that they worked a lot better than fountain pens for a lot of people. Like they worked by gravity, you could write with them in different angles. They were less likely to leak in some cases, but it was also in part because of commercial efforts to market them. The Schafer Company paid half a million dollars for the US marketing rights. British businessman Henry George Martin reportedly sold thirty thousand of these pens to the Royal Air Force because they did not leak due to changes in air pressure like fountain pens did, so pilots could use them in the air. By the time the war was over, ballpoint pens had become a big enough business to spawn patent infringement suits as multiple companies all tried to corner the market on them. For example, Milton Reynolds bought some of Bureau's pens while in Buenos Aires, and after returning to the US he established Reynolds International Pen Company and launched the Reynolds Rocket. He apparently thought his design was different enough from Bureaus that it wouldn't cause patent issues, But ever sharp and everhard Faber had already teamed up to acquire licensing rights for Bureau's ballpoint in the United States. This led to lawsuits as ever Sharp tried to keep Reynolds from bringing his pens to market. This whole thing worked out badly for everybody. Ever, Sharp's lawsuit failed, reynolds product didn't actually work that well, and the whole market got oversaturated with ballpoint pens in the process. These early ballpoints were also different from the disposable plastic ones that are ubiquitous today. This is not something that someone would hand you for free at a booth at a street fair. They were made from metal and other durable materials, and they were refillable but supposed to need refilling only every couple of years. And they were all so expensive. When reynolds design first went on sale at Gimble's department store in New York in nineteen forty five, it cost around ten dollars. These comparisons are always an exact, but that's something like a two hundred dollars pen today. In addition to the expense, that newly developed ink didn't actually work that well. It did dry quickly, but it could also smear or be wiped away. If someone was really really careful, they might even be able to scrape somebody's ballpoint signature off of one document and transfer that signature on to something else. This blows my mind. Some banks would not accept check signed in ballpoint pen and a nineteen forty eight article in the American Bar Association Journal expressed a number of concerns about forgeries, fading, and what they called gooping, that's leaving clumps of ink that had accumulated on the ball at random points on the page. These issues started to be resolved in nineteen forty nine when Austrian chemist Franzique, who was living in California and working for paper mat developed a better ink using glycol. The person who was the most influential in the shift from two hundred dollars ball points or the equivalent of two hundred dollars ballpoints to disposable plastic things was Marcel Beeck, who had been born in Italy but moved to France and became a French citizen. He bought Laso Biro's patent rights and a disused factory outside of Paris, and he started a company called Society Beck to mass produce inexpensive ballpoint pens. The Bic Crystal launched in nineteen fifty and soon became the world's best selling pen. Beeck also took a similar strategy with razors and lighters, developing relatively inexpensive plastic versions of each. In the words of his nineteen ninety four obituary in the UK Independent, quote for mere pennies, the ordinary man can write more clearly, shave more closely, and have more reliable access to fire than a run as prints also a lot of plastic waste. Uh. While Laslo Biro was paid for selling or licensing his patent rights, this really did not compare to how much money other people made manufacturing and selling ballpoint pens. Biro is quoted as saying, quote, I often think that with a little more business acumen, I could have made a huge fortune with my invention, but I harbor no grudges. The bureaus has become the most popular writing instrument in the world. It has overtaken the pencil and the fountain pen, and that thought makes me forget the riches I missed out on. Ballpoint pens are still known as bureaus and a lot of the world today fountain pens still had and have their devotees, and in nineteen fifty six, wa Schaeffer developed a model with a removable ink tube which could be refilled separately from the rest of the The first roller ball pens were introduced in Japan in the nineteen sixties. These have ballpoint tips with a water based ink rather than the oil based inks of most ballpoint pens. The first commercially successful felt tip pens came out in the nineteen sixties as well. Brush pens developed for East Asian calligraphy were introduced in nineteen seventy two. The first erasable pen, Gillette's Erasermate, came out in nineteen seventy nine. Sakura Color Products of Osaka, Japan, introduced gel pens, which use a pigmented gel for ink, in nineteen eighty two. You can probably hear the lilting tone in my voice because I love them. I love them. Also the first time I found gel pens, I was like, these magic has arrived. I have found the magical pen I want for the rest of my life. That's pens. We'll talk more about pens than the behind the scenes. I'm sure I have some most This is from Lizzie. Lizzie wrote high Beloved History podcast. First of all, I wanted to say thank you for keeping me company while I recovered from gallbladder surgery. A nice trip down some long country roads sure kept me sane while stuck in bed. Your most recent listener mail on the ECG episode reminded me of a little moment of horror I had some years back. In case folks don't remember, this was an episode or a listener mail that was about tetanus. There was an archaeological dig in town with open volunteering to dig, so, of course, being the sort of person who listens to your show, I signed right up. The one requirement was an up to date tetanus vaccine because we'd be scrabbling around in the dirt all day. Well, I ended up chatting to another volunteer as we unearthed a terrifying amount of burial shroud pens under an old church, and as we work, she told me to keep an eye on her and call for a member of this staff if anything happened to her. She told me she'd done hundreds of these sorts of digs in her life, and of course, being health conscious, had gotten her tetanus vaccine before every single one. She was now functionally allergic to both the vaccine and tetanus, which would immediately send her into shock on contact, at which point I was staring at her open mouthed, baffled at her doctor surgery allowing her to do that, her commitment to amateur archaeology, and the fact that she was digging without gloves. This moment lives rent free in my head at any mention of archaeology or tetanus, and frankly I had to pass it on just to not be burdened with this horror alone. No pets for the tax. But here's the gigantic grogu me and my mom made for ourselves because we are silly people. There follows a very adorable grogu. Are there any other kind? No, they're definitely not. It is hard to tell the size of this of this grogu. Grogu is standing in what looks to me like a sewing room, on a pile of what looks to me like you know, your pile of sewing fabric, and grogu is incredibly cute, such a cutie. Uh look at that baby, Look at that baby. I know exactly the pattern they used for this. Oh yeah, because I have it too. I'll never make one, but if I ever encounter licensed Star Wars patterns, I buy them so that pattern companies know that people want them. Although pattern companies are a whole other problem right now. Yeah, So this email ends, thank you for all the podcasting, and I wish you the exact amount of appropriate immunization for whatever situation you're in. Lizzy, thank you Lizzy for this email. I have shared the horror of this with everyone. Now everyone can all bear this with you. The story of someone who got so many tetanus vaccines that they are now allergic to the vaccine and tetanus. This is not so much as applicable to tetanus, because tetanus, as we talked about in that episode, is something that's around in the world around us all of the time. But the fact that people can be allergic to vaccines is one of the reasons that it is so important for everyone who can be vaccinated to be vaccinated, because that protects the people who cannot. Tetanus is in the environment everywhere, so that's the one vaccine I can think of that rule. As you're protecting yourself with a tetanus vaccine, you're not necessarily protecting your neighbor as is the case with things like measles vaccines and COVID vaccines. So yes, thank you so much for this, this adorable picture, this great email, this story that wow. I also have a number of responses and questions to thank you. Lizzy. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, or someone you've encountered in the world that has done something so baffling that you I would like to share, as long as it's not truly traumatic, I'll read that. You can send us a note where at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.