THE MAN WHO GAVE THE WORLD PENS THAT NEVER QUIT
LÁSZLÓ BÍRÓ
Fountain pens of the 1930s clogged, leaked, and smudged, and the thin ink used by newspaper presses dried almost instantly on paper. Bíró, an Hungarian journalist noticed that the printing ink worked and wondered whether a version of it could be carried in a pen. With his brother György, a chemist, he worked toward a thick, quick-drying ink held in a socket with a small rotating ball at the tip, which meters the ink onto the page. The idea was not wholly new, earlier inventors had patented rolling-ball writing devices, but the Bíró brothers solved the problem that had stopped those designs from working as pens.
Their patent in Hungary in 1938 came just as the political climate turned hostile to Jewish citizens, and the brothers fled to Argentina in 1940. In Buenos Aires they refined the design and patented it there, but they lacked the capital to manufacture at scale. They sold or licensed their rights to British and American companies, and the pen's commercial success belonged largely to others. Milton Reynolds, an American entrepreneur, launched a ballpoint in New York in 1945 at a price of about $12.50, an enormous sum at a time when fountain pens cost a fraction of that.
Within a decade, the ballpoint had become the default writing instrument for much of the world. It was cheap enough to discard, reliable enough for offices and classrooms, and its ink did not need the constant care that fountain pens required. This changed ordinary life in modest but real ways; forms could be filled out quickly, notes were written anywhere, and schoolchildren could afford their own pens.
Bíró's personal rewards were far smaller than his influence. He earned royalties but never became wealthy from his invention, and his fortunes were disrupted by war, emigration, and the legal and commercial arrangements he had made. He solved a small, practical problem with a clever idea and changed how the world writes; yet, his story also shows how often the people who make a breakthrough are not the ones who profit from it.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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