The Enduring Genius of the Ballpoint Pen
A eureka moment involving a puddle and a marble gave the world the ballpoint pen—an invention that no high-tech writing gadget has yet to challenge
More than 100 billion Bic Cristal pens have been sold to date. PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS; ILLUSTRATION BY KELLY PECK
Seventy years later, the ballpoint pen isn’t making headlines, but it’s still hugely popular. The pens are cheap, long-lasting and extremely portable. They’ve come a long way from that first day in Gimbels—because the Reynolds International, frankly, didn’t work.
The ballpoint pen came to the U.S. from Budapest, by way of inventor László Bíró. Born in 1899, Bíró tried several careers—from studying medicine to practicing hypnotism to selling insurance—until he stumbled into journalism. That led to his great invention. One day, while visiting the printing room of the newspaper where he worked, Bíró grew frustrated when the heat of the presses made his fountain pen leak. He watched the machine cylinders apply ink to paper and wondered if he could develop a pen that worked similarly. He spotted one issue: A cylinder could only roll backward and forward, while a pen needs to move in all directions.
Bíró sat in a nearby Budapest cafe, trying to solve this puzzle. Looking out the window, he saw a group of children playing marbles in the street. It had been raining, and one boy rolled a marble through a puddle. As it rolled along the pavement, it left a line of water in its wake. With that inspiration, the ballpoint was born: By using high-quality ball bearings and creating minute grooves in the head of the pen to draw the ink to the tip (through a process known as capillary action), Bíró was able to create a reliable product.
As Bíró’s pen became popular around the world, the American entrepreneur Milton Reynolds decided to launch his own version and capture the U.S. market. Having failed to buy the U.S. rights to Bíró’s pen, he got his hands on a British version and attempted to copy it. The Reynolds International was rushed into production after just five months of development, and Reynolds’s desire to be first on the market drove him to cut corners with his version. While Bíró’s design used capillary action, Reynolds’s relied on gravity alone. It would blotch, blob, leak and scratch. Its main selling point was that it came with a two-year guarantee.
Reynolds replaced 104,643 faulty pens in the first eight months alone, according to author L. Graham Hogg, and other opportunistic manufacturers began flooding the market with even less reliable designs. A few years after those frenzied October 1945 scenes in New York, U.S. sales of ballpoint pens had collapsed entirely.
Still, one U.S. businessman, Patrick Frawley, kept faith with the idea of the ballpoint. His first Paper Mate pen, launched in 1949, restored consumer confidence in ballpoints with its innovative retractable nib and quick-drying ink. Now part of the Newell Rubbermaid conglomerate, Paper Mate remains one of the most popular pen brands today.
But it was a Frenchman, Marcel Bich, who truly perfected the ballpoint—producing an icon of modern industrial design. He dropped the last letter of his surname to avoid mispronunciation and called his new pen the Bic Cristal.
The cap for a Bic Cristal pen PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS
With its hexagonal body (inspired by the shape of a traditional wooden pencil) and instantly recognizable lid, the Bic Cristal is familiar to millions around the world. It was launched in 1959, when it sold for just 19 cents—$1.50 in today’s money. The Bic’s promise that it “writes first time, every time” made it an enormous success. More than 100 billion have been sold to date, the company says, and half of all ballpoint pens sold around the world are Bics. The Museum of Modern Art in New York even has a Cristal in its permanent collection, celebrating the pen’s simple, utilitarian design. Bic’s products are available in 160 countries, and it boasted sales of more than $2 billion last year.
Most of us use a ballpoint every day, but few of us ever think about its revolutionary design or its inventors. Thanks to Bíró, Frawley and Bich, anyone can write anything anywhere. Their mighty little pen made writing accessible to all.
--Mr. Ward is the author of “The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession,” recently published by Touchstone.
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