The Humble Ballpoint Pen

Before the ballpoint pen, people used their hands, reeds, bamboo, brushes, quills, and eventually nibs to write or draw. But how did things evolve from there to get to things like the fountain pen, and eventually, a ballpoint?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Holly Frey?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new Chicken Nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces, and they created a brand new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants, don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.

• 1:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:05Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:19Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  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

• 3:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 3:30Holly Frey?

  People have, of course, been making marks on things for millennia, going back to Paleolithic peoples using their hands and natural pigments like hematite, 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 4,500 to 5,000 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.

• 4:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 pen and let it flow out again through capillary action. This hollow structure of the pen 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.

• 4:54Holly Frey?

  In China, people likely started making and using brushes as writing implements around 300 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 "pena," which means feather. The first written references to quill pens are in the work of 7th century writer and historian Saint Isidore of Sevilla, although they were probably being used long before that mention.

• 5:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Americas, 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

• 6:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  normally look anything like a gigantic ostrich plume.

• 6:16Holly Frey?

  So when you go to the party store today, if you can find one and you buy a pen like that for an occasion.

• 6:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's just for show.

• 6:25Holly Frey?

  It's 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,

• 7:08Holly Frey?

  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.

• 7:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 and something to write on into your bag and then go. You had to take an inkwell 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.

• 8:04Holly Frey?

  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 79 C E. More than 1,000 years ago, people also started experimenting with making pens that had a reservoir that could hold more ink than a reed or quill could. Caliph Al-Muis Le Dian Allah of the Fatima Dynasty reportedly commissioned and received a pen like this, which also would not stain his hands and clothes, although we don't know the details of what this pen was made of or precisely how it worked.

• 8:47Holly Frey?

  Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519, drew diagrams that seemed to represent a reservoir pen, but it isn't clear whether he actually made one of them.

• 8:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the 17th and 18th 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 Nicolas Bion in the 1680s. It had a metal nib and the body was a hollow brass tube. The word fountain pen was first used in writing in 1712, and soon that term was being used to generally describe various styles of reservoir pens. 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 inkwell.

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  By the late 18th 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 1780. People were also still working on ways to improve on the quill pen. In 1809, English inventor Joseph Brahma 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 19th century, which were, of course,

• 10:26Holly Frey?

  a lot more durable than the points on reeds or feathers.

• 10:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 paintbrush. 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 16th century, following the discovery of large graphite deposits in the Lake District of England.

• 11:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  People incorrectly thought these deposits were lead, thus the term pencil lead. 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 16th-century graphite find. We'll get back to fountain pens, as promised, after a sponsor break.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 11:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  It was could rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 12:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes Field Services Manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 12:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 12:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 12:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT

• 13:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown-Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:58Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them

• 14:42Holly Frey?

  more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 15:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we said before the break, by the 18th 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 reed 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 19th 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,

• 16:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 17:04Holly Frey?

  When people use the word fountain pen today, they're usually talking about something a little more sophisticated than what was basically a metal tube 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 18th and early 19th 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.

• 17:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometimes Frederick Folsch is described as the first person to patent a fountain pen. That was a British patent that was awarded in 1809, 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.

• 18:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  But too much air into the pen could also cause the ink to just rush out in leaks or drips or blobs. Folsch'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."

• 18:44Holly Frey?

  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.

• 19:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Remarks that were printed alongside one publication of this patent read, quote, "These pens seem very superior in their construction to common fountain pens, and would be found very serviceable to those who are 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."

• 19:40Holly Frey?

  Alonso T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, worked for A.T. Cross Company, which his father had founded in 1846. In 1880, Cross was awarded U.S. Patent 232804 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

• 20:25Holly Frey?

  the pen by slotting the lower end of the air tube, or an extension thereof, and connecting loosely thereto 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."

• 20:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  So where Folsa's design had used a button and a valve to try to control the airflow, Cross's relied on the vibrations caused by the act of writing, ideally 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.

• 21:14Holly Frey?

  The person who is usually credited with resolving this unpredictable ink flow situation is Louis 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 293545, 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 ink through the nib, but those three fissures

• 21:58Holly Frey?

  balanced the airflow through the pen.

• 22:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Here's how Waterman described it in his patent. Quote, "It may be observed that the tendency to a heavy and 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 inked duct, are in my admission pressed to one side of the duct and their outward movement greatly accelerated by the outflow of current of ink."

• 22:44Holly Frey?

  This pen's ink reservoir had to be filled with an eyedropper, 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 1900, his pens were awarded the Medal of Excellence at the Paris World Exposition.

• 23:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Fountain pens are obviously still around today and Frederick Fults, AT Cross and Waterman 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.

• 23:47Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends.

• 24:29Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:50Holly Frey?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

• 25:33Holly Frey?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself. This new chicken nugget, reinvented,

• 26:34Speaker 05

  based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 26:45Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 27:29Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 28:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  While fountain pens were becoming more reliable and sophisticated in the 19th 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 elastic 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.

• 28:35Holly Frey?

  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 pens often didn't work well on surfaces that were rough or irregular. John J. Lout of Weymouth, Massachusetts, found a possible solution to this in 1888 with an early version of the ballpoint pen.

• 28:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Lout 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 it to roll against, and then all of this was held in place by a conical cap that was connected to a rod and spring.

• 29:32Holly Frey?

  In the words of Lout's US Patent #392046, 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."

• 30:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  This invention seems to have worked well enough, but Lauth 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 cartridges ignited by a fuse, inseparably connected therewith. I preferably use for my cartridge the ordinary firecracker, and the cannon being adapted for the purpose herein set forth is so constructed as to be perfectly safe for children and careless persons to whom accidents frequently occur using firearms."

• 30:46Holly Frey?

  I'm just gonna giggle about it. I love children and careless persons.

• 30:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  This has nothing to do with pens, but when I read that, I was like, that's a good one in the episode.

• 30:54Holly Frey?

  We all know exactly who he's talking about in our friend group, too. Or maybe it's us. Lauth'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 1916, Van Vecten Reisberg 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,

• 31:39Holly Frey?

  which may be readily cleaned, and which shall be void of complicated or intricate mechanism or parts."

• 31:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Lauth, Reisberg did not turn this invention into a commercial enterprise.

• 32:21Holly Frey?

  One of the ongoing issues in all of these pens was the time that it took for the ink to dry. In the 1930s, Hungarian journalist Laszlo 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 Andor Goy on the pen itself. In some versions of this story, Laszlo Biro was also inspired

• 33:06Holly Frey?

  by seeing a child's marble leave a trail behind it after rolling through a puddle, which is why this pen had a ballpoint.

• 33:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  A prototype of this creation made its debut at the Budapest International Fair in 1931. It was patented in Hungary in 1938, and unlike Lauth and Reisberg, Laszlo Biro did try to make this into a commercial product. More patents followed in other countries, including in the United States in 1945. By this point, these pens were commercially available in much of the Americas and Europe.

• 33:45Holly Frey?

  U.S. Patent 2390636 "Writing Instrument" describes this pen as, "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."

• 34:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  The conduit for this ink is "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."

• 34:32Holly Frey?

  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 Agostino Pedro Justo while on a vacation in Yugoslavia. And when the Bureau brothers needed to flee from Hungary in 1938, Justo 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 Mena to open a pen factory in 1943. They combined their names, calling their pen "Birome."

• 35:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Ballpoint pens quickly became popular. Some of this was because of the ways that they worked a little 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 Schaefer Company paid half a million dollars for the US marketing rights. British businessman Henry George Martin reportedly sold 30,000 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.

• 35:55Holly Frey?

  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 Bureau's that it wouldn't cause patent issues. But Ever Sharp and Ever Hard 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.

• 36:39Holly Frey?

  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.

• 36:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 also expensive. When Reynolds Design first went on sale at Gimbel's Department Store in New York in 1945, it cost around $10. These comparisons are always inexact, but that's something like a $200 pen today.

• 37:29Holly Frey?

  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 checks signed in ballpoint pen, and a 1948 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.

• 38:12Holly Frey?

  These issues started to be resolved in 1949, when Austrian chemist Franz Sich, who was living in California and working for Papermate, developed a better ink using glycol.

• 38:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  The person who was the most influential in the shift from $200 ballpoints, or the equivalent of $200 ballpoints, to disposable plastic things, was Marcel Bic, who had been born in Italy but moved to France and became a French citizen. He bought Lazlo Bureau's patent rights and a disused factory outside of Paris, and he started a company called Societe Bic to mass-produce inexpensive ballpoint pens. The Bic Crystal launched in 1950 and soon became the world's best-selling pen.

• 39:01Holly Frey?

  Beek also took a similar strategy with razors and lighters, developing relatively inexpensive plastic versions of each. In the words of his 1994 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 Renaissance prince."

• 39:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Also, a lot of plastic waste.

• 39:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Laszlo Bureau 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. Bureau 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 Bureau's 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 in a lot of the world today.

• 40:11Holly Frey?

  Fountain pens still had and have their devotees. And in 1956, W.A. Schaefer developed a model with a removable ink tube, which could be refilled separately from the rest of the pen. The first rollerball pens were introduced in Japan in the 1960s. 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 1960s as well. Brush pens developed for East Asian calligraphy were introduced in 1972. The first erasable pen, Gillette's Eraser Mate, came out in 1979.

• 40:53Holly Frey?

  Sakura Color Products of Osaka, Japan introduced gel pens, which use a pigmented gel for ink, in 1982. You can probably hear the lilting tone in my voice because I love them.

• 41:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love them also. The first time I found gel pens, I was like, these?

• 41:11Holly Frey?

  Magic has arrived.

• 41:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  I have found the magical pen. I want for the rest of my life. That's pens. We'll talk more about pens and the behind the scenes, I'm sure. I have some listener mail. This is from Lizzie. Lizzie wrote, "Hi 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

• 41:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 pins under an old church. And as we worked, she told me to keep an eye on her and call for a member of the 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

• 42:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  on contact. At which point I was staring at her open mouth 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 and 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."

• 43:14Holly Frey?

  Are there any other kinds?

• 43:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  No, there definitely not. It is hard to tell the size 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 Grogu is incredibly cute. Such a cutie. Uh, look at that baby. Look at that baby.

• 43:41Holly Frey?

  I know exactly the pattern they used for this.

• 43:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah?

• 43:45Holly Frey?

  Cause I have it too. I'll probably, 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.

• 43:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Uh, 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." Lizzie, thank you, Lizzie, 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.

• 44:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tetanus is in the environment everywhere. So, uh, that's the one vaccine I can think of. That rule is 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, Lizzie. 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 would like to share, as long as it's not truly traumatic, I'll read that. Um, uh, you can send us a note.

• 45:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  We're at [email protected] and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.

• 45:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 45:57Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:28Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 47:05Speaker 06

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• 47:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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