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Birome
Ballpoint Pen Collection
Centro
Argentino de Ingenieros
Buenos Aires, Argentina
 The
manufacture of economical, reliable ballpoint pens resulted from
a combination of experimentation and the precision of 20th century
technology. Hundreds of similarly patents worldwide are testaments
to failed attempts to make these pens commercially viable and widely
available, until the "Biro" of 1943. Working with his
brother Georg, a chemist, journalist Ladislao "Laszlo"
Josef Biro (1899-1985) developed a new tip consisting of a metal
ball turning freely in a socket that, as it turns, picks up ink
from an interior tube and then deposits it on the paper, where it
quickly dries, smudge-free. Biro's first vision of this occurred
before a massive rotary printing press that flung ink onto the pages,
drying instantly as the pages rolled off the press.
His
challenge was to produce a pen that would provide an even flow of
ink and within manufacturing tolerances that were extremely tight,
since clearance between the ball and its seat are in the 1-1.5 micron
range. He noted, "the point with a plane or conical seat would
not write with any ink because the writing force put pressure on
the ball and it blocked the flow of ink. … At the beginning
of 1943, I started working on a new invention related to the utilization
of the capillary effect to close off a pipet. In this principle,
the ink is maintained between the ball and its seat due to the capillary
effect, making a seal supporting a column of ink inside a tiny tube
in which, at its end, atmospheric pressure holds the surface of
the ink in a meniscus." When pen is put to paper, ink flows
from a capillary constriction along grooves behind the ball. It
promises neither to leak nor to need frequent refills. This is still
the principle on which the modern ballpoint pen operates.
The
Biro brothers began their experiments in 1935 in their homeland
of Hungary, had the fundamentals of a working pen by 1938, and soon
patented their pens in Hungary, France, and Switzerland. In the
early rumblings of World War II, the Biros fled Hungary for Paris
and then moved to Argentina, where they found several investors
interested in financing their work. They opened their factory in
1944 at 3040 Oro Street in Buenos Aires. Known as Eterpen, the company
was not commercially successful, but the Biro pen continued to be
developed through licensing and patent purchases.
In
1943, British financier and government official Henry Martin realized
that the advantages of a pen that was immune to atmospheric pressure
changes would be very useful to airplane navigators. The British
government bought the patent, and in 1944 Miles-Martin, an aircraft
manufacturer, produced the pen under the name "Biro" for
the British Royal Air Force. After the war in 1945, the company
produced pens for the public in time for the Christmas season, and
"biro" entered the British lexicon as the generic name
for a ballpoint pen.
An
enterprising French manufacturer Marcel Bich (1914-1994) studied
Biro's pens and factory and bought a license to manufacture the
pens. In 1950 he began to sell his "Bic" pen. In 1954,
Parker Pen Company introduced its "Jotter" and sold 3.5
million ballpoint pens in less than a year. Bich went on to capture
70 percent of the European market by the end of the 1950s and, by
1960, entered the North American market with his inexpensive, reliable
product. Today, inexpensive ballpoint pens are produced daily by
the millions.
In
2003, the Biro Foundation donated several original ballpoint pens
to an exhibit at the Centro Argentino de Ingenieros (CAI, Argentine
Center of Engineering) at Cerrito 1250 in Buenos Aires.
Designation
as a Mechanical Engineering Heritage Collection is scheduled for
September 29, 2005.
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