Today, June 10, is Ballpoint Pen Day.
Even though people don’t write anything much anymore — most things are recorded using some type of keyboard, on the computer, phone, etc. But when people do write things on paper, they almost always use a ballpoint pen. We must have dozens and dozens of them lying around the house.
Sometimes I can’t remember what day it is, but I do remember the first ballpoint pen I ever saw. I was probably about seven or eight years old, and my dad bought a ballpoint pen at one of the drugstores (Maysville had two drugstores at the time.) I remember him bringing it back into his store and everyone “marveling” at it. I remember it had a cap that had to be removed to reveal the “ball” point. I don’t know how much my dad paid for the pen, but I’m pretty sure that it was more than ten dollars. That was a lot of money back in the early 1940s.
The original ballpoint pen was “invented” by John J. Loud in 1888, however his pen was full of problems and the patent held by Loud eventually expired, and the world continued to use fountain pens and ink bottles. Then in 1938, Hungarian newspaper editor Laszio Brió got fed up with ink smudges and refilling fountain pens and got his brother to help him come up with the kind of ink to couple with the ball and socket design and make a ballpoint pen that wouldn’t allow the ink to dry out in the pen, but would still leave the mark behind when used.
It turns out that ink was the real issue — Brió got the ball and socket mechanism right, but the ink overflowed in the summer and in the winter, the ink didn’t flow… and froze. One day while visiting printing houses, Brió noticed that the ink used on newspaper printing dried almost instantly with no smudges. He spoke to his brother Gyōrgy about the ink. Gyōrgy, was a dentist, but he was also a rather talented chemist. They tried using newspaper ink in the pens, but the newspaper ink was too thick and clogged the ball mechanism. Turns out that the key was that newspaper ink was oil based. Water-based ink that Brió had been using leaked out of the pen and needed to saturate the fibers of the paper, but oil-based ink sat on top of the paper, preventing it from bleeding through the page and allowing it to dry almost on contact.
Today, before an average pen runs out of ink, it can write 45,000 words — give or take a few.
So even though we live in an increasingly digital world, I still have a number of ballpoint pens in my desk drawer — and — I sill use them fairly often. Until I retired, I always had a ball-point in my shirt pocket — I don’t do that anymore. One feature that appeals to me about a ballpoint pen is that you never have to change the battery or charge it….
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