The Best Ballpoint Pens | JetPens

History of the Ballpoint Pen

As modern as they seem, ballpoint pens were actually early alternatives to the fountain pen. The first pen that could be described as a ballpoint was patented in 1888 by an American tanner named John Loud. It had an ink reservoir and a rolling ball in the tip to dispense the ink, but Loud’s ink was too viscous, and his design was never commercially developed. Other inventors tried to develop similar pens throughout the early 1900s, but they all failed due to the difficulty of finding an ink that would flow consistently and evenly around the ball without clogging, leaking, or smearing.

Eventually, Hungarian newspaper editor László Bíró noticed that the viscous ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly without smearing. He worked with his brother György, who was a chemist, to develop a similar ink for use in a pen with a freely-rotating ball in the tip. They patented this successful design in 1938. A few years later during World War II, the Bíró brothers moved to Argentina to escape the Nazis. There they founded a company to sell their pen, which they named the Birome. To this day, ballpoint pens are commonly called a “birome” in Argentina and a “biro” in Britain.

Ballpoint pens are now the most popular pens in the world. Although details of their design have changed over the years, modern ballpoints remain remarkably similar to the humble ballpoint pen developed by László and György Bíró.