Who Invented the Ballpoint Pen?

The first ballpoint patent belongs to John J. Loud, a Massachusetts leather tanner, granted US 392,046 on 30 October 1888. It worked on leather and was useless on paper.

The pen you actually use descends from László Bíró, a Hungarian journalist who solved the problem Loud could not and patented the result in 1938. He then lost the American market to a man who reverse-engineered his pen in a Buenos Aires shop.

Loud’s problem and Bíró’s problem

Loud needed to mark cutting lines on leather. A pencil would not take and a fountain pen bled. He built a writing tip with a small rotating metal ball seated in a socket, and it did the job on hide, cloth, and rough surfaces.

On paper it was hopeless. The mechanism was too coarse for ordinary writing, and the patent lapsed without commercial use. Loud’s design was correct in principle and wrong in every tolerance that mattered.

Bíró came at it from journalism. He noticed that newspaper ink dried almost instantly on the page while fountain pen ink stayed wet, smeared, and soaked through. The obvious move, putting printing ink in a fountain pen, failed immediately. That ink was far too viscous to travel down a nib by capillary action. The problem was never the ball. Thick ink needs a delivery system that thin ink does not.

What made it work

Bíró worked with his brother György, a dentist and chemist, and the solution came in two halves that only function together.

György formulated an oil-based paste ink, thick and fast-drying. László built a tip where a precisely machined ball turns freely in a socket, picking up ink from the reservoir as it rotates and depositing it as it rolls across the page. The ball acts as a pump rather than a nib. That pairing is the invention, and every ballpoint since is a refinement of it.

They showed a first production version at the Budapest International Fair in 1931 and filed patents in 1938 in Paris and Britain, with an Argentine filing following in 1943.

Why Argentina

The Bírós were Jewish. Anti-Jewish laws took effect in Hungary in 1938, and the brothers left for Paris and then Buenos Aires in 1941.

The Argentine connection was already in place. Bíró had met Augustín Pedro Justo while on holiday, at the time the president of Argentina, who saw the pen and urged him to build it there. In Buenos Aires the brothers named it the Birome, blending Bíró with their partner Meyne. Argentines still call ballpoints biromes, and Inventor’s Day there falls on Bíró’s birthday, 29 September.

The first large order came from the British Royal Air Force around 1944, roughly 30,000 pens for aircrew. Fountain pens leaked at altitude as cabin pressure dropped. A sealed paste-ink pen did not.

The part where he loses the market

In June 1945 a Chicago businessman named Milton Reynolds was in Buenos Aires and bought some Birome pens.

Eversharp, described by TIME as the largest pen and pencil maker in the world, had already paid roughly half a million dollars for the North and Central American rights to Bíró’s patent and was developing its version carefully.

Reynolds designed around the patent instead. Bíró’s claim covered capillary feed, so Reynolds built a version fed by gravity. He knew gravity feed was prone to leaking. He shipped anyway.

His real advantage was not engineering. Selling sign-making equipment before the war had put him on personal terms with the heads of the major department stores, including Fred Gimbel, and that relationship bought him an exclusive launch.

The Reynolds Rocket went on sale at Gimbels on 32nd Street on 29 October 1945 at $12.50, somewhere north of $200 in today’s money. Full-page advertisements claimed it would write for two years without a refill and work underwater. Five thousand people turned up on the first day, and thirty thousand pens sold in the first week.

Bíró received his own US Patent 2,390,636, “Writing Instrument,” on 11 December 1945, six weeks after Reynolds had taken the American market.

The collapse, and who actually won

The Rocket leaked, exactly as Reynolds knew it would. Returns mounted, the advertised claims proved false, and the price collapsed. Some accounts have it down to around nineteen cents. The early ballpoint market burned itself out on bad product within a few years.

Marcel Bich did the slow thing. He licensed Bíró’s design rather than skirting it, spent years on manufacturing precision instead of rushing a launch, and released the BIC Cristal in 1950. Over 100 billion have sold since, making it one of the best-selling manufactured objects in history.

The sequence is worth laying out because it is not the one most accounts give. The man with the first patent never made it work. The man who made it work was beaten to his largest market by someone who copied him. The copier destroyed his own business with a product he knew was defective. The money went to a fourth party who paid the licence and fixed the manufacturing.

Bíró died in Buenos Aires in 1985. In Britain and Australia the pen is still simply called a biro.