Everything about Ballpoint totally explained
A
ballpoint pen (
Hungarian: golyóstoll, also
eponymously known in
British English as a
biro and
bye-roe in
Britain but sometimes /ˈbiːroʊ/
bee-roh" elsewhere, named after its inventor
László Bíró), is a modern
writing instrument. A ballpoint pen has an internal chamber filled with a
viscous ink that's dispensed at the tip during use by the rolling action of a small metal sphere (0.7
mm to 1.2 mm in diameter) of
brass,
steel or
tungsten carbide. The
ink dries almost immediately after contact with paper. Inexpensive, reliable and maintenance-free, the ballpoint has replaced the
fountain pen as the most popular tool for everyday writing.
History
The manufacture of economical, reliable ballpoint pens resulted from a combination of experimentation, modern chemistry and the precision manufacturing capabilities of 20th century technology. Many patents worldwide are testaments to failed attempts to make these pens commercially viable and widely available. The ballpoint pen went through several failures in design throughout its early stages. One of the many failures was an attempt to place a cube in the pen instead of a ball. However, this obviously was a mistake. Other attempts with triangles and dodechahedrons were tried but unfortunately didn't work as well as a ball. It has even been argued that a design by
Galileo Galilei (during the 17th century), was that of a ballpoint pen.
The first
patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on
30 October 1888, to John J Loud. The pen had a rotating small steel ball, held in place by a socket. Although the pen proved to be too coarse for letter writing, it could be used to mark rough surfaces such as leather and wasn't commercially exploited.
In the period between 1901 and 1940, there was intense interest in improving writing instruments, particularly alternatives or improvements to the fountain pen.
Slavoljub Eduard Penkala invented a solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, a German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916. In these inventions, the ink was placed in a thin tube whose end was blocked by a tiny ball, held so that it couldn't slip into the tube or fall out of the pen. The ink clung to the ball, which spun as the pen was drawn across the paper. These proto-ballpoints didn't deliver the ink evenly. If the ball socket was too tight, the ink didn't reach the paper. If it were too loose, ink flowed past the tip, leaking or making smears. Many inventors tried to fix these problems, but without commercial success.
László Bíró, a
Hungarian newspaper editor, was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, and the sharp tip of his fountain pen often tore his pages of newsprint. Bíró had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Since, when tried, this viscous ink wouldn't flow into a regular fountain pen nib, Bíró, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens. Bíró fitted this pen with a tiny
ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Bíró filed a British patent on
15 June 1938.
Earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Depending on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and required that the pen be held nearly vertically. The Biro pen both pressurized the ink column and used
capillary action for ink delivery, solving the flow problems.
In 1940 the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, moved to
Argentina fleeing Nazi Germany and on
June 10, filed another patent, and formed
Bíró Pens of Argentina. The pen was sold in Argentina under the
Birome brand (portmanteau of
Bíró and
Meyne), which is how ballpoint pens are still known in that country. László was known in Argentina as Ladislao José Bíró. This new design was licensed by the
British, who produced ball point pens for
RAF aircrew as the
Biro, who found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude.
Eversharp, a maker of
mechanical pencils teamed up with
Eberhard-Faber in May 1945 to license the design for sales in the
United States. At about the same time a U.S. businessman saw a Biro pen in a store in
Buenos Aires. He purchased several samples and returned to the U.S. to found the
Reynolds International Pen Company, producing the Biro design without license as the
Reynolds Rocket. He managed to beat Eversharp to market in late 1945; the first ballpoint pens went on sale at
Gimbels department store in
New York City on
29 October 1945 for US$12.50 each. This pen was widely known as
the rocket in the U.S. into the late 1950s.
Similar pens went on sale before the end of the year in England, and by the next year in most of Europe. Cheap disposable instruments were produced by the
BIC Corporation with "Bic" as the tradename (pronounced BiK, not Beak); as with '
Hoover' and '
Xerox', the tradename has subsequently passed into general use. With BIC's expanding product range, the original Bic pen design is now termed the
Bic Cristal.
Since 1990, Bíró's birthday (the 29th of September) is
Inventor's Day in Argentina.
Description
There are two basic types of ball point pens: disposable and refillable.
Disposable pens are chiefly made of plastic throughout and discarded when the ink is consumed;
refillable pens are metal or plastic and tend to be higher in quality and price. The refill replaces the entire internal ink reservoir and ball point unit rather than actually refilling it with ink, as it takes special high-speed centrifugation to properly fill a ball point reservoir with the viscous ink. The simplest types of ball point pens have a cap to cover the tip when the pen isn't in use, while others have a mechanism for retracting the tip. This mechanism is usually controlled by a button at the top and powered by a
spring within the pen apparatus, but other possibilities include a pair of buttons, a
screw, or a slide.
Rollerball pens combine the ballpoint design with the use of liquid ink and flow systems from fountain pens;
Space Pens, developed by Fisher in the United States, combine a more viscous than normal ballpoint pen ink with a gas pressurized piston which forces the ink toward the point. This design allows the pen to write even upside down or in zero gravity environments.
Standards
The
International Organization for Standardization has published standards for ball point and roller ball pens:
ISO 12756:1998: Drawing and writing instruments -- Ball point pens and roller ball pens -- Vocabulary
; ISO 12757-1:1998: Ball point pens and refills -- Part 1: General use
ISO 12757-2:1998: Ball point pens and refills -- Part 2: Documentary use (DOC)
; ISO 14145-1:1998: Roller ball pens and refills -- Part 1: General use
ISO 14145-2:1998: Roller ball pens and refills -- Part 2: Documentary use (DOC)
Ballpoint pens in everyday life
Ballpoint pens are ubiquitous in modern
culture. While other forms of pen are available, ballpoint pens are certainly the most common and almost every
household is likely to have several. The fact that they're so cheaply available (costing as little as one one-hundredth of a
cent/
penny to produce) and so convenient to use means they're often to be found on desks and also in pockets, handbags, purses, bags and in
cars — almost anywhere where one could conceivably need to use a pen. Ballpoint pens are often provided free by businesses as a form of
advertising — printed with a company's name, a ballpoint pen is a relatively low cost advertisement that's highly effective (customers will use, and therefore see, a pen on a daily basis). Businesses and charities may also include ballpoint pens in
direct mail mailings in order to increase a customer's interest in the mailing.
In recent years, the ballpoint pen has become a popular art medium. The immediacy of results with little or no preparation compared to many other media such as painting and the relative low price of the pens makes it the medium of choice for many modern artists.
Some people also create art on themselves with the pens; this is sometimes known as a
ballpoint tattoo. Due to this, and to its wide-spread use by schoolchildren, all ballpoint ink formulas are non-
toxic, and the manufacturing and content of the ink is regulated in most countries.
Multi-coloured pens
Some ball point pens are made with multiple ink colours that can be selected by the user by choice.
The most common versions of these are the
three-colour pen, which has black, blue, and red.
Bic has made a
four-colour pen for a long time that also has green ink. Both of these versions work by the user pressing down on a
lever, that will lock in place when it's held to the bottom. It can be released by pressing down partway on a lever of another color.
PenTech has made some more unusual versions of the four-colour pen that include colours like lime green, hot pink, turquoise, and purple.
The past generation has seen the introduction of a 10-colour ball point pen. Most of these work by pressing down on a lever the same way as one would in a three- or
four-colour pen, but in order to release the colour, a button at the top must be pressed.
Colours that are commonly found in 10-color pens are black, blue, brown, green, orange, pink, purple, red, turquoise, and yellow, though these may vary slightly, depending on the manufacturer.
Today, 10-colour pens are often sold at
dollar stores unbranded. But in the past, they were sold at a higher cost, and were harder to find.
One unusual version of the 10-colour pen that was sold during the early 90s at
The Nature Company stores had scented ink.
Limits of ballpoint pens
Compared to
rollerball and
fountain pens, ballpoints require more pressure to write. Ballpoints lack the free flowing supply of ink that both of these types of have, and they require the writer to apply a lot more pressure to the page. This is necessary because pushing it starts the flow of ink unlike rollerballs in which the ball is always coated. Making them like this though has benefits, like a lower chance of leakage compared to rollerballs.
Normal ballpoint pens are widely believed to be unusable in space but that's reported not actually to be the case . They have difficulty writing on surfaces with low
adherence (such as plastics, shiny surfaces, and wet or oily surfaces) or writing upside down . There are
special pens that do work upside-down.
Trivia
The Al Faisalia skyscraper in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, takes the shape of a ballpoint pen.
The best selling ballpoint pen in the world is the Bic Cristal
Inhuman Pyramid
by Phillip Blackman may be the largest example of ballpoint pen art in the world at two metres tall and a metre and a half wide.
A Bic Cristal ballpoint pen contains enough ink to draw a continuous line up to two miles (3.2 km) long.
In 2005, Bic sold its hundred billionth ballpoint pen - enough ink to draw a line to Pluto and back more than 20 times.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Ballpoint'.
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