What would our writing look like if the Bic ballpoint pen had never been invented? At its birth, this rudimentary plastic ink roller that every human on the planet now has access to and discards almost weekly had massive effects on the way that we record information, communicate, and even represent our written characters. To fully understand the impact that this simple invention now has on our daily lives, it’s helpful to examine its humble beginnings.
The Unique History of the Ballpoint Pen
Before World War II, the act of writing something on paper was virtually the same as it had been for thousands of years. The earliest examples that we have of humans using a stylist and ink to write messages and documents date back to 2500 BC when ancient Chinese and Egyptians used charred bone, tar, and sap as ink which was stylized into characters using a sharpened stick or bone.
In the late 19th Century, this method was practically unchanged. In Western societies, including the United States, fountain pens were widely used. Pieces of wood or metal or a combination of the two were hollowed out to hold the ink which was spread onto paper through a fashioned tip.
The earliest forms of ballpoint pens were patented in the 1880s by an American lawyer and inventor named John J. Loud. Loud’s design was largely unsuccessful as the materials used were expensive and though it was one of the first types of modern pens that were able to write on coarse materials such as leather and wood, it struggled to write on traditional paper without destroying it.
The ink transfer was also sloppy. While writers using a fountain pen were accustomed to the heavy flow associated with the traditional design, fountain pen ink transferred through a ballpoint was dispensed much faster which caused considerable smudging. In 1930, a Hungarian journalist named László Bíró replicated Loud’s design (which was no longer patented) and with the help of his chemist brother, designed a new type of ink that dried much faster.
With the improved ink development, Bíró’s ballpoint pen caught on fast, though he received little royalties for it. As a Jew during World War II, he and his brother were forced to emigrate to Argentina where he saw some success marketing his pen to local Argentinians and British pilots who were able to use the pen at high altitudes with little smudging. In 1945 on a trip to Buenos Aires, Milton Reynolds of the Reynolds International Pen Company purchased a few of the pens but changed the design just enough to be able to file his own patent. Once his design went on the market, he saw unfathomable success, nearly selling out of his supply of 50,000 pens in the first week.
The Bic Ballpoint
The final transformation of the ballpoint pen happened just a few short years later. With the second industrial revolution in full force following World War II, the trend of cheap materials manufacturing was easily applied to the production of ballpoint pens. In the late 1940s, French industrialist Michel Bich (yes, the “h” was later dropped) designed the Bic pen that we know today. Bich created his design using cheap plastic materials, a more narrow ink tube in the center, and an eight-sided octagonal grip.
These new improvements were exceptionally crucial to the design that we know today. Previous to the Bich design, the ballpoint pen cost 80 cents to make (nearly $15 USD in 2024) and was sold for $12.50 (over $220 USD in 2024) making it a high-end luxury item. Reynolds also designed his pens to be refilled as you would refill a fountain pen which meant that his customers were only purchasing their pen once and refilling it every few years. Bich’s design not only allowed him to have a much higher profit margin, but it vastly increased access to reliable writing utensils through his mass production and affordable prices.
How Has Writing Changed Since the Invention of the Bic Ballpoint Pen?
Simply through widespread access, the Bic ballpoint pen affected writing by increasing penmanship. From remote villages in the African continent to the rural communities of Appalachia, students were suddenly able to quickly transfer their thoughts to the page without having to refill their ink, allow their ink to dry from word to word, or spend time making repairs to their pen. The cheap cost of ballpoint pens and their ability to be carried from place to place without leakage essentially made fountain pens obsolete within a few years.
For better or for worse, the invention of the ballpoint pen also made cursive writing obsolete. While many people consider computers and smartphones to be the killers of this nearly extinct form of writing, many historians have concluded that cursive writing has been in a slow decline since the early 1960s, right around the time when nearly every person worldwide had multiple ballpoint pens in their possession.
While losing the beauty of cursive to print writing may feel like a loss to certain generations, it’s important to understand the innumerable benefits that the invention of the ballpoint pen brought to the world. Without the speed that our trusty Bics allow, it’s quickly apparent how much slower the progression of the 20th century would have been. The ability to quickly communicate and record through the written word would be lost along with the many discoveries and advancements that we take for granted today.
