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October 27, 2025

— László Bíró

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Better than gravity

László Bíró had ink on his hands. Again.

It was the 1930s in Budapest, and Bíró, a middle-aged newspaper editor, was losing a daily battle against his fountain pen.

The ink smudged before it dried, blotted when he wrote too fast, and leaked when he needed it most.

But one afternoon at the printing press, watching the massive rollers lay down tomorrow's headlines, Bíró noticed something he'd seen many times, but in a different light: Newspaper ink dried instantly, with no smudges or waiting.

Hmmm, Bíró thought, or whatever the equivalent would be in Hungarian.

"It got me thinking," he later recalled, "how this process could be simplified right down to the level of an ordinary pen."

He tried filling a fountain pen with printing ink, but it clogged immediately. The ink was simply too thick to flow through the delicate tip. But he couldn't let it go. So, he turned to his brother György, who was a dentist and had a background in understood chemistry.

Together they worked out an elegant solution: a tiny metal ball sitting in a socket at the pen's tip.

As the ball rolled across paper, it would pick up thick ink from a cartridge and deposit it smoothly, using capillary action—the same physics that lets water climb up a plant's stem.

In 1938, Bíró secured a British patent. But then, of course, the world caught fire.

Escape and Reinvention

László and György were Jewish, and as Nazi forces swept through Europe, the two brothers and a friend named Juan Jorge Meyne fled the continent, finally making it to Argentina.

In Buenos Aires, they started over. They opened a factory, filed a new patent, and called their pen the "Birome"—a blend of Bíró and Meyne. Argentina still calls ballpoint pens "biromes" today.

The war proved their invention's worth, and the Royal Air Force bought 30,000 of the pens, which solved a difficult problem. At very high altitudes, fountain pens leaked constantly, and when navigators were using paper maps to track their location in combat, spilled ink -- and ruined maps -- could have catastrophic consequences.

but, Bíró's design worked the same whether you were on the ground or at 30,000 feet.

The American Scramble

After the war, an American businessman Milton Reynolds was shown a Birome during a sales call at a Chicago department store. He recognized the commercial potential immediately. He also saw an opportunity.

Bíró's had filed for a U.S. patent at this point, but it was still pending. So, Reynolds redesigned the pen to use gravity feed instead of capillary action, undermining the patent while cutting corners on quality.

His "Reynolds Rocket" made its debut at Gimbels in New York City on October 29, 1945, 80 years ago today. The price was $12.50 (about $215 today).

Thousands stormed the store. Reynolds sold out in days.

There was one problem: Gravity-powered pens leaked almost as often as fountain pens, and the crazy-expensive Reynolds Rockets failed to live up to their hype. The ballpoint boom became a bust in the U.S. by the following year.

The Right Way

Enter Marcel Bich, a French industrialist who saw an opportunity of his own. In 1953, Bich licensed Bíró's design for $2 million and founded BIC.

He focused on precision manufacturing and reliable ink formulas. The BIC Cristal worked smoothly, consistently, every single time—for just 29 cents.

BIC has now sold over 100 billion pens. I can almost guarantee you have a few of these in your house today.

Marcel Bich made a fortune. Bíró made enough from his pen patent to live comfortably, but he never developed massive wealth.

In most of the English-speaking world — although not the United States — his name became the product itself.

• "Hand me a biro."
• "Got a biro I can borrow?"

Late in life, he reflected that while he could have made a fortune "with a little more business acumen," knowing the biro became "the most popular writing instrument in the world" made him "forget the riches I missed out on."

Inventor's Day

Still, he kept working and creating—and was credited with hundreds of other inventions throughout his life, though none achieved the success of the ballpoint pen.

If you've ever used roll-on deodorant, we have him to thank for that, too.

László Bíró died in Buenas Ares on October 24, 1985, at age 86, Argentina declared his birthday, September 29, as Inventor's Day.

His daughter Mariana still lives there, stewarding her father's legacy.

So here's to October 29, and to the journalist who got annoyed at smudged ink.

Next time you click a pen, remember: someone noticed that something didn't work as well as it should, and cared enough to follow through.

O.K. What should we fix next?

​

7 other things to know this week ...

• Sunday, October 26: "They may say what they please, but Clinton has defied them all." — Observer at the Erie Canal opening ceremony this day in 1825. Initially mocked as "Clinton's Folly," the 363-mile waterway connecting Lake Erie to the Hudson River became one of America's most successful infrastructure projects—dropping freight costs from $100 per ton to just $6, opening up western settlement, and making New York City the nation's commercial capital.
• Monday, October 27: "No sir! I'm running this train!" — New York City Mayor George B. McClellan on this day in 1904. McClellan was supposed to ceremonially start the train from the ornate City Hall station and immediately turn it over to a professional operator, but he was so captivated by the experience that he piloted the train all the way to 103rd Street—skipping some stops along the way.
• Tuesday, October 28: "We will not let you pass!" — Captain Valentin Savitsky to his crew aboard Soviet submarine B-59 on October 28, 1962, as he prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo after being depth-charged by the U.S. Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Flotilla Chief of Staff Vasily Arkhipov's lone dissent prevented what could have been nuclear war.
• Wednesday, October 29: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." — Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus," on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated on October 28, 1886. The dedication featured the first ticker-tape parade in New York City history, celebrating what would become America's most iconic symbol of freedom and welcome to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.
• Thursday, October 30: "We typed the L and the O, and then the system crashed." — Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA computer science professor, describing the first ARPANET message sent on this day in 1969. The team had intended to type "LOGIN" but the system crashed after just two letters. Nevertheless, those two letters—"LO"—marked the birth of what would become the internet.
• Friday, October 31: "The invention which will be most important to the world is that which is entirely free from commercial aspect." — John Logie Baird, Scottish inventor who on October 30, 1925, successfully demonstrated the first working mechanical television, transmitting moving silhouette images in his laboratory.
• Saturday, November 1: "The purpose of this memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States." — Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore, which was finally finished this day in 1941.