The Bic Biro comes of age
The first modern ball-point pen, the Bic Biro, went on sale this week 60 years ago in the UK. BBC story here:
In 1938, Hungarian newspaper journalist Laszlo Biro noticed the ink used on the printing presses dried quickly and so tried using it in a fountain pen to avoid the problem of leaks, blots and smudges.
But the ink was too thick to flow into the nib. So Biro, with the help of his brother, a chemist, devised a pen tipped with a metal ball bearing that used capillary action to draw ink through the rotating ball.
The patent to the pen was later licensed in 1950 to Marcel Bich of France who used a shortened version of his last name to market the pen: Bic. The world of writing was never the same again.
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