標準歴史・文化

The Story of the Ballpoint Pen

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Before the middle of the twentieth century, most people wrote with fountain pens. These pens had to be filled with ink again and again, and they often left marks on the paper and on the writer's fingers. In the 1930s, a Hungarian journalist named László Bíró noticed that the ink used to print newspapers dried almost as soon as it touched the paper. He wondered whether the same kind of ink could be used in a pen, but it was far too thick to through the narrow tube of a fountain pen. Bíró's answer was to put a ball at the tip of the pen. As the ball rolled across the paper, it turned inside its socket and picked up ink from the tube above. Getting the ink to the right thickness proved difficult, and Bíró worked on the problem together with his brother, who was a chemist. The two men received a patent in 1938. Soon afterward they left Europe and continued their work in Argentina. The new pen quickly for an reason. a fountain pen, it did not leak at high , so the British air bought large numbers of them during the war. After the war, a shop in New York sold its first ballpoint pens at ten dollars each, and thousands of people waited in line outside. However, many of the early pens were poorly made and stopped writing after a short time, and sales soon fell sharply. Prices came down as manufacturing improved. By the 1950s a French company was producing pens so cheaply that they could be thrown away when the ink ran out, and the ballpoint became an rather than a . Today, however, that very cheapness has become a problem. Billions of plastic pens are discarded every year. Some companies now sell pens made of or recycled with ink tubes that can be replaced, though these more. In several countries, schools and offices used pens and send them to factories where they are broken so that the plastic can be used again.