26th July 2008
The tungsten ball that provides the writing tip is a technological achievement needing grinding into a sphere over a prolonged time. It is also possible to date Biro’s and Bic’s – a French company started by Marcel Bich - by the pen-cap itself – As stricter requirements with regard to public safety were introduced so the cap design has changed. Such innocuous items as these can cause sever difficulties in breathing if they become lodged in the throats of children – easily done when so many children suck and chew the ends of their pens – Most recent standards require that a certain volume of airflow is possible through the perforations introduced into the design of cap to allow for this to happen…..
......So much design and technology into something that sells by the million at such a low cost every day.
......So much design and technology into something that sells by the million at such a low cost every day.
As with many inventions the time at which it was developed helped with its success. Manufacturing items in large quantities makes them accessible at lower prices to more people but the costs of setting up large scale production often prevents this from happening. The need for pens that wrote whilst aircraft were being flown – in times such as wartime – without ink leaking from the pen in the reduced air-pressures found at ‘flying altitudes’ - assured the company of larger orders than might otherwise have been ossible. Both the British and American airforces used them.
There can be few inventors whose name has become a household word in the way that the Biro’s name has become associated with the modern ball-point pen. Ideas for pens that rolled ink onto a surface were not new – such ideas had been devised for writing on canvas – but Biro had a brother who was able to formulate a quick drying ink that contributed to the necessary components to achieve the product. His observation that ink in his own area of expertise - that of newspaper publishing - dried morequickly than ink from the nib of a pen led him to seek the assisatnce of hos broither who was a chemist.
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