Ballpoint pens.

• Position: LIFE-CYCLE STUDIES

Overview

Argentina was the cradle of the ballpoint pen, America its nursery, and France its intensive care unit. Ballpoints were first patented in 1888 and then another 350 times, without making their mark, by 1935. That's when Hungarian newspaperman Laszlo Biro and his chemist brother Georg began tinkering with a prototype. Then they met the president of Argentina at the beach. He invited them to build a plant in his country, which they did in 1943. The brothers sold a few pens there and ran out of money.

But the idea had finally caught on. Milton Reynolds, an American businessman adept at making and losing fortunes, was inspired by an early Biro pen. Advised by his lawyers that he could ignore Biro's patent, in late 1945 Reynolds began production, selling the output through Gimbel's department store in Manhattan. The store sold 10,000 of them the first day, at US$10 apiece (about US$105 in 2005). That success stimulated a frenzy of competition involving some familiar names (Eversharp, Parker). But the resulting plunge in prices, along with the pens' unreliability and leakiness (the spur for the pocket protector), drove the market to the point of collapse.

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It was revived in the early 1950s by Patrick Frawley (Papermate brand) in the United States and especially by Marcel Bich (Bic) in France. Frawley introduced the retractable tip and no-smear ink. Bich focused on the basics, studying every ballpoint on the market. The result was the Bic Cristal, a six-sided, clear-barreled disposable commodity pen: simple, plain, dead reliable, and cheap. Today it is the world's iconic ballpoint. Bic claims to have sold over 100 billion altogether, currently perhaps 20 million every day.

Manufacture

Over the years pens have been made of feathers, wood, steel, aluminum, platinum, leather, hard rubber, bakelite, celluloid, and even deer antler and buffalo horn. Modern...