{"id":33157,"date":"2015-10-12T04:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T08:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33157"},"modified":"2015-10-11T22:36:18","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T02:36:18","slug":"is-the-ballpoint-pen-the-reason-we-all-write-so-badly-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/12\/is-the-ballpoint-pen-the-reason-we-all-write-so-badly-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the ballpoint pen the reason we all write so badly now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic<\/em>, Josh Giesbrecht<\/a> postulates that our penmanship went south in parallel with the rise of the ballpoint pen:<\/p>\n

Recently, Bic launched a campaign to \u201csave handwriting.\u201d Named \u201cFight for Your Write,\u201d it includes a pledge to \u201cencourage the act of handwriting\u201d in the pledge-taker\u2019s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company\u2019s ballpoints into classrooms.<\/p>\n

As a teacher, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder how anyone could think there\u2019s a shortage. I find ballpoint pens all over the place: on classroom floors, behind desks. Dozens of castaways collect in cups on every teacher\u2019s desk. They\u2019re so ubiquitous that the word \u201cballpoint\u201d is rarely used; they\u2019re just \u201cpens.\u201d But despite its popularity, the ballpoint pen is relatively new in the history of handwriting, and its influence on popular handwriting is more complicated than the Bic campaign would imply.<\/p>\n

The creation story of the ballpoint pen tends to highlight a few key individuals, most notably the Hungarian journalist L\u00e1szl\u00f3 B\u00edr\u00f3, who is credited with inventing it. But as with most stories of individual genius, this take obscures a much longer history of iterative engineering and marketing successes. In fact, B\u00edr\u00f3 wasn\u2019t the first to develop the idea: The ballpoint pen was originally patented in 1888 by an American leather tanner named John Loud, but his idea never went any further. Over the next few decades, dozens of other patents were issued for pens that used a ballpoint tip of some kind, but none of them made it to market.<\/p>\n

These early pens failed not in their mechanical design, but in their choice of ink. The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoint\u2019s predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib\u2014but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and you\u2019ll end up with a leaky mess. Ink is where L\u00e1szl\u00f3 B\u00edr\u00f3, working with his chemist brother Gy\u00f6rgy, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn\u2019t leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The B\u00edr\u00f3s lived in a troubled time, however. The Hungarian author Gyoergy Moldova writes in his book Ballpoint<\/em> about L\u00e1szl\u00f3\u2019s flight from Europe to Argentina to avoid Nazi persecution. While his business deals in Europe were in disarray, he patented the design in Argentina in 1943 and began production. His big break came later that year, when the British Air Force, in search of a pen that would work at high altitudes, purchased 30,000 of them. Soon, patents were filed and sold to various companies in Europe and North America, and the ballpoint pen began to spread across the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic, Josh Giesbrecht postulates that our penmanship went south in parallel with the rise of the ballpoint pen: Recently, Bic launched a campaign to \u201csave handwriting.\u201d Named \u201cFight for Your Write,\u201d it includes a pledge to \u201cencourage the act of handwriting\u201d in the pledge-taker\u2019s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,15],"tags":[492,723,380,134],"class_list":["post-33157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-technology","tag-argentina","tag-hungary","tag-patents","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8CN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33158,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33157\/revisions\/33158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}