Who invented the ballpoint pen? The real story, and 11 facts.

The ballpoint pen was invented by László József Bíró, a Hungarian, who filed the patent on 25 April 1938. The date you often see, 1944, is when the pen first went into mass production, not when it was invented.

People sometimes blur the two together, so here are the milestones in one place before the rest of the story fills them in.

So the invention belongs to 1938 and to Bíró. The fame, and the billion pens that followed, came later and through other hands.

The inventor of the ballpoint pen was László József Bíró, born in Budapest in 1899. His was not the straight line of a career engineer.

Bíró's birth name was Schweiger. His Jewish family changed it to Bíró six years later, to align it more closely with their Hungarian home. As a young man he began studying medicine, though he never finished the degree, and along the way he worked as an insurance broker and a racing driver. The ballpoint is the invention he is remembered for, but it was far from his only one.

That restlessness matters to the story. The ballpoint did not arrive from a laboratory. It came from a journalist who was annoyed by smudged ink and curious enough to do something about it.

Strictly speaking, Bíró was not the first to imagine a pen like this. Inventors before him had sketched writing instruments that resembled the ballpoint, but only resembled it.

People were already writing with ink pens in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 19th century, patents were even filed for pens that carried their own ink supply, an early answer to the problem of dipping and refilling. The catch was the writing tip: as a rule, those pens still wrote with nibs, not with a ball.

The rolling ball, the feature that defines a ballpoint, is exactly what those predecessors lacked. That single piece is what Bíró got working, and it is why the line of credit stops with him.

The idea came from two ordinary things: a printing press and his children's marbles. In the 1930s, Bíró worked as a journalist, author and publisher across several newspapers.

He wanted a pen that wrote with ink without smudging, much like newspaper printing, only by hand. The marbles supplied the missing mechanism. He noticed that when they rolled through a puddle, they left a wet trail behind them, and he transferred that principle to a small ball at the tip of a pen. The ball carries ink onto the paper, where it dries.

All it took, in the end, was a tube, a ball, and ink guided through the tube to the ball. With several friends and acquaintances, Bíró built the first ballpoint and filed it for patent protection on 25 April 1938. It came to market as the Go-Pen, a writing instrument, you might say, for life on the move.

History almost made Hungary the first great ballpoint power. The Nazis prevented it.

Bíró was Jewish, and the pressure on him grew sharply toward the end of 1938, with Hungary allied to Nazi Germany. When a law was about to come into force banning patents from being taken abroad, he and his family fled in time to France, then moved on to Argentina as Jews in France faced rising persecution too.

He kept working. In South America he continued his research into ballpoints and obtained a further patent in 1943, this time in the United States. On that basis, an Argentine factory went on to produce seven million ballpoint pens each year. The pen that might have been Hungarian became, by force of circumstance, Argentine.

The real breakthrough came through another businessman, and for an unusual reason. The Briton Henry George Martin saw the pen's potential not for the office but for the air.

Because the ballpoint worked reliably at high altitude and did not leak, Martin judged it ideal for aircraft crews, who until then had struggled with fountain pens failing in the thin air aloft. He bought the patent rights from Bíró and started series production. In 1944, he made around 30,000 units for the Royal Air Force.

From there it scaled worldwide. By the mid-1950s, one billion ballpoints had been produced, though some were made without anyone buying the patent rights. Even so, Bíró held patents in dozens of countries and is rightly regarded as the official inventor. The pen that finally put a ballpoint in every pocket, cheap and reliable, came from France in the 1950s, made in vast numbers by Marcel Bich.

Bíró's name outlived him in the most literal way. In several languages it simply became the word for the pen.

In Britain, and in Italy, many people call a ballpoint a Biro to this day. France went a different route and says Bic, which has nothing to do with Bíró and everything to do with Marcel Bich, whose affordable pens carried the writing instrument to the masses. Bíró, meanwhile, kept inventing: one of his other ideas applied the same ball principle to a perfume, an early cousin of the roll-on deodorant. It failed commercially at the time, though the roll-on concept later succeeded handsomely.

Two final facts close the story. The Fisher Space Pen, developed by Paul C. Fisher and others with no involvement from Bíró, uses a pressurized refill that writes in zero gravity, in extreme temperatures, and even tip-up, where an ordinary ballpoint would quit. NASA has carried it since 1968. And since 1986, the year after Bíró died in Buenos Aires, Argentina has marked Inventors' Day on 29 September, his birthday, in tribute to the man who made his home there for some 40 years.