Larry
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The ballpoint pen is one of those inventions that we take for granted nowadays. It seems like they’ve always been there, but before the ballpoint pen, people had to frequently dip a pen in a bottle of runny ink. Ballpoint pens replaced almost all fountain pens when they started to be massed produced because they are less messy, less expensive, and more reliable than fountain pens. Also, the type of ink that can be used in a ballpoint pen dries extremely quickly. Fountain pen ink takes up to a full minute or longer to dry.
It is said that Galileo Galilei, the famous astronomer, invented a ballpoint pen in the 1600s, but it was never used by anyone but him. A patent for a ballpoint pen was first issued in 1888 to John Loud. This pen didn’t work well for writing letters and was used only to make large marks on leather. Two other ballpoint pens were said to have been invented by a German named Baum in 1910 and by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916. These early designs were plagued with problems that no one was able to fully fix.
The man credited with inventing the modern ballpoint pen is Laszlo Biro, with help from his brother George. Laszlo filed a patent in the British patent office in 1938. In England and a few other countries, the ballpoint pen is still known as the biro. The Biro brothers moved to Argentina in 1940, where the ballpoint pen was first marketed. The pen was first brought into mainstream U.S. in 1945 almost simultaneously by Eversharp and the Reynolds Pen Company.
 Posted 5371 day ago
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