June 10: On This Day in 1943 - Ballpoint Pen

June 10, 1943: On this day, Hungarian Laszlo Bíró patented the ballpoint pen, which he had been developing since the 1930s. He was living in Argentina, where he had gone to escape the Nazis.

Bíró was a newspaper editor and was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages. He had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Bíró, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens. Bíró fitted this pen with a tiny ball in the tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper.

In many languages, the word for ballpoint pen is biro.