It’s the most-used writing tool on earth, yet almost nobody knows the story behind it. The ballpoint pen took decades to get right and made (and lost) fortunes along the way. Here’s the short history.
The first patent: John J. Loud, 1888
An American named John J. Loud patented a pen with a rotating steel ball tip in 1888, intended for marking leather and rough surfaces. It worked on those materials but was too crude for writing on paper, and the patent eventually lapsed. The idea was sound; the execution wasn’t there yet.
The breakthrough: László Bíró, 1938
The modern ballpoint came from a Hungarian journalist, László Bíró. Frustrated that fountain-pen ink smudged and took forever to dry, he noticed that the thick ink used in newspaper printing dried almost instantly. Working with his brother György, a chemist, he paired a quick-drying ink with a tiny rotating ball in the tip that fed ink smoothly onto the page. He patented it in 1938. In many countries, ballpoint pens are still called “biros” after him.
War, pilots, and a sales frenzy
The ballpoint’s first big break was altitude: unlike fountain pens, it didn’t leak in the low pressure of an airplane cockpit, so air forces wanted it during World War II. After the war, it exploded as a consumer product. In 1945, a New York store sold thousands of ballpoint pens in a single day at a premium price, despite early models being expensive and prone to leaking.
Marcel Bich makes it cheap
The pen became the everyday object we know thanks to Frenchman Marcel Bich, who refined the design and drove the cost down dramatically in the 1950s. His company — BIC — turned the ballpoint into a disposable item anyone could afford, selling it by the billions.
The ballpoint today
Modern ballpoints have come a long way from those scratchy early pens. Low-viscosity and hybrid inks (like the Uni-ball Jetstream) now write as smoothly as gel pens while keeping the ballpoint’s fast-drying, low-bleed advantages — which is exactly why they’re great for journaling. See our best ballpoint pens for journaling, or learn how every ink type compares in pen types explained.
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