The Cheap Pen that Changed Writing Forever
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
The cheap pen that changed writing forever:
Fountain pens were a stylish statement but messy and impractical. Their replacement was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.
On 29 October 1945, the New York City branch of Gimbels department store unveiled a new product. Billions upon billions would follow in its wake.
Gimbels was the first to sell a new kind of ink pen, the design of which had taken several decades to come to fruition. The pens, made by the Reynolds International Pen Company, promised an end to the messy mishaps users of fountain pens encountered - leaking ink, smudges and pooling ink blots.
The new ballpoint pens did away with this, using a special viscous ink which dried quickly and didn't leave smudges. At the heart of it, the rolling ball in the nib - and gravity - ensured a constant, steady stream of ink that didn't smear or leave solid pools of ink on the page.
The new ballpoint was clean and convenient. What it wasn't was cheap.
The new Reynolds ballpoint cost $12.50 - convert that to 2020 money and it's more than $180 (138.50). Today, if you were buying your pens in bulk, from stack-'em-high superstores, you could end up with more than 1,000 for the same price.
The pen was the first to go on sale in the US, but it was by no means the first ballpoint pen - the head of the US company that made it had in fact discovered a version during a business trip in South America. Its evolution is, in many ways, an example of a game-changing design waiting until outside factors - in this case the rise of plastics and mass-production infrastructure, and a brilliant marketeer - allowed it to achieve its full potential.
Interestingly I've seen more people using fountain pens in the past five years than before.
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