> Did you ever wonder about the history of ballpoint pens?
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> By David McClelland
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> I can't think of many of my possessions that I use more often than my huge assortment of ballpoint pens. They are everywhere around my house, in my vehicles, the garage, etc.
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> I wondered about their history and, you guessed it, I did the research. The first patent was issued on October 30, 1888 to John Loud's. That design was improved dramatically and by 1946, the type of pen we use today was already being manufactured.
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> I found a neat little book, Ball-Point Pens by Bernie Zubrowski and illustrated by Linda Bourke, publishede by Little, Brown and Company in 1979, that calls itself "A Children's Museum Activity Book" and has many amazing facts as well.
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> Since it is a book written for children, I figured I would be able to understand most of what it contained. For example, it asks whether the reader thought a ball-point pen is good only for writing. The answer, "Wrong. With a little imagination and a little information, you can do a variety of things with your pen." Mr. Zubrowski said that you can turn you pen into a part of a scale, make it a simple pump or use it as a thermometer.
> He went on to say that, by taking a pen apart, you can construct other tools such as a balance, an eye dropper or a prism.
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> It turns out that a ballpoint pen is more complicated than it looks. Its tip is designed to take advantage of the properties of liquids. The ink is not just colored water, but a liquid especially selected for properties that result in uniform writing. The design of the pens had to take many issues into account, like the weight and spreading of the ink, the type, size and material of the ball used for the point, the type and amount of ink to be stored in the tube and the quick drying time of the ink. We take all of that for granted now.
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> The pen won't write upside down because the weight of the ink will pull it away from the ball. I found that my pens won't even write in the horizontal position for more than a couple seconds. There is a good story about the huge amount of time and money that NASA expended to develop a ballpoint pen that would write in space in any and every position, whereas the Russian astronauts just use a pencil. Should tax payers revolt?
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> There is much more to say, but I tried to cover the basics and, I think you know that you should never leave home without your ballpoint pen and a pad of paper.