Some about the Ballpoint Pen

Маша Подгорнова
3 min readJan 30, 2019

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Ballpoint pen pen is one of most useful things in our reality. Everyone, from the reachest person to poorest one usually use it in their lifes. But not many people think about their history and pluses and minuses of construction.

(Historical information is taken from wiki)

First ballpoint pen was produced by the request of the Royal air forces of great Britain. The reason for it was the fact that usual fountain pens leaks in airplanes from lower atmospheric pressure at altitude. June 10, 1943 in the United States ballpoint pen was patented by Milton Reynolds. In 1953, the Frenchman Marcel BICK improved and simplified the construction and got the cheapest (one-time) in the production model of a ballpoint pen called “BIC Cristal”. In the USSR, ballpoint pens became distributed in the late 1950-ies, after their mass production began started in 1950 at the Swiss equipment. Cores and writing knots were in deficiency, so for the population there were organized filling of cores with paste on the basis of workshops on repair of household appliances. Firstly, master solided wire from the back side, squeezed the ball from the empty rod on the magnet, then inserted the rod into a special machine, and the movement of the handle from top to bottom pumped there writing paste, then pressed the rod on the ball, and he stood in place, wiped everything with a rag. It cost a penny. Because of the frequent filling of the rod, the ball and its groove broke, over time, such a handle began to “snot”. For some time in Soviet schools, primary school students were not allowed to use ballpoint pens, believing that it is impossible to develop a correct and beautiful handwriting (the first ballpoint pens wrote much worse than ink pen). With the improvement of the quality of ballpoint pens, this prohibition was gradually abolished.

This is the most common form of ballpoint pen, which we can see during the day. Also it’s easy to remember about pen of this type, but simpler construction (base of this pen).

The greatest difference between the two presented pens in the schemes of handles is in the fact that in the first kernel is inside and extends by pressing the cap-button. Accordingly, while the kernel is completely pushed inside the handle, there is no possibility to write.

The principle of its operations is very simple. The corpus of the pen serves as protection against damage to the kernel and thing, which people will keep in the hand (later we will turn to ergonomics in it). In the kernel are the same ink, which go away, when we need to write something. When the ball is pressurized, it changes its position in quite a bit, and allows the ink to flow out onto the paper in a normalized amount, good for writing and drawing.

The advantages of a ballpoint pen:

+ You can adjust the pressure

+ Does not require advance preparation (for example, grinding, as with a pencil)

+ Can not be erased from the paper

Disadvantages of the ballpoint pen:

- Has the property of leaking

- Makes your hands dirty

- The ball may get stuck and the pen will stop working even if there is ink inside

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