ON MONDAY, OC tober 29, 1945, at nine-thirty in the morning, 5,000 shoppers stormed into Manhattan’s Gimbel Bros, department store in pursuit of technology’s latest marvel. An advertisement in the previous day’s paper had called it “the miracle pen that will revolutionize writing.” The ball-point pen was a wonder that would write in the Aleutian Islands, underwater, or at 20,000 feet, without smudging or leaking, for two whole years. By the end of the day, Gimbels had sold 8,000 pens at $12.50 apiece (with desk stand). They were no good.

But there were decent ballpoints in other countries. For all its capabilities, the ball-point pen was really quite simple. Instead of the conventional fountain pen’s slit nib, it had a one-millimeter steel ball housed in a socket. The ball picked up gelatinous dye from a reservoir and rolled it onto the paper. This decades-old concept had been put on the market sporadically, with little success, before being developed to the point of practicality in 1937 by Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian painter, journalist, and proofreader, with the help of his brother Georg, a chemist.

At the outbreak of World War II the Biros, who were Jewish, moved to Paris, where Laszlo obtained a patent on his design. When France fell, he fled to neutral Argentina, where he had friends, and in 1943 he formed Eterpen S.A. to manufacture the pen. It quickly became popular in Great Britain as the Stratopen, manufactured by the Miles Aircraft Company. American and British fliers prized the ball-point for its leak-free performance at high altitudes. In the spring of 1945 Eterpen announced plans to market ball-points in the United States. The press eagerly reported the story, and Biro looked forward to satisfying the pent-up demand of American consumers. Unfortunately, he was already too late.

In June 1945 Milton Reynolds, a Chicago huckster who had made and lost several fortunes, saw a display of Biro pens in Buenos Aires. He hurried home and discovered to his joy that a similar pen had been patented by one John Loud of Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1888. The ball-point concept was in the public domain.

Loud’s pen, with a spring-operated inking mechanism, was designed to write on wood, leather, or coarse wrapping paper; it was not suitable for penmanship. Biro’s pen used capillary action (the tendency of liquids to rise in a narrow tube) to deliver dye to the point; thus, it could even write upside down. To avoid infringing Biro’s patent, Reynolds used simple gravity flow, correctly judging the upside-down market to be negligible. Reynolds rushed his design into production and beat his unwitting rival to the sales counter. Within a month his $26,000 investment had, by some accounts, turned into more than $500,000. Reynolds pens flew off the shelves, but they were junk. Air bubbles blocked the dye, ball bearings malfunctioned, and dye came out in dobs or even fermented, causing the pens to explode. And to the horror of bankers and attorneys, that dye tended to disappear when exposed to light. The Reynolds was called the only pen that would produce eight carbons and no original. By the spring of 1946 Reynolds had sold two million pens, of which more than a hundred thousand were returned.

In February 1946 Macy’s introduced the Birome pen, made by the Argentine firm, with a retractable point and a $19.98 price tag. It had serious problems with quality control and was too late to ride the first wave of public excitement, so it sold poorly. By the end of 1946 scores of companies had entered the market, and ball-point pens became throwaway items, selling for twenty-nine cents with a key chain included. In 1947 Biro gave up and sold his North American rights. Reynolds flew a Douglas A-26 around the world in record time as a publicity stunt, handing out pens along the way. It didn’t help. Soon he, too, was out of business.

Then another Hungarian, Franz Seech—with financial backing from Patrick Frawley, the founder of Paper Mate— developed a quick-drying glycerinated ink that didn’t fade. Strict quality control and the new ink combined to make a vastly improved pen. Frawley got bankers and school principals to endorse it, and by the mid-1950s the ball-point was flourishing once again. Massive production and marketing followed, notably by the French firm Bic, and within a decade the old-fashioned fountain pen had become an affectation.