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Laszlo Biro
Topics: Argentine inventors Argentine Jews Hungarian-Argentines
Laszlo Jozsef Biro is the inventor of the modern ballpoint pen.
Biro , , was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1899. He presented the first version of the ball pen at the Budapest in International Fair in 1931. While working as a journalist in Hungary, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. Working with his brother Georg, a chemist, he developed a new tip consisting of a ball that was free to turn in a socket, and as it turned it would pick up ink from a cartridge and then roll to deposit it on the paper. Biro patented the invention in Paris in 1938.
In 1943 the brothers moved to Argentina and on June 10 filed another patent, and formed Biro Pens of Argentina . This new design was licensed by the British, who produced ballpoint pens for Royal Air Force aircrew, who found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude.
Related websites
Article about him at the webpage of the Hungarian Patent Office
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Laszlo Biro
