This article is transferred from: Key after dinner
In the early years, people wrote letters with a brush or pen, which was written with ink and ink, and later the fountain pen that flowed into China from the West was indeed much more convenient than the brush, and could be carried around for signing, but many people would splash ink when the pen was opened, and the ink was easy to run out or easy to dry and could not be written, so it has been a trouble in letter writing.
↑↑The figure pictured above is Ladislo Birro ↑↑
Hungarian journalist Ladislo Biró is very aware of the problems that exist with ordinary fountain pens. Biro believes that he came up with the idea of replacing the traditional ink pen with a pen that uses quick-drying ink while visiting a newspaper. Newspaper inks dry almost instantaneously and leave no smudges. Biro vowed to apply similar ink to a new type of writing instrument. To avoid the sticky ink clogging his pen, he offered to install small metal balls capable of spinning at the top of the tube containing the quick-drying ink. This metal ball will have two functions: as a cap to prevent the ink from drying out. Allows ink to flow out of the pen at a controlled rate.
↑↑ Initial design of the ballpoint pen ↑↑
So, in June 1943, Bíró and his brother Georg (a chemist) applied for a new patent with the European Patent Office and produced the first commercial ballpoint pen, the Biro.
A ballpoint pen is a writing instrument that uses the rotation of a steel ball to write ink onto paper. The initial market price of a ballpoint pen was very high, and a ballpoint pen was worth $10 ($10 was worth more than $10 now)! Later, the Frenchman Marcel Bich developed an industrial process for the manufacture of ballpoint pens, which led to a significant reduction in unit costs, and the first inexpensive ballpoint pen was produced in 1945.
After World War II, ballpoint pens were introduced to China. Shrewd businessmen advertised "ballpoint pens" and used the aftermath of the atomic bomb exploded in Japan to open up sales. In fact, "ballpoint pen" has nothing to do with atoms, but is just similar in pronunciation. Ballpoint pens soon became popular all over the world. Japan alone consumes 400 million ballpoint pens a year.
The ballpoint pen is able to write because the steel balls in the nib bring out the quick-drying ink and transcribe it onto the paper as it rolls.
In order to install the "Chinese pen head" on tens of billions of ballpoint pens, the state started to tackle key projects as early as 2011. Wang Huimian, senior engineer of TISCO Group Technology Center, believes that steel to make pen nibs, must use a lot of special trace elements, the steel to adjust to the best performance, trace element ratio of subtle changes will affect the quality of steel, this ratio can not be found, China's pen industry will always need to import nib steel.
After five years of countless failures, the trial was a success in September 2016. After more than ten large-scale steelmakings, the first batch of machinability steel was finally released. This batch of stainless steel wires with a diameter of 2.3 mm can proudly be written with the logo of "Made in China".
The pictures are all from the Internet, non-original}
(Welcome to send a private message to Key sister to contribute~.)
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