László Bíró is credited with inventing the modern ballpoint pen and receiving a patent for it in 1938.
Bíró was a Hungarian-born journalist who noticed that fast-drying newspaper ink produced cleaner pages than fountain-pen ink. Because that thicker ink would not flow through a conventional fountain-pen nib, he and his brother György developed a rotating ball held in a socket. The ball picked up ink from a reservoir and transferred it smoothly to paper.
Bíró patented the design in Paris in 1938. After fleeing Europe during World War II, he moved to Argentina, where he and business partner Juan Jorge Meyne filed a further patent in 1943. In Argentina, the pen became known as the “birome,” combining Bíró’s name with Meyne’s.
John J. Loud had patented an earlier ballpoint design in 1888, but it was not commercially successful. Bíró’s achievement was making the mechanism practical and reliable. In 1945, Marcel Bich acquired rights to the design and later helped popularize the inexpensive ballpoint through the Bic brand.