László Bíró

Biography

László Bíró showed his first ballpoint pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931. It was not a success at the time.

He was born on 29 September 1899 in Budapest, into a Jewish family, under the surname Schweiger. His father, Mózes Mátyás Schweiger, was a dental technician, and his mother was called Janka Ullmann. The family changed its name to Bíró in 1905, with the permission of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. Bíró meant to carry on the family trade and entered a medical institute, but left his studies. He then worked for an oil company, became interested in motor racing, and later became a journalist; he also painted. The idea of the pen came to him in newspaper work. Printing ink dries quickly and leaves no smudges, but such ink would not flow in a fountain pen: it was too thick. By Bíró’s own account, in 1930 he watched children rolling marbles through a puddle, each leaving a trail of water behind it. That gave him the idea of a writing tip with a ball turning freely in a socket and picking up ink from a cartridge. He worked on the design with his brother György, a chemist.

The story is also told differently. According to one version, the first prototypes in Budapest in the 1930s were built by Gyula Németh, and Bíró was his assistant and registered the invention in his own name. Németh’s family keeps one of the models. What Bíró himself contributed, I cannot say: the dispute remains unsettled.

He filed his first application for a “fountain pen” with the Hungarian patent office on 25 April 1938, and a second, for a paste-like ink, on 23 November of the same year. In 1938 restrictions on Jews began in Hungary, and Bíró left for Paris; there, by some accounts, he patented the invention. That same year he and his wife converted to Lutheranism. He moved to Argentina in 1940 or 1943, depending on the account. The invitation, it is reported, came from the president of the country, Agustín Pedro Justo, whom Bíró had met in Europe: that the man was the president he learned only at the consulate, where he had gone to apply for an entry permit. He received his Argentine patent on 10 June 1943. Together with his brother and a partner, Juan Jorge Meyne, he founded a company, and from 1945 the pens went on sale. The Royal Air Force in Britain used them in 1944: at altitude the ink did not leak. In 1945 the French businessman Marcel Bich bought the patent from Bíró; his modifications grew into the company Bic and the Cristal pen. In Argentina and Uruguay the pen is still called a “birome”, and in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Italy a “biro”.

The ballpoint pen was not his only undertaking. More than twenty inventions are known: a steam washing machine (1930), an automatic gearbox, the patent for which General Motors bought, an electromagnetic transmission device, a clinical thermograph, a roll-on deodorant, and a device for harnessing energy from sea waves. He tested the gearbox on his own motorcycle with a sidecar on the road from Budapest to Berlin. None of these developments went into production.

Bíró died in Buenos Aires on 24 October 1985. His birthday, 29 September, has been marked in Argentina as Inventors’ Day since 1986. The minor planet 327512 Bíró, discovered in 2006, is named after him.