How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive

Recently, Bic launched a campaign to save handwriting. Named Fight for Your Write, it includes a pledge to encourage the
act of handwriting in the pledge-takers home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the companys ballpoints into
classrooms.
As a teacher, I couldnt help but wonder how anyone could think theres a shortage. I find ballpoint pens all over the place: on
classroom floors, behind desks. Dozens of castaways collect in cups on every teachers desk. Theyre so ubiquitous that the
word ballpoint is rarely used; theyre just pens. But despite its popularity, the ballpoint pen is relatively new in the history of
handwriting, and its influence on popular handwriting is more complicated than the Bic campaign would imply.
The creation story of the ballpoint pen tends to highlight a few key individuals, most notably the Hungarian journalist Lszl Br,
who is credited with inventing it. But as with most stories of individual genius, this take obscures a much longer history of
iterative engineering and marketing successes. In fact, Br wasnt the first to develop the idea: The ballpoint pen was originally
patented in 1888 by an American leather tanner named John Loud, but his idea never went any further. Over the next few
decades, dozens of other patents were issued for pens that used a ballpoint tip of some kind, but none of them made it to
market.
These early pens failed not in their mechanical design, but in their choice of ink. The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoints
predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and youll end up
with a leaky mess. Ink is where Lszl Br, working with his chemist brother Gyrgy,
made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting
with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the
ball-tip design to create a pen that didnt leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen
could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes.)
The Brs lived in a troubled time, however. The Hungarian author Gyoergy Moldova
writes in his book Ballpoint about Lszls flight from Europe to Argentina to avoid
Nazi persecution. While his business deals in Europe were in disarray, he patented
the design in Argentina in 1943 and began production. His big break came later that
year, when the British Air Force, in search of a pen that would work at high altitudes,
purchased 30,000 of them. Soon, patents were filed and sold to various companies in
Europe and North America, and the ballpoint pen began to spread across the world.
Businessmen made significant fortunes by purchasing the rights to manufacture the ballpoint pen in their country, but one is
especially noteworthy: Marcel Bich, the man who bought the patent rights in France. Bich didnt just profit from the ballpoint; he
won the race to make it cheap. When it first hit the market in 1946, a ballpoint pen sold for around $10, roughly equivalent to
$100 today. Competition brought that price steadily down, but Bichs design drove it into the ground. When the Bic Cristal hit
American markets in 1959, the price was down to 19 cents a pen. Today the Cristal sells for about the same amount, despite
inflation.
The ballpoints universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of
its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket
protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.
As a teacher whose kids are usually working with numbers and computers, handwriting isnt as immediate a concern to me as it
is to many of my colleagues. But every so often I come across another story about the decline of handwriting. Inevitably, these
articles focus on how writing has been supplanted by newer, digital forms of communication typing, texting, Facebook,
Snapchat. They discuss the loss of class time for handwriting practice that is instead devoted to typing lessons. Last year, a
New York Times article one thats since been highlighted by the Bics Fight for your Write campaign brought up an fMRI
study suggesting that writing by hand may be better for kids learning than using a computer.
I cant recall the last time I saw students passing actual paper notes in class, but I clearly remember students checking their
phones (recently and often). In his history of handwriting, The Missing Ink, the author Philip Hensher recalls the moment he
realized that he had no idea what his good friends handwriting looked like. It never struck me as strange before We could
have gone on like this forever, hardly noticing that we had no need of handwriting anymore.
Perhaps its not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper.
Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather
than merely touch it. The No.2 pencils I used for math notes werent much of a break either, requiring pressure similar to that of
a ballpoint pen.
Moreover, digital technology didnt really take off until the fountain pen had already begin its decline, and the ballpoint its rise.
The ballpoint became popular at roughly the same time as mainframe computers. Articles about the decline of handwriting date
back to at least the 1960s long after the typewriter, but a full decade before the rise of the home computer.
I wonder how many other mundane skills, shaped to accommodate outmoded objects, persist beyond their utility. Its not news
to anyone that students used to write with fountain pens, but knowing this isnt the same as the tactile experience of writing with
one. Without that experience, its easy to continue past practice without stopping to notice that the action no longer fits the tool.
Perhaps saving handwriting is less a matter of invoking blind nostalgia and more a process of examining the historical use of
ordinary technologies as a way to understand contemporary ones. Otherwise we may not realize which habits are worth passing
on, and which are vestiges of circumstances long since past.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/