Do you remember your first ballpoint pen?
The first ballpoint pen was sold in the United States in late1945. It was called the Reynolds Rocket and sold for about $10 when it was unveiled at Gimbel’s department store in New York City before spreading across the country like wildfire. But the script did not unfold as originally written.
Image via Wikipedia
It seems that the first ballpoint was developed to mark leather back in 1888, but it was never marketed commercially. In 1938, a European journalist named Laszlo Biro patented a ballpoint that was licensed by the British Government for use by the Royal Air Force during WWII. The RAF flyers needed a pen that, unlike traditional fountain pens, would not leak at high altitudes. And, Biro’s ballpoint worked.
The pen worked so well that at the end of the war, two major producers of writing instruments (Eversharp and Eberhard-Faber) joined forces with the intent to market ballpoint pen using the rights obtain from Biro who had migrated to Argentina and was selling his pens there. Their plans were interrupted when a businessman named Milton Reynolds visited the country, saw the pen and decided to manufacture the pen himself.
One problem with Reynolds’ plan was that he bypassed obtaining a license from the inventor and beats Eversharp to the market. The Reynolds Bullet was an immediate success. Eversharp introduced its version soon after Reynolds beat them to the punch. At the same time, Eversharp filed a law suite for copyright infringement. While the legal battle went on both companies saw sales soar. The brand spent heavily on advertising, so there were few pre-boomers who didn’t want one of these pens.
Reynolds advertised the pen as one that would write under water. It failed to do that and often leaked, skipped or failed to write altogether. Eversharp had quality problems with its pen as well. Poor product quality and frequent price wars resulted in sales falling as dramatically as they rose. And the price of these pens fell to just 50 cents each.
By 1951 the ballpoint pen category had all but died. Fountain pens re-emerged as the preferred writing instrument and Reynolds went out of business. About the same time, the low-price Bic ballpoint pen entered the marketplace. In 1954 Parker, a famous US brand, introduced the longer writing and smoother flowing Jotter with a variety of different point sizes and refillable cartridges. This revitalized the ballpoint pen business, which has seen many innovations over the years.
Go to any grocery, drug or office supply store and you’ll find ballpoints pens of every description at a variety of price points. And the nice thing is they work. For those of us who were around when the Reynolds Bullet was all the rage, its sort of fun to remember the thrill of trying to write with that neat pen. Even if it didn’t work very well, the ballpoint pen came on the American scene in 1945, so it is now a New Senior, too.
Although my primary collecting focus is fountain pens one particular pen that I am a sucker for when I see them in antique stores is the Eversharp CA ballpoint pen. In 1945 when the CA was introduced ballpoint pens were a novelty with very few available on the market.