Practical fountain pens with internal ink cartridges had been in use for decades, but Laszlo Biro devised a new version that used a ball bearing instead of a nib—in other words, the modern ...

These pens rely on gravity to bathe the ball in ink, which allows it to glide around in the socket like a tiny roll-on deodorant. Bíró’s US Patent for the ballpoint. Image via US Patent #2390636 ...

A fountain pen uses a nib in the place of a ball. The nib sits on top of a collector, which itself is connected to a feed. The feed takes ink from the pen’s reservoir and the collector ensures ...

The inventor of ball pen was Ladislao José Bíro, a Hungarian born in 1899 into a Jewish family. He invented the ball pen in 1931 to get rid of fountain pen's blotting and smudging.

Chinese manufacturers produce 38 billion ballpoint pens a year—80% of the global market. But they didn’t make the nib, the part that holds the ball at the tip, long preferring the quality of ...

Fountain pens dominated school desks until the late 1980s, when low-cost ball-points such as the Reynolds 045 swept the ...

The enormous patina-green fountain pen juts over the sidewalk on F Street, two blocks from the White House, its gold nib pointing down at the front doors like a command. “Fahrney’s Pens ...

A fountain pen uses a nib in the place of a ball. The nib sits on top of a collector, which itself is connected to a feed. The feed takes ink from the pen’s reservoir and the collector ensures ...