In Argentina we like to tell this urban legend that is somehow kind-of-true, that the ballpoint pen was invented there, thanks to the idea of a Hungarian-born man called László Bíró who moved to Argentina at some point during World War II.
This story is not entirely true in the sense that when Bíró came to Argentina he had already invented the ballpoint pen (actually, it was invented by somebody else, but that early patent lapsed without commercial distribution). The first large-scale production and commercialization of the ballpoint pen started and spread from there, through the “Bíró & Meyne” company. And yes, in Argentina we still refer to ballpoint pens as “biromes” (derived from the company name), and I’m not kidding, that’s really how we call them, and that’s how I’ll call them in this article.
Then the story goes that a French man called Marcel Bich bought Bíró’s patent, and thus begat the Bic Cristal ballpoint pen that we all know, somewhere between the 1950s and 60s. And this is the gist of this article.
Because for all practical purposes, I consider the birome (specifically, the Bic Cristal) to be the most important invention of the 20th century. Yes: more important even that aeroplanes, computers, antibiotics, cell phones, tamagotchis, space travel, Walkmans, Pink Floyd, paperback books, or whatever else that came up during that time. The Bic Cristal is inexpensive (like, dirt cheap, not even 0.22 CHF per unit from Galaxus, that’s like 0.27 USD or 0.24 EUR), durable, lightweight, trustworthy, ubiquitous, simple, practical, reliable, and I’m running out of positive adjectives as I write this. And no, no other brand of birome can reach the quality of the Bic Cristal, not even remotely. All other biromes just plain suck in one way or another.
The Bic Cristal birome is a triumph of human engineering and ingenuity. It’s so good it hurts. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, it’s like a bicycle for your hand.
Not many technologies created by humans can claim to be so deceptively useful and trustworthy at the same time. The birome is the most important invention of the 20th century because it democratized, without pretention and without limits, writing for everyone, everywhere, at every time.
No matter how many other kinds of pens I try (and believe me, I love my Pentel EnerGel pens, I truly do) I always come back to the Bic Cristal. It’s the pen I used throughout primary and high school (except for a short while in early primary school, when my teachers insisted we use fountain pens for some pedantic reason).
I simply love the ink quality (it dries in literal milliseconds and never ever fades away from paper) and how lightweight it feels on my hand. Its transparency tells you how much ink remains on it, and the cap fits perfectly on the opposite side while you write, providing a very nice counterweight on your fingers.
The birome feels surprisingly good in your hand. But, of course, writing is out-of-fashion these days, just like reading, or more generally, just like thinking.
As the Joker said in the 1989 “Batman” movie,
The pen is truly mightier than the sword.
And in that category, the Bic Cristal birome is the mightiest of them all.