What could you buy for the price of a ball point pen? No much. Not a newspaper, not a cup of coffee, and certainly not a hamburger. You can get one of the ubiquitous Bic pens for a little over 11 cents if you buy a box of 60. It wasn\u2019t always like that, of course. When they were first introduced, ball point pens sold for the equivalent \\$100\u2013\\$120 in today\u2019s dollars.<\/p>\n
The BBC has a fascinating history of the ball point pen<\/a> that discusses the early days of the ball point and how it changed writing. If you\u2019ve ever used a fountain pen, you understand why the ball point was so revolutionary. Fountain pens leaked ink, easily smudged, had to be refilled often, and regularly left drops of ink over whatever you were writing. All of those problems went away with ball point pens.<\/p>\n Marcel Bich\u2019s genius was not inventing the ball point but in mass producing it at low cost. Between 1950 and 2006, Bic sold over 100 billion of their iconic Cristal ball points.<\/p>\n The article says that ball point pens changed writing forever. It\u2019s ironic, then, that another article, this time from the Atlantic in 2015, claims that the ball point pen killed cursive writing<\/a>. As regular readers know, I\u2019d consider that another benefit of ball points. The TL;DR of that article is that whereas fountain pens encourage and make easy the forming of connected letters, ball points make that harder. I\u2019m not sure I completely buy the premise but you can read it for yourself and see what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What could you buy for the price of a ball point pen? No much. Not a newspaper, not a cup of coffee, and certainly not a hamburger. You can get one of the ubiquitous Bic pens for a little over … Continue reading