I wonder how many great books have been written with a biro?
The simple device, found in millions of homes around the world, was the work of László Bíró, a Hungarian editor who grew frustrated at wasting time filling up fountain pens and cleaning smudged pages. His brother Győrgy, a dentist with a helpful knowledge of chemistry, helped him develop a formula for a more viscous ink. His idea for a ball-and-socket mechanism that controlled the flow of ink came from watching a game of marbles that some children were playing.
Bíró filed for a British patent for his invention in 1938. In 1941 the two brothers fled from Germany (they were Jewish) and went to Argentina. There they filed a new patent in 1943 and formed a company to sell their pens. The new design was licensed by a British engineer and manufactured by Miles Aircraft to be used by the RAF, as biros were less likely to leak on flights than were fountain pens.
In 1945 Marcel Bich bought the patent from Bíró and sold the pens through his company Bic. Bic has sold more than 100 billion ballpoint pens worldwide. There had been an American inventor who had come up with a similar concept about 50 years before Bíró had his brainwave, but he failed to make a commercial success of it and the idea died away.
The biro pen was such a success that today the word ‘biro’ is a generic term for any ballpoint pen. Argentina’s ‘Inventors Day’ is celebrated on Bíró’s birthday, and Google has commemorated him with a Google Doodle. The pens have even been used in space. Low cost, portable, cheap and available everywhere, biros have truly proved to be a great invention.
Many authors today do their writing on a computer, but some of us still like to pick up a biro and paper and use more traditional techniques. I’ve often thought about the writing process of large Victorian novels, when authors had to pause to dip a pen in an inkwell, sharpen nibs and even make ink with which to write. It all seems very cumbersome to us today, but perhaps those necessary pauses involved creative thinking time? I wonder if Dickens would still have written what he did, had a biro been available to him?
I don’t think I’ll ever know how many books were written using a biro. Do you still hand write with a biro or do you prefer to use a keyboard? Let me know by leaving a comment.
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Beverley Earnshaw
I use a Biro for every day tasks, but for my work I use pencil. I am a historian, and reference libraries and archives repositories do not allow ink products in their reading rooms.
Anne
I’m definitely a pen and paper person. I love pretty note paper to write to friends using snail mail. Lots of notes and lists are always on benches, tables and desks. I can add to them, tick off when completed whether it’s chores or people to phone back or shopping items.i carry a small note book in my handbag for jotting down a name or place and when travelling make notes on itineraries pages to match up with a photo or a happening to jog the memory on return.
Keyboard is mainly used for answering email
Susannah Fullerton
I feel just as you do – definitely prefer pen and paper. And just think of some of the amazing libraries and museums we have visited together. Had everything been written on computers, we’d have no fabulous manuscripts to view, or idiosyncratic jottings and doodles by writers.
Melody
A biro is an essential tool for doing the cryptic crossword in the newspaper!
John
I write a daily diary with a biro, and I like to have hard copy of notes with addresses, reference numbers, etcetera, and a year-long wall calendar, which involve a biro. But otherwise, I use a keyboard, mainly for email and some messaging, that being far faster and cheaper than writing letters.
Before I retired, I wrote academic papers, their involving a mixture of biro and keyboard, the former in part because they often involved diagrams, which I found much easier and faster to draw by hand.
Toni Pollard
I’m not a writer but a translator – of Indonesian literature. I am sure I am rare among translators as I always do my first draft by handwriting using a biro, rather than type directly onto the computer. I find my brain and hand work at the same pace whereas my typing is slow and full of typos and stopping to correct them spoils the flow.. The language flows from Indonesian into English at the same pace I write. And I can pause to look up words in the dictionary or else leave those words in Indonesian to look up later, so as to keep the flow going.. I fill up several large pads or exercise books with my scrawl for each book I work on . As I complete a chapter I then type it up and this is when I rearrange sentences, find a more appropriate word, make the language flow more naturally. I edit this draft several times, but the creativity takes place in the initial handwritten version. It is a slow and cumbersome process, but it works for me.
Susannah Fullerton
Thanks for sharing your writing / translating process, Toni. I think we all work out what way of getting words down works best for us. I also love to write by hand – all my To Do lists, notes, first drafts etc are done by hand.