Laszlo Biro

Laszlo Biro was born in 1899 in Budapest Hungary. Early in his career, he worked as journalist and noticed that the ink that was being pressed onto newspaper would not smudge and dried very quickly, unlike the fountain pen he had to use. He decided to see if he could use the ink from the paper press in his pen to write but found out quickly that this would not work. He enlisted the help of his brother who was a chemist and they invented a new pen tip that rolled the ink onto the paper. He patented this idea and this is now what’s known as the ball point pen. He moved to Argentina where he began to produce these pens out of the Biro Pens of Argentina Company. This patent was eventually bought out by Marcel Bich in 1950, but is not the basis of the BIC pen company.
A picture of him can be found at:
http://www.helens.ie/classes/invent/pages/images/laszlo.gif
A picture of the pen can be found at:
http://www.mszh.hu/kiadv/ipsz/199608/biro4.gif