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During the summer of 1944, word reached American newspapers about a groundbreaking writing instrument. The inventor, László Bíró, was a Hungarian-Argentinian journalist who devised a pen that used a ball-bearing tip in place of a traditional nib, required only infrequent refills, and could perform at high altitudes. Bíró enlisted his brother, a dentist and chemist, to craft a quick-drying, viscous ink that wouldn’t clog or smear.
Bíró wasn’t the first to imagine a ballpoint mechanism—an American had patented a version back in 1888—but he was the first to bring the concept to market. He secured a patent in 1938, but wartime circumstances stalled his plans. As Jewish men, Bíró and his brother fled Europe in 1941 and settled in Argentina. By 1943 they had begun selling the pens, known there as “biromes,” and the new writing tool quickly gained popularity across the country.
In 1945, two American firms, Eversharp and Eberhard Faber, secured the North and Central American rights to the invention for half a million dollars (roughly $9.4 million in today’s money). Yet another American had already made an entrance. Milton Reynolds had encountered the pen while visiting Buenos Aires the year before, hurried back to the United States, and produced his own version—the Reynolds Rocket—launched on October 29, 1945.
It proved to be a phenomenon. At Gimbel’s in Manhattan, TIME observed a frenzy as thousands of eager buyers lined up to pay $12.50 each for this new fountain pen (about $234 in today’s money). Gimbel’s promoted it as a marvel of the atomic era, a pen that could be used anywhere for months, and they ordered 50,000 units—30,000 of which had already sold within the first week. This rush endured even as Eversharp and Eberhard Faber challenged the newcomer legally. Seven hundred more stores placed orders, and Reynolds amassed millions in profits. Reports circulated that he used his windfall to purchase a chateau near Versailles, complete with a moat, a symbol of the era’s extravagant mood.
The debut, however, wasn’t flawless. About 104,643 pens were returned as defective in the first eight months of sale. Still, the era of the ballpoint had irrevocably altered the world of writing instruments—and soon Marcel Bich would arrive to redefine the landscape once more by popularizing disposable, inexpensive ballpoints. But that, as they say, is a tale for another time.
