The Invention of the Ballpoint Pen

The Invention of Radio

Radio owes its development to two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone, all three technologies are closely related.

Marconi (1874-1937) was born in Italy and studied at the University of Bologna. He was fascinated by Heinrich Hertz's earlier discovery of radio waves and realized that it can be used for sending and receiving telegraph messages, referring to it as "wireless telegraphs."

Marconi's first radio transmissions, in 1896, were coded signals that were transmitted only about a mile (1,6 km) far. Marconi realized that it held huge potential. He offered the invention to the Italian government but they turned it down. He moved to England, took out a patent, and experimented further. In 1898 Marconi flashed the results of the Kingstown Regatta to the offices of a Dublin newspaper, thus making a sports event the first "public" broadcast. The next year Marconi opened the first radio factory in Chelmsford, Essex and established a radio link between Britain and France. A link with the USA was established in 1901. In 1909 Marconi shared the Nobel prize in physics for his wireless telegraph. Marconi became a wealthy man.

But Marconi's wireless telegraph transmitted only signals. Voice over the air, as we know radio today, came only in 1921. Marconi went on to introduce short wave transmission in 1922.

Marconi was not the first to invent the radio, however. Four years before Marconi started experimenting with wireless telegraph, Nikola Tesla, a Serb who moved to the USA in 1884, invented the theoretical model for radio. Tesla tried unsuccessful to obtain a court injunction against Marconi in 1915. In 1943 the US Supreme Court reviewed the decision. Tesla became acknowledged as the inventor of the radio - even though he did not build a working radio.

First developed in 1896, the first radios were bulky, noisy, and had poor reception. With the advent of improved technologies such as vacuum tubes and rectifiers, the radio was honed into the interesting little device that made it into such a craze during the 1920s.

Once radio signals could be transmtted and received with improved clarity around 1920, the idea of public radio began to take hold in America. The first public radio broadcasting station opened in Pittsburgh, 1922. It was an instant success; listeners would sit around the radio listening to everything that was broadcasted. As a result many more radio stations popped up during the 20s, some even over night

Radio provided acheap and convenient way of conveying information and ideas. The first broadcasts consisted of primarily news and world affairs. Later in the decade, radios were used to broadcast everything from concerts and sermons to "Red Menace" ideas. The radio was certainly one of the most important inventions of the 1920s, because it not only brought the nation together, but it brought a whole new way for people to communicate and interact.

The Invention of the Ballpoint Pen

Necessity is the mother of invention, no doubt. Ladislao Biro, an Hungarian, was a sculptor, a painter and a journalist. But he was also a printer's proof reader, and the need to incessantly refill his fountain pen from a bottle of ink was driving him crazy.

In the early 1930s he and his brother Georg, a chemist, started experimenting with a pen that would not need to be refilled and would not smudge the pages. The concept would revolve around a ball that was used on the tip of the pen. As the object moved along the paper the ball would rotate and bring ink from the cartridge.

In 1943 the two brothers moved to Argentina, and there they found someone willing to finance their invention. They started selling ballpoint pens in Argentina under the name of Birome, and soon they opened a factory in England to provide pens to the Royal Air Force.

The pen used to be publicized as the only pen that could write under the water. In the first promotional event 5000 customers (who apparently longed to write under water) gathered in a square to watch the demonstration. After a couple of years BIC Corporation bought the company, and the rest is history. The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of penholders and pen cases. Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens he had seen and he was also shocked at their high cost. But he recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market. He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent. Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope. By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, ncn-leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic." The ballpoint pen had finally become a practical writing instrument. The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1015