When the BIC pen was born

The BIC pen, the world's best-selling and most famous, was created in 1950 in France, not by an industrialist, but by a Hungarian journalist to solve a practical problem. László József Bíró had grown tired of the waste caused by fountain pens, which were always very delicate, required a lot of liquid ink, and could smear or interrupt the flow while writing . Bíró noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and decided to adapt it to a pen. So, together with his brother György , a chemist, he developed a system with a small rotating sphere at the tip : the sphere collected ink from the reservoir and transferred it to the paper.

The patent was filed in the 1930s, but it wasn't the Bíró brothers who developed it commercially. Frenchman Marcel Bich acquired the rights to the technology in 1945 and launched the BIC pen in 1950. Bich was a French entrepreneur, born in Italy and later naturalized French, who, with his partner Édouard Buffard , founded a company that would become BIC, a name that played on the name of the pen invented by the Hungarian journalist and the surname of the new patent owner.

Bich's extraordinary ability was to produce the pen in enormous volumes at very low costs. Since 1950, 120 billion BIC pens have been sold, and Bich's winning approach has never changed: to produce a pen that wasn't particularly sophisticated (that's why there are collector's and hobbyist models), but practical, reliable, economical, and highly efficient.

All thanks to these factors:

• Very few components. The body of the BIC is essentially a small plastic tube, a metal tip, a small ballpoint, and the ink. Fewer parts means less work and less chance of failure.
• Huge production. Bich focused on mass production: selling lots of pens with a relatively small margin on each.
• Automated and highly precise production. BIC even went so far as to use techniques derived from the Swiss watchmaking industry to achieve an extremely precise ballpoint and ink supply system.
• Design remained substantially unchanged. There is no need to constantly reinvent the product or add expensive components.
• Continuous savings on materials. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect: in 1950 the trunk weighed approximately 4,4 grams, while today it weighs approximately 3,1 gramsWith one ton of plastic BIC can now produce approximately 214.000 Crystal, against the approximately 168.000 of 1950. 

Read also:

• Where do you throw away pens, pencils, and markers?
• How to refill pens that don't write
• What to do with pens and pencils you no longer use