“No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had” 

 Samuel Johnson

Hello everyone! Well, today let us talk about the things of everyday use! Have you ever wondered what does our life look like without it? There are a tooth brush, a needle with a thread, a spoon or a fork, a key ring and a hair comb.  Of course, there are so many. We use it every day without thinking about its inventing or the story of making. We just use it, because these things have been invented a long time ago, as we think. People had begun to make it a habit to use such everyday things. A modest ballpoint pen is of the same sort of things. It is used by office stuff and housewives, students and doctors, lawyers and directors. And it is considered to be “invention that changed the way we write”.

Of course, in our electronic age of mobile phones, Skype, chat rooms, local nets and e-mails, there is no necessity in consistent use of pen and paper. Today with the help of the modern technologies one can look up the information, find out the details, make a point of noting the action required via fingertips or voice only. Oh, and via various electronic devices. Modern ballpoint pens are rather cheap, very worthy and all sorts of miscellaneous colors. That is why they are used as everyday-use-things.

A ballpoint pen was patented on October 30^th, 1888. The patent was issued to John Loud, a leather tanner. Loud was trying to create a writing tool that would be able to write on leather. This task was beyond then-fountain pens.  The patented pen had a small steel ball capable of rotating in all directions. A threaded cap could be removed to recharge the pen with ink. The invention was quite ingenious, however Loud’s plans quickly dashed. Leather surfaces were too rough to write, so this patent was commercially unexploited. But the idea wasn’t changed. Later, there were others – Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian inventor, Milton Reynolds, and American enterpriser, who produced the first commercially successful ballpoint pens, Marcel Bich and his famous BIC pen. Today we know and use various ballpoint pens – from modern pressurized or erasable ballpoint pens to traditional ones. But it could not exist without John Loud.