Technical Description – Ball Pen
Nguyen Doan
City College of New York
Writing for Engineering – ENGL 21007
Instructor: Pamela Stemberg
Date: 7/17/2023
Abstract
I was tasked to write a technical description of a simple object in this assignment. Even though there were a plentiful amount of simple objects that had significant impacts on human history throughout time, I chose to ball pen as my writing object in this assignment. People use pen every day on their simple tasks, for example: writing, drawing, or even simply scribbling for no reason. A ball pen was such a simple thing that most people had accidentally ignored the question of its originality. Therefore, I want to take this opportunity to write as well as research a small, modern innovation that had a huge impact in the past.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
History of Innovation 3
TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION
Overview 5
Exterior Parts 5
Interior Parts 6
CONCLUSION 7
REFERENCES 8
SELF-REFLECTION 9
History of Ball Pen
Figure 1: Hand-drawing of Laslo Biro. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201028-history-of-the-ballpoint-pen
The ball pen, or ball-point pen was invented by a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro in 1938 (Figure 1). The thicker ink wouldn’t flow from a regular pen nib, so Biro had to come up with a new type of point. He did this by fitting his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its tip. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Biro had noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper smudge-free (Bellis, 2018). With the help of his brother, Gyorgy, who was a talented chemist, the duo came up with a new type of ink that dried fast and spread easily. When the pen isn’t in use, the ball sits snugly against the end of the ink reservoir, preventing air from entering and drying out the ink. Most frequently, ballpoint pens run out of ink long before they dry out. The principle at the heart of the ballpoint pen mimics the action of a roll-on deodorant – gravity and the force applied smear the rolling ball with a continuous stream of ink as the ball rolls along the writing surface (Dowling, 2020). After the ball pen went viral, they were adopted by so many businesses, such as Eversharp and the fountain pen manufacturer Parker, that the market became oversaturated because the pens were made with high-quality materials and the ink cartridge was easy to replace, which made ball pen a one-time purchase for most customers. People purchased refills but not additional pens (Dowling, 2020). To make ball pens more affordable, Marcel Bich, an Italian manufacturer, changed the metal that made the outer shell as well as the ink cartridge to plastic, since plastic is much cheaper than steel and can be mass-produced. His brand, BIC, has been a well-known ballpen until today.
Figure 2: Ballpoint pen. (2023, July 3). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen
Technical Description
Figure 3: Parts of pen. Retrieved from: https://www.pens.com/blog/parts-of-a-pen/
Even though there are many types of ball pens nowadays. I chose to write about retractable ball pen because it is very popular with most of people. It doesn’t need a cap to cover the ballpoint tip, instead, it has a more interesting mechanism by using a thrust device to pop the tip out and retract it inside, which makes this type of ballpen more interesting to write about.
Tip
The tip, made from plastic, has a cone-shaped. The larger has a gasket that connects the tip and barrel together. The smaller end has a big enough diameter length that allows only the ballpoint tip to pass through, but not the ink chamber.
Barrel
The barrel has a cylinder shape and is made from plastic to reduce the pen’s overall weight, which provides a light, comfortable feel for the scribbling movement. Towards one end, the barrel is usually attached with a clip, which makes it convenient for users to hang their pens on their shirt pockets.
Spring
The spring is made of hardened steel. It has a length that is usually equivalent to the length from the stopping point on the ink chamber to the ballpoint tip. The spring is used in almost all retractable pens, it helps to hold the ballpoint tip to stay in place when the thrust device is clicked.
Ink Chamber
The ink chamber is where the pen’s ink is stored. It is a small cylindrical plastic tube, The top of the ink chamber connects to the ballpoint tip, while the bottom is stuffed with a type of gel that prevents the ink from leaking out.
Ballpoint Tip
Figure 4: Ballpoint pen. (2023, July 3). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen
The ballpoint tip has bullet-shaped and has a small metal ball attached to one end, while the other end attaches to the ink chamber. The ball is held inside the bullet and is rotatable. When we write, the ink flows from the ink chamber to the ballpoint tip, and the metal ball rolls around inside the bullet as our hand moves. As the ball rolls, the ink attaches to it and spread on paper.
Thrust Device
The thrust device is made from plastic and is attached to a retractable plunge on the end of the barrel. Its mission is to pop the ballpoint tip out when the pen is ready to be used and retracted it back to the tip when the pen is done using.
Conclusion
Ball pen is a simple accessory that people have been using for years in their daily lives. However, because it was too small and simple that most people had forgotten to ask questions about the importance of the ball pen, “What would happen if the ball pen never existed in the first place?”. Maybe, we would have used a quill, or a fountain pen to take quick notes, which is not a comfortable writing experience, and we might get out hands full of ink every time we used those kinds of stylus. Being able to study about these seem-to-be-little inventions but have great impacts is an extraordinarily valuable opportunity to appreciate the amazing work that great innovators, like Lazslo Biro, did for humankind.
References
Bellis, M. (2018). Inventor Laszlo Biro and the battle of the ballpoint pens. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/ballpoint-pens-laszlo-biro-4078959
Dowling, S. (2022, February 24). The cheap pen that changed writing forever. BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201028-history-of-the-ballpoint-pen
Andersen, K. W. (2023, May 8). Parts of a Pen: Anatomy of Ballpoint, Stick & Fountain Pens. pens.com. https://www.pens.com/blog/parts-of-a-pen/
Wikipedia contributors. (2023). Ballpoint pen. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen
Self-Reflection
In this assignment, I tried to imagine myself as a reader. English is not my strength, so I tried to simplify what I understood with vocabulary that was simple to understand. In order to make my assignment easy to read, I tried to follow the order in my outline, separate parts into paragraphs. The pictures I insert would help readers understand what pen component I was writing about. In terms of formulating, I didn’t contribute anything to the ball pen’s invention, I simply did research and gathered information I had, and tried to summarize them from a technical perspective. Most of the references I had were from Google and Wikipedia because given a short time, it was hard for me to find sources that are from professional databases such as Google Scholar. Besides, the ball pen was not technically complicated, so simple articles from Google or Wikipedia should be good enough to be referenced.
