Rothman is managing editor at TIME. An early ballpoint pen, circa 1945 Rothman is managing editor at TIME. The first whispers came in the summer of 1944: a Hungarian inventor living in Argentina had ...

Patents for ballpoint pens go back to the late 1800s, but it took half a century to develop good, fast-drying inks. Bic, Pilot, and other makers jealously guard their formulas, but to get that classic ...

With a ballpoint, one can write without thinking, on almost any surface, and even underwater, if you feel the urge to do so. There are even pens that can work in the weightlessness of space. It's a ...

The evolution of writing implement technology is a continuous and subtle one. Lewis Waterman opened up the possibility of portable pens with his invention of a practical fountain pen in 1884. But ...

"Perhaps there is a market for refillable pens again." ...

Recently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and ...

In the autumn of 1948, Marcel Bich, owner of a company located north of Paris that produced ink cartridges for fountain pens, pushed a wheelbarrow in his garden in the village of Rhuis. He considered ...

Where someone with years of hard-won personal experience, and lots of trial and error, shares everything they’ve learned. Read more here. I’m not anti-tech per se, but there are certain modern ...

Artist James Mylne spends hundreds of hours on each of his drawings. His preferred tool is a standard Bic ballpoint pen, leaving no room for mistakes, slips or smudges. James Mylne's hyper-realistic ...

The idea of perforating the caps of pens appears to have started in the United Kingdom, where a new safety standard was adopted in 1990 (BS 7272). Between 1970 and 1984, nine children in the United ...