Ladislao Biro

Ladislao José Biro, birth name: László József Bíró, (Budapest, September 29, 1899 - Buenos Aires, October 24, 1985) was an inventor and a Hungarian nationalized Argentine journalist, author of 32 inventions, including the ballpoint pen, which gave him international fame.

Biography

At birth, her weight was less than two kilos, which led the doctors to believe that she would not survive, however, her mother (who according to her granddaughter and Ladislao's daughter, would have wanted to be a doctor, something almost impossible for the time) put him to bed in a cotton-lined shoebox with a lamp underneath to keep him warm.

His main inventions were: the perfume bottle, which has the same principle as the pen that was later applied to roll-on deodorants; the fountain pen model (1928), the washing machine (1930); the mechanical automatic gearbox (which he sold to General Motors in 1932); the clinical thermograph (1943), the continuous process for phenolic resins (1944); the process for improving the strength of steel rods (1944); a device to obtain energy from the waves of the sea (1958); the antitoxic mouthpiece; the inviolable lock; a molecular and isotopic system for gas fractionation (1978).

Birome

Commercial propaganda in the Argentine magazine Leoplán, 1945, promoting the first birome.

birome manufactured by the brothers Biro and Meyne.

As a journalist, he was annoyed by the disruption his fountain pen (which was right-handed and he was left-handed) caused him when it got stuck in the middle of a story. So, together with his brother Gyorgy, who was a chemist, he obtained an ink that was useful for writing by hand, but that could not be used with the pen because it stuck when writing. One day, watching some children play in the street with balls that, when crossing a puddle, came out tracing a line of water on the dry floor, he realized that he had to replace the use of the metal pen at the tip with a ball.. Biro patented a prototype in Hungary and France in 1938, but never commercialized it.

Agustín Pedro Justo, shortly after ceasing to be President of the Argentine Nation, invited him to settle in his country when by chance he met him in Yugoslavia writing articles for a Hungarian newspaper with a prototype of the pen and Biro told him about its inconveniences to get a visa. Then Justo, who had not told her who he was, gave her a card with his name on it.

Biro did not decide at that time to go to Argentina, but in May 1940, at the beginning of World War II, he and his brother emigrated to Argentina together with Juan Jorge Meyne, his partner and friend of Jewish origin who he helped him escape from Nazi persecution. Some time later, his wife Elsa and daughter Mariana would also land in Buenos Aires (their house was in the Colegiales neighborhood, and today it houses an institution dedicated to inventors).

In that year they formed the company Biro Meyne Biro and in a garage with 40 workers and a low budget they improved their invention, patented on June 10, 1943 in Buenos Aires. They launched the product on the market under the trade name of Birome (acronym with the initial syllables of Biro and Meyne). Its sale to the public was between 80 and 100 dollars, excessive for that time.

Writing a modern pen.

At first the booksellers considered that these "ink pens" were too cheap to sell as work tools and they sold them as children's toys. In this regard, in his last interview before his death, Biro stated:

My «play» left $36 million in the Argentine treasure, money that the country won by selling products not from the earth but from the brain.

When it began to be promoted, it was called ballpoint pen and it was emphasized that it was always charged, it dried instantly, it allowed copies to be made with carbon paper, it was unique for aviation, and its ink was indelible.

In 1943 he licensed his invention to Eversharp Faber, of the United States, for the then extraordinary sum of USD 2,000,000, and in 1951 to Marcel Bich, founder of the Bic company of France.

The partnership formed by Biro and his partners went bankrupt, plagued by lack of financing and new inventions that were not commercially successful. A former supplier, Francisco Barcelloni, tried to get Biro excited about making a low-cost pen. He failed to convince him and settled on his account; he improved the flow of ink and tried a ball of triple hardness. Later, Barcelloni hired Biro to manage the new factory.

In 1969 the Buenos Aires publishing house Rodolfo Alonso published Biro's memoir "A Silent Revolution".

Trademark "Biro"

His ballpoint pen is heavily referenced as a "biro" in many countries: United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, Australia, Italy. Although the word is a registered trademark, its use has been vulgarized.

Other inventions

Biro developed other inventions, some very popular:

Perfume

Little known, several perfumes registered by the company Biro, Meyne & Biro.

Tributes

Ládislao Biró appears on a series of postage stamps issued in 1994 by the Argentine Post Office, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the ballpoint pen, in his honor and that of three other Argentine inventors.

In Argentina on September 29, the day of his birth, Inventor's Day is commemorated.

In Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina, a school founded in 2021 bears his name, called Colegio Biró.