Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 206-209. (Budapest, 2009)
KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK —COMMUNICATIONS - Strasser, Gerhard F.: Az első „töltőtolltól" a golyóstollakig - írószerszámok orvosoktól és orvosok számára
214 Comm. de //ist. Artis Med. 206- 209 (2009) trying to improve on with his own version. Nonetheless one is hard put to see any major improvement even though Bücking was well aware of the weaknesses of his own design, namely the poorly regulated ink flow and the size of the flow opening at the bottom of the pen. However, Bücking is the first to document experiments with brass and silver nibs and observed that the former oxydized too quickly and the latter were too sofit and did not withstand writing pressure. Much to his chagrin he had to fall back on the nib painstakingly fashioned from a bird's feather and glued into his metal pen. 6. Epilogue With Bticking's publication — like Schwenter's original proposal unknown in the literature devoted to the development of the modern fountain pen — we have reached the threshold of the industrial age. It would take the experiments with metal nibs that finally led to John Waterman's 1884 invention of an iridium-hardened gold-tipped nib along with capillaries under such a nib that produced the first workable fountain pens. These fountain pens were the writing instruments for the next one hundred years until the Hungárián László Biró (1899-1985), a one-time medical student and the son of a medical doctor, revolutionized our writing habits once more: As a joumalist and newspaper editor he noticed in the printing room that printer's ink would dry up fast and not smear. Over more than a decade he experimented with various forms of metal tubes and cartridges, and in 1938, with the help of his brother György and others, he created a tip with a ball bearing that would rotate during writing and pick up ink from the ink cartridge, thus leaving it on the paper. The ball point pen was patented in 1938, and again in 1940 in Argentína, where László and his brother George emigrated. After many ups and downs immediately after World War II, the ball point pen — or biro, as it is still called in many countries — has become our everyday writing instrument and is here to stay, despite efforts by companies like Waterman, FaberCastell, or MontBlanc to remind us that the most prestigious — and certainly most expensive — writing tool remains the gold-tipped fountain pen. GERHARD F. STRASSER MD Professor Emeritus Penn State University Piflaser Weg 10 B D-84034 Landshut GERMANY Phone/Fax: +49-871-29889 E-mail: gfsl (gpsu.edu
