There are many everyday items in the office that we know very little about, which have an interesting background.
Pens
The ballpoint pen has replaced the fountain pen. They consist of a tube or chamber of ink that is dispensed by a small metal ball that rolls the ink onto the paper as the user writes. The main benefit is that the ink dries almost instantly and today ball point pens are cheap and disposable.
The first inventor with a solid ink fountain pen that was close to the modern ballpoint pen was Slavoljub Edvard Penkala from Croatia in 1907. The most famous inventor was Laszlo Biro who in 1938 started the pen revolution. With his brother Georg the developed and patented their special tip in 1943 and set up the Biro Pens of Argentina company. The pens were first used in the UK by the RAF since they worked better than fountain pens at high altitude. The pen was taken into mass production by a French man Marcel Bic in 1950 when he founded the BIC foundation and the BIC Biro has been the most popular writing implement ever since.
Paper Clips
Everyone can describe a paperclip as being a thin metal rod that is looped over to make a clip, but it is not often that people value the importance of this invention. Due to the way the wire is bent and looped it produces a strong and flexible clip with the ability to hold together sheets of paper without tearing or marking.
The invention of the paperclip dates back to 1890 where it was made in the UK at the Gem Manufacturing Company, and is sometimes still referred to as the gem. In modern day other office equipment has been designed with a paperclip in mind, such as the emergency eject on CDROM drives, or reset switches on handheld pc’s, which require a thin rod which an unwound paperclip is ideal for.