October 30 - John J. Loud

Image courtesy pens.com

On this day, in 1888, John Jacob Loud received US Patent #392,046, the first ever for a ballpoint pen. For hundreds of years, if you wanted to write a letter to someone or sign a legal document, you needed two things: a container of ink and a pointed object you could dip in the ink and then scratch out a few letters before dipping again. Feathers, or quills, became quite useful for writing with because of the hollow tube running down the center of them. Dip a feather in ink and some of it got sucked up into the tube giving you the ability to write a lot more before having to dip again. Plus you could keep the tip of the feather sharp, creating a nice point to write with. The whole process was fairly messy, however. If you’ve ever seen old letters and documents, you might have noticed that there are frequently drops of ink all over them, smeared letters and a distinct unevenness to the amount of ink used on any given word. Add to that the fact that you had to keep cutting yourself a new tip (and you had to keep sharpening the knife you used to do that) and it’s no wonder that the art of writing was a time consuming pastime.

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

But man is a pretty smart, inventive creature. In the 1820s, using steel writing points, or nibs, became popular. Although metal nibs had existed since the dynasties of Ancient Egypt, they produced inferior writing results compared to a quill until improvements in design and manufacture came along in the Nineteenth Century. The advantage of steel nibs was not only that they lasted far longer than quills but that different nibs could be designed to create different writing effects. They still usually had to be dipped in ink though and were still messy. Someone got the idea to make the handle of the pen hollow and fill it with ink, which solved the constant dipping problem but probably made it easier to get ink everywhere trying to fill it. Leave it to someone who wrote all the time, like a banker, to come up with a better way.

John Loud was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on November 2, 1844. After graduating from Weymouth High School, he went on to Harvard, earning a law degree in 1866. He apprenticed for a prominent local law firm and was even appointed to the Suffolk County Bar before he decided that a life in law was not for him. In 1871, John joined the Union National Bank, the same bank his father worked as a cashier, as an assistant cashier. When his father passed away three years later, John was promoted to the elder’s position. He remained a cashier with Union National for the next twenty-one years, until his health necessitated that he retire in 1895.

Image courtesy toycannons.ray-vin.com

Banking wasn’t the only thing that held John’s interest during those decades. He was also an avid tinkerer. His first patent, #375,453, was granted in 1887 for improvements he made to make toy cannons safer (but since they still fired like a real cannon, it’s debatable whether you can use that word). The following year, he received patent #385,127 for a cannon that launched fire crackers, was partially collapsible for storage purposes and, in his own words, “perfectly safe for children and careless persons to whom accidents frequently occur in using fire arms.” You might be forgiven for thinking that his third and final patent was also cannon related, but as I mentioned earlier, it was actually for a new kind of pen.

The inspiration for the ballpoint pen had nothing to do with letter writing. The stated purpose of John’s new invention was to make it easier to write on rough surfaces like wood and leather. Instead of a nib that drew ink out of a reservoir using a capillary action and was great for fine lines and letter writing, John’s pen used a tiny little ball as a nib. The ball rolled around in a socket at the end of the pen, keeping ink from spilling out but getting coated with ink as it turned. When the ball was dragged across a surface, it acted like a mini paintbrush, leaving a trail of ink behind.  And his pen worked great. On everything but actual paper, where often times it wouldn’t write at all. The mechanism was just too crude to lend itself to letter writing. Since no one could think of very many reasons why they’d want to write on wood, no one decided to manufacture the new design and the patent ran out in 1905 virtually unused. It would take the creation of new, more viscous ink along with far more precise manufacturing practices to create an economically viable ballpoint pen and the patent for that wouldn’t come around until 1943.

Image courtesy jetpens.com

It’s unclear whether or not John invented anything else. If he did it wasn’t enough to warrant another patent. After retiring from the bank, he became interested in genealogy, directed his church’s choir, wrote poetry, spoke at local functions and served as a trustee of the Tufts University library. All of that plus the time spent with his eight children I’m sure made for quiet, humdrum twilight years. John passed away in his home in Weymouth, fairly close to the spot where he started life 71 years earlier, on August 10, 1916.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Paul J. Smith