|
Pen Express Choose Senator
branded pens for promotional use.
Ideas and products which are different from others. This was
the maxim of Friedrich Merz when he founded Merz & Krell company
in 1920 together with his brother Georg and the lathe-turner Justus
Krell.
The former family and handicraft company for wooden nib holders,
propelling pencils and fountain pens today has become one of the
leading manufacturers of the world. As an internationally orientated
group of companies with subsidiaries in the USA, France, Great
Britain, Poland, India, Benelux, representation offices in Russia
and Scandinavia and several exclusive partners Senator is today
present in some 100 countries world-wide. Two thirds of all refillable
ballpens produced in Germany come from our factory.
Products for every image and every budget but always one idea
ahead
Our strong position in the international
market is based on the entrepreneurial courage to enter new areas
with innovative and competitive product ideas, with investments
in increasingly efficient technologies and with service solutions
that assure our customers significant advantages.
If you choose a SENATOR writing instrument
you choose to trust in a brand with image. Only when form and
function match one another perfectly in highest quality, a product
may bear the name of SENATOR.
Our comprehensive range starting from the original low-priced
give-away all the way up to a high-quality gift is consequently
targeted at the requirements of our customers and business partners.
We are therefore in a position to create the perfect advertising
item produced according to your needs.
How Ballpoint Pens Work
In this electronic age of voice mail, e-mail and cell phones,
there is still no substitute for pen and paper. Even as you browse
the Web, you probably have a pen within easy reach to jot down
notes, scribble phone numbers, or even to doodle! Modern ballpoint
pens are so inexpensive that we don't even think about them anymore
-- you might have a cup on your desk that contains a dozen or
so different pens that have wandered in from who knows where!
Have you ever held a ballpoint pen and wondered how it works?
Why doesn't all the ink come flowing out?
Pen Technology
A pen is a tool used for writing or drawing with a colored fluid,
such as ink. A ballpoint pen is a pen that uses a small rotating
ball made of brass, steel or tungsten carbide to disperse ink
as you write. It is very different than its pen predecessors --
the reed pen, quill pen, metal nib pen, and fountain pen (see
A Brief History of Writing Instruments for details).
All of the pens that preceded the ballpoint used a watery, dark
India ink that fed through the pen using capillary action. The
problems with this technology are well-known. For example:
The ink can flow unevenly.
The ink is slow to dry. The ink is exposed to the air while
it is flowing through the pen, so it cannot dry quickly or it
would clog the pen.
When it does accidentally dry in the pen, the ink gums the whole
thing up and requires meticulous cleaning.
When you add to this list the fact that fountain pens tend to
flood when you fly on an airplane with them, you can see that
all pens up until World War II presented some significant problems
for their users -- the world awaited a better solution.
History of the Ballpoint
Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro was well aware of the problems
with normal pens. Biro believed that the idea of a pen using a
quick-drying ink instead of India ink came to him while visiting
a newspaper. The newspaper's ink left the paper dry and smudge-free
almost immediately. Biro vowed to use a similar ink in a new type
of writing instrument. To avoid clogging his pen up with thick
ink, he proposed a tiny metal ball that rotated at the end of
a tube of this quick drying ink. The ball would have two functions:
It would act as a cap to keep the ink from drying.
It would let ink flow out of the pen at a controlled rate.
In June 1943, Biro and his brother Georg, a chemist, took out
a new patent with the European Patent Office and made the first
commercial models, Biro pens. Later, the British government bought
the rights to the patented pens so that the pens could be used
by Royal Air Force crews. In addition to being sturdier than conventional
fountain pens, ballpoint pens wrote at high altitudes with reduced
pressure (conventional fountain pens flooded at high altitudes).
Their successful performance for the Royal Air Force brought the
Biro pen into the limelight, and during World War II the ballpoint
pen was widely used by the military because of its toughness and
ability to survive the battle environment.
In the United States, the first successful, commercially produced
ballpoint pen to replace the then-common fountain pen was introduced
by Milton Reynolds in 1945. It used a tiny ball that rolled heavy,
gelatin-consistency ink onto the paper. The Reynolds Pen was a
primitive writing instrument marketed as "The first pen to write
underwater." Reynolds sold 10,000 of his pens when they were first
introduced. These first publicly sold pens were very expensive
($10 each), primarily because of the new technology.
In 1945, the first inexpensive ballpoint pens were manufactured
when Frenchman Marcel Bich developed the industrial process for
making the pens that lowered the unit cost dramatically. In 1949,
Bich introduced his pens in Europe. He called the pens "BIC,"
a shortened, easy-to-remember version of his name. Ten years later,
BIC first sold its pens on the American market.
Consumers were reluctant to buy the BIC pens at first, as so many
pens had been introduced in the U.S. market by other manufacturers.
To counter this hesitancy, the BIC company created an exciting
national television campaign to tell consumers that this ballpoint
pen "Writes First Time, Every Time!," and sold it for only 29
cents. BIC also launched television ads that depicted its pens
being fired from a rifle, strapped to an ice skate, and even mounted
on a jackhammer. Within a year, competition forced prices down
to less than 10 cents each. Today, the BIC company manufactures
millions of ballpoint pens a day!
Ballpoint Design
The key to a ballpoint pen is, of course, the ball. This ball
acts as a buffer between the material you're writing on and the
quick-drying ink inside the pen. The ball rotates freely and rolls
out the ink as it is continuously fed from the ink reservoir (usually
a narrow plastic tube filled with ink).
The ball is kept in place -- between the ink reservoir and the
paper -- by a socket; and while it is in tight, it still has enough
room to roll around as you write. As the pen moves across the
paper, the ball turns and gravity forces the ink down the reservoir
and onto the ball, where it is transferred onto the paper. It's
this rolling mechanism that allows the ink to flow onto the top
of the ball and roll onto the paper you're writing on, while at
the same time sealing the ink from the air so it does not dry
in the reservoir.
Because the tip of a normal ballpoint pen is so tiny, it is hard
to visualize how the ball and socket actually work. One way to
understand it clearly is to look at a bottle of roll-on antiperspirant,
which uses the same technology at a much larger scale. The typical
container of roll-on has the same goals a ballpoint pen does --
it wants to keep air out of the liquid antiperspirant while at
the same time making it easy to apply. At this scale, it is easy
to see how the mechanism works.
The Ink
Ink is a fluid or paste that comes in a variety of colors -- usually
black or dark blue -- used for writing and printing. It is composed
of a pigment or dye dissolved or dispersed in a liquid called
the vehicle.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, writing inks date from about
2500 BC and were used in hieroglyphics found in ancient Egypt
and China. They consisted of lampblack ground with a solution
of glue or gums. The resulting mixture was molded into sticks
and allowed to dry. Before use, the sticks were mixed with water.
Various colored juices, extracts, and suspensions of substances
from plants, animals, and minerals also have been used as inks,
including alizarin, indigo, pokeberries, cochineal, and sepia.
For many centuries, a mixture of a soluble iron salt with an extract
of tannin was used as a writing ink and is the basis of modern
blue-black inks.
Modern quick-drying inks usually contain three things:
The vehicle
Coloring ingredients
Pigments
Agents
Lacquers
Additives
The ink vehicle can be either plant-based (linseed, rosin, or
wood oils), which dries by penetration and oxidation, or solvent-based
(such as kerosene), which dries through evaporation. The vehicle
is a faint bluish-black solution that is difficult to read.
To make the writing darker and more legible, coloring ingredients
(dyes) are added. Coloring ingredients can be pigments, which
are fine, solid particles manufactured from chemicals, generally
insoluble in water and only slightly soluble in solvents; agents,
made from chemicals but soluble both in water and in solvents;
or lacquers, created by fixing a coloring agent on powdered aluminum.
Black, the standard ink color, is derived from an organic pigment,
carbon. Colored pigments are inorganic compounds of chromium (yellow,
green, and orange), molybdenum (orange), cadmium (red and yellow),
and iron (blue).
The additives stabilize the mixture and give the ink additional
desirable characteristics. Depending on the medium that the ink
is being made for (pens, printing presses, printers) and the material
to be printed, the proportions change.
In the case of ballpoint pen ink, the ink is very thick and quick-drying.
It is thick so that it doesn't spill out of the reservoir, but
thin enough that it responds to gravity. That is why a normal
ballpoint pen cannot write upside-down -- it needs gravity to
pull the ink onto the ball.
Unusual Ballpoints
Two of the more interesting developments in the world of ballpoint
pens include space pens and erasable pens.
Space Pens
Space Pens, or pressurized pens, are a technological novelty.
A space pen's ink reservoir is pressurized (~40 lb/sq. in.), and
the ink is a special viscoelastic ink (like thick rubber cement).
The ballpoint must rotate in order for the thick ink to liquefy,
allowing it to write smoothly and dependably on most surfaces,
even under water. Ordinary ballpoint pens rely on gravity to feed
the ink and have an opening in the top of the ink cartridge to
allow air to replace the ink as it is used. There is no hole in
space pens, eliminating evaporated or wasted ink as well as leakage
from the rear of the ink reservoir. In addition, a space pen can
last up to 100 years, compared with the average two-year shelf
life of a standard ballpoint pen.
Since the 1960s, when the "Space Race" began, space pens have
been used by the U.S. astronauts on all manned space flights,
including lunar trips, and were also used by many of the Russian
cosmonauts on the Soyuz space flights and the MIR space station.
Erasable Pens
Erasable pens were tremendously popular when they were introduced
in the early 1980s. They combine the readability of brightly colored
or black ink with the eraser functionality of a pencil. While
the pens are still manufactured under names like Gillette Eraser
Mate, they aren't as commonly used as they were before. Patents
US2966418 and US4097290, among others, describe these pens in
detail.
What makes erasable ballpoint pens so different from traditional
ballpoint pens is the "ink" -- instead of being made from oils
and dyes, it is made of a liquid rubber cement. As you write,
the ballpoint rolls on the paper and dispenses the rubber cement
ink (the resulting mark is known as a trace). Modern erasable
pens work by allowing a ballpoint pen to leave a definite and
intense black or colored trace which looks like an ink trace,
but is capable of being easily erased shortly after writing (usually
up to 10 hours). After that time, the trace will harden and become
non-erasable.
Erasable ink generally consists of 15 percent to 45 percent (by
weight) natural rubber that is dissolved in a series of volatile
organic solvents with varying boiling points.
|
