How a World War helped the ball pen to take off

It is true that many Indians make startling innovations, but these innovators also need the equivalent of the RAF order.

Last week, the Royal Air Force celebrated its century in grand style all over the UK. Nobody celebrated the fact that it was the RAF that gave a fillip to ball pens.

Sixty five ball pens sell every second all over the world, year after year. The Hungarian inventor of the ball pen, Laszlo Jozsef Biro, was included in the National Inventors Hall of Fame about 11 years ago. While the creative part of the innovation appeared in my book, “A biography of innovations”, I was curious about what caused the innovation to take off.

While Biro had developed a working model