Bic Limited Edition case in 925°/oo black velvet

Limited series created for the 40th anniversary of the Bic factory. Made in Italy.

Success story published in an Italian newspaper a

Rome on October 28, 2015 :

  The idea came to Lazlo Josef Birò like a bolt of lightning, while he was watching the kids playing marbles in the street. There is a child who pulls the glass ball - a classic gesture with thumb and forefinger - and it squirts away from his hand, to reach its destination after however having rolled into a puddle and having left behind it, in the dust, a clear , perfect liquid trail. As if the marble were writing, in short.

It was the end of the 1930s and Laszlo - a young Hungarian journalist with a passion for inventions - stole the idea for his historic invention from the writing ball: the ballpoint pen. Fifteen years later, in a New York department store, the first Bic was sold - a brand invented by the Italian-French baron Marcel Bich, who bought the patent from Birò during the war - destined to revolutionize the world of handwriting.

It was October 29, 1945, 70 years ago. The biro Bic (both names are still in use) has since retired the old nib and inkwell, perhaps becoming the quintessential symbol of the twentieth century.

And if the boom in the commercialization of the ballpoint pen is due to Baron Bich, the idea remains that of that versatile genius of Birò. A special type, half artist and half journalist (he was editor of a magazine in Budapest) and with a phobia - the legend tells - very particular: he hated getting his hands dirty. And between tempera and brushes, ink and nib, it's hard to keep your hands spotless. It was precisely the idiosyncrasy for stains that triggered the inventor's idea of inserting a small metal ball between the container and the paper which held back, without blocking it, the flow of the ink and from which a clear and clean line could emerge, like that of the marble darting in the puddle.

Laszlo immediately set to work together with his brother Gyorgy and, in 1938, applied for a patent. But World War II looms and the journalist - of Jewish origins - is forced to flee first to Spain, then to France and finally to Argentina. Here the good Birò perfects and patents his 'creature' but times are hard and production costs are too high for his pockets. So he is forced to cede the rights of his invention to Baron Marchel Bich, a Turinese who moved to France, who will perfect it and forever link it to his surname (after removing the 'h'). Transformed into a light and practical, as well as economical, pen, the 'Bic' landed in a New York department store precisely on October 29, 1945, at the price of 12.50 dollars.

It was an immediate boom: Baron Bich produced up to 10 million ballpoint pens a day, while poor Laszlo Birò died, unknown and in misery, in a suburb of Buenos Aires in 1985. The first ballpoint pens landed in Italy immediately after the war but they were initially opposed, especially by teachers at school, as they were believed to make handwriting worse. Even in offices the ballpoint pen (italo Calvino seems to have been the first to call it that, in honor of its inventor) was off limits until the 1960s. Then, inevitably, everything changed.

The author and radio host Marco Presta in 'A kick in the mouth works miracles', celebrates it like this:

"The Bic is the thing that more than any other reminds me of the human being. It is capable of grandiose feats - filling winning coupons and bad checks - of mediocre actions - writing shopping lists and greeting cards - and of horrific crimes - writing death sentences and love letters".