Birome

In Argentina we like to tell this urban legend that is somehow kind-of-true, that the ballpoint pen was invented there, thanks to the idea of a Hungarian-born man called László Bíró who moved to Argentina at some point during World War II. This story is not entirely true in the sense that when Bíró came to Argentina he had already invented the ballpoint pen (actually, it was invented by somebody else, but its patent lapsed without commercial distribution). The first large-scale production and commercialization of the ballpoint pen started and spread from there, through the “Bíró & Meyne” company. And yes, in Argentina we still refer to ballpoint pens as “biromes” (derived from the company name), and I’m not kidding, that’s really how we call them, and that’s how I’ll call them in this article. Then the story goes that a French man called Marcel Bich bought Bíró’s patent, and thus begat the Bic Cristal ballpoint pen that we all know, somewhere between the 1950s and 60s. And this is the…