Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

What do you think was most important 20th century invention applicable to education? I think the common ballpoint pen would be up there. You know the device that teachers banned me from using in school. They said it would ruin my hand-writing and was messy and blotchy. For that reason I never used a ballpoint pen for academic work until I reached university.

They were of course right, the ballpoint pen had a rocky road to becoming ubiquitous and a means of empowering self-expression and giving access to learning. The first patent for a ballpoint pen was issued in 1888 to John J Loud. The pen had a rotating small steel ball bearing. As with modern ballpoint pens, the ball was held in place by a socket. It was fitted with a means for supplying heavy, sticky ink to the ball. The pen was too coarse for letter writing and was only good for marking leather. It wasn’t until 1938 when Lazio and his brother George Biro, realised that the success of the ballpoint pen lay with the accuracy in which the ball is ground. To enable the ball to rotate smoothly in its metal seat, the seat itself was formed by pressing the ball into a previously machined metal socket to form its own impression. Such a precision manufacturing process meant that the biro was still relatively expensive, and Biro failed to take out a North American patent despite its success in Europe during the 1930s. The production of cheap ballpoints in the US led to a reputation for leaking or not working at all. It wasn’t until Marcel Bich, a Frenchman, developed gravity-flow inks held in rubber sacks, and then brass tubes and a layer of grease to force the flow of ink that the modern “BiC” was born. Today, ballpoint pens are almost ubiquitous, from the cheap disposable to the luxury writing instrument. Advances in the technology which control bonding of metal particles by heat transfer allowed Parker to produce a sintered sphere that holds more ink inside than on the surface. Together with paste inks which offer greater resistance to weather and extremes of pressure, the Parker “Jotter” can perform in the heat of the Sahara, in high altitudes of the Andes and freezing temperatures in Alaska, and produce more than five miles of linear writing before running out of ink.

Many are claiming that ICT devices are becoming ubiquitous in our classrooms and among learners, but when you compare such devices with the humble ballpoint pen, which through advanced technology makes writing so easy and transparent at a cost of practically nothing, one realises we have an awful long way to go. We haven’t even invented the biro yet.

Image credit: Shane Gavin

Tags: devices, biro, pen, learning