Douglas Engelbart Invented the computer mouse (1964)

Inventors of the Modern Computer

The History of the Computer Mouse and the Prototype for Windows - Douglas Engelbart. By Mary Bellis "It would be wonderful if I can inspire others, who are struggling to realize their dreams, to say 'if this country kid could do it, let me keep slogging away'." - Douglas Engelbart Douglas Engelbart changed the way computers worked, from specialized machinery that only a trained scientist could use, to a user-friendly tool that almost anyone can use. He invented or contributed to several interactive, user-friendly devices: the computer mouse, windows, computer videoteleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, email, the Internetand more.

Wilson Greatbatch Invented the first heart pacemaker (1960)

1996 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award Winner.

Photo by Robert Lewis

In an attempt to record the sound of a heartbeat, Dr. Wilson Greatbatch inadvertently created something far more crucial—a device that emitted electricity pulses to the heart. It was this discovery that led to the implantable cardiac pacemaker and distinguished Greatbatch as having created one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century. In 1996, he was honored with the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award.

Greatbatch first learned of heart block—a condition in which a nerve fails to send electrical impulses to make the heart work—while talking with two surgeons visiting Cornell University in the early 1950s. At the time, combating heart block was done with a painful electric shock delivered via bulky external equipment. Greatbatch was convinced he could invent a smaller, implantable device.

Then, quite by accident, Greatbatch's "eureka moment" happened in 1958. Transistors had recently become available, and Greatbatch was building an oscillator with one transistor to record heartbeat sounds. He incorporated the wrong transistor, which produced a pulse that mimicked the rhythm of a heart. "I stared at the thing in disbelief, thinking this was exactly the properties of a pacemaker," said Greatbatch.

Greatbatch licensed his invention to Medtronic, Inc., and the first pacemaker was implanted in a human in 1960. He upgraded his device with a lithium iodine battery for durability in 1970, and his invention has been saving lives ever since.

Greatbatch has shown a commitment to educating children through inspirational speeches at schools and museums. He also established the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Foundation to donate money to schools and other causes.

Still inventing, Greatbatch acquired three patents with scientist John Sanford in the 1980s and 1990s for methods of inhibiting the replication of AIDS and another similar virus in cats.

Greatbatch was born in 1919 in Buffalo, NY. U.S. Naval service in World War II enabled him to receive a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University as a GI Bill student (1950). He received a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Buffalo (1957), succeeded by four honorary degrees. Greatbatch, who holds over 220 patents, is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering, among others. 

Jack Kilby Made the first microchip - the start of miniaturisation of technology (1958)

It seems that the integrated circuit was destined to be invented. Two separate inventors, unaware of each other's activities, invented almost identical integrated circuits or ICs at nearly the same time.

Jack Kilby, an engineer with a background in ceramic-based silk screen circuit boards and transistor-based hearing aids, started working for Texas Instruments in 1958. A year earlier, research engineer Robert Noyce had co-founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. From 1958 to 1959, both electrical engineers were working on an answer to the same dilemma: how to make more of less.

Why the Integrated Circuit Was Needed

In designing a complex electronic machine like a computer it was always necessary to increase the number of components involved in order to make technical advances. The monolithic (formed from a single crystal) integrated circuit placed the previously separated transistors, resistors, capacitors and all the connecting wiring onto a single crystal (or 'chip') made of semiconductor material. Kilby used germanium and Noyce used silicon for the semiconductor material.

Patents for the Integrated Circuit

In 1959 both parties applied for patents. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.

Commercial Release

In 1961 the first commercially available integrated circuits came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. They later used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie finger. Today an IC smaller than a penny can hold 125 million transistors.

Jack Kilby holds patents on over sixty inventions and is also well known as the inventor of the portable calculator (1967). In 1970 he was awarded the National Medal of Science.Robert Noyce, with sixteen patents to his name, founded Intel, the company responsible for the invention of the microprocessor, in 1968. But for both men the invention of the integrated circuit stands historically as one of the most important innovations of mankind. Almost all modern products use chip technology.

Jonas Salk Made the vaccine for polio (1955)..Humility Personified

Jonas Salk - Medical Pioneer

Even the disease's name scares everyone today: Cancer. But in the 1950's the scary disease was Polio. It paralyzed or killed children. People kept hoping someone would find a way to stop it. Dr. Salk worked every day for years to discover a vaccine to prevent polio, and he succeeded. But instead of bragging and taking lots of money for his work, he displayed HUMILITY and kept working as a doctor to find cures for other diseases, including cancer and AIDS. Quotes: "If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born." "Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality. " "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next. " "The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more. " Oct 28, 1914 - Jun 23, 1995  Virtue: Humility What could you say to someone who praises you for doing a good job?

Sir Christopher Cockerell Invented the hovercraft

Hovercraft

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By Mary Bellis
A hovercraft is a vehicle supported on a cushion of air supplied by a powered fan mounted on the craft. The hovercraft was invented by Christopher Cockerell in 1956. The theory behind one of the most successful inventions of the 20th century, the Hovercraft, was originally tested in 1955 using an empty KiteKat cat food tin inside a coffee tin, an industrial air blower and a pair of kitchen scales. Sir Christopher Cockerell developed the first practical hovercraft designs, these led to the first hovercraft to be produced commercially, the SRN1.
Christopher Cockerell's idea was to build a vehicle that would move over the water's surface, floating on a layer of air. This would reduce friction between the water and vehicle. To test his hypothesis, he put one a smaller can inside a larger can and used a hairdryer to blow air into them. The downward thrust produced was greater when one can was inside the other rather than air just being blown into one can.

Djerassi...Discovered the contaceptive pill.

Djerassi was born in the Austrian capital of Vienna, the son of a Bulgarian physician and an Austrian mother. As both parents were Jewish, Djerassi emigrated to America in 1939. He was educated at Kenyon College, Ohio, and at the University of Wisconsin, where he completed his PhD in 1945, the same year in which he became an American citizen. From 1945 to 1949 he worked for the pharmaceutical company CIBA in Summit, New Jersey, as a research chemist. In 1949 Djerassi decided to join a new pharmaceutical company, Syntex, in Mexico City, to work on the extraction of cortisone from plants. At that time it was being produced from cattle bile at a cost of 200 dollars a gram.

Despite competition from other leading laboratories, Syntex were the first to extract cortisone (C21H28O5) from a vegetable source, namely diosgenin (C27H42O3), a steroid derived from a variety of wild Mexican yam.

Following their initial success Djerassi and his team turned their attention to the steroid hormone progesterone. Known as ‘nature's contraceptive’, the hormone inhibits ovulation. Why, then, could it not be taken as a simple, natural contraceptive? The difficulty was that taken orally it lost most of its activity. Further, as hormones were extracted from such animal sources as human urine, bull's testicles, and sow's ovaries where they occur in small amounts, they tended to be very expensive. The first step was to produce progesterone synthetically. This was achieved at Syntex by Djerassi and others in the early 1950s, the price of progesterone dropped dramatically and it became available in large quantities.

Chemists were inhibited by the belief that steroid hormones were structure-specific; change the structure, the claim went, and the potency is lost. Djerassi was aware, however, that Max Ehrenstein had destroyed this myth a decade earlier and that it was at least conceivable that progesterone could be changed into an oral form without necessarily changing its potency.

Progesterone (C21H30O2) contains four rings of carbon atoms. Following some hints in the literature Djerassi thought that the removal of the methyl group at position 19, thus forming 19-norprogesterone, would increase its potency. His hunch proved to be sound. He was also aware that an acetylene bond introduced into position 17 of the male hormone testosterone increased its oral activity, although known as ‘ethisterone’, it had found no use.

Djerassi's crucial step was to propose that ethisterone's potency could be enhanced, as with progesterone, by removing a methyl group. By October 1951 he had produced testosterone minus a methyl group, but with an added acetylene group. The precise result was 19-nor-17a-ethinyltestosterone, which proved to be a highly active oral progestational hormone. A patent was filed in November 1951. After the appropriate testing it received Federal approval in 1962 under the name Ortho-Novum. Djerassi received one dollar for the patent, a standard payment by a pharmaceutical company to its staff.

In 1951 Djerassi left Syntex for Wayne State University, Detroit, where he remained until 1959 when he was appointed professor of chemistry at Stanford. He continued to work for Syntex, as vice-president in charge of research (1957–69) and as president of research from (1969–72).

He has also served since 1968 with Zoecon, a company partly owned by Syntex and specializing in pest control by using natural juvenile hormones that prevent insects maturing and breeding. In 1977 Zoecon was taken over by Occidental Petroleum and was then sold in 1982 to Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical company. Djerassi has remained as chairman of the board.

Djerassi's business interests have had little impact on his productivity, with over 600 papers to his credit. He has also published a novel (Cantor's Dilemma), a collection of verse, and his autobiography, The Pill, Pigmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse (1992).

George deMestral/ Invented velcro (1948)

The Invention of VELCRO ® - George de Mestral

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Microscopic view of VELCRO

By Mary Bellis

One lovely summer day in 1948, a Swiss amateur-mountaineer and inventor decided to take his dog for a nature hike. The man and his faithful companion both returned home covered with burrs, the plant seed-sacs that cling to animal fur in order to travel to fertile new planting grounds. The man neglected his matted dog, and with a burning curiosity ran to his microscope and inspected one of the many burrs stuck to his pants. He saw all the small hooks that enabled the seed-bearing burr to cling so viciously to the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. George de Mestral raised his head from the microscope and smiled thinking, "I will design a unique, two-sided fastener, one side with stiff hooks like the burrs and the other side with soft loops like the fabric of my pants. I will call my invention 'velcro' a combination of the word velour and crochet. It will rival thezipper in its ability to fasten."

Mestral's idea met with resistance and even laughter, but the inventor 'stuck' by his invention. Together with a weaver from a textile plant in France, Mestal perfected his hook and loop fastener. By trial and error, he realized that nylon when sewn under infrared light, formed tough hooks for the burr side of the fastener. This finished the design, patented in 1955. The inventor formed Velcro Industries to manufacture his invention. Mestral was selling over sixty million yards of Velcro per year. Today it is a multi-million dollar industry.

Not bad for an invention based on Mother Nature.

Enrico Fermi Built the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago (1942)

Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of Atomic Bomb CHICAGO, Nov. 28--Dr. Enrico Fermi, an architect of the atomic age and Nobel Prize winner, died at his home here this morning of cancer. His age was 53. He had undergone what was described as an "exploratory" operation in Billings Memorial Hospital on Oct. 9. He returned to his home several weeks ago. Dr. Fermi was Distinguished Service Professor for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. On Nov. 16 he was named the recipient of a special $25,000 award given by the Atomic Energy Commission for his work on the atomic bomb. The award was authorized under terms of the Atomic Energy Law, enacted this year, and it was bestowed upon Dr. Fermi with the approval of President Eisenhower. As a member of the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, Dr. Fermi continued his investigations of the atom's fundamental properties, concentrating on the nature of particles constituting the nucleus, or heart of the atom. In his studies, the scientist concentrated on mesons, the short-lived atomic particles believed to form a kind of cosmic cement holding the atom together. He also served as a consultant in the design of the university's synchocyclotron, one of the world's most powerful atom smashers. After Dr. Fermi had set the atomic furnace into successful operation in 1942, Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, now of Washington University, St. Louis, and director of the Metallurgical Laboratory, telephoned an impromptu coded message to Dr. James B. Conant, then president of Harvard University and also head of the National Defense Research Committee. Dr. Compton said "The Italian navigator arrived at the shores of the new world." Dr. Conant asked, "How were the natives?" Dr. Compton replied: "Very friendly." That meant the first atomic fire in history had been kindled. Dr. Fermi held honorary degrees from the Universities of Utrecht, Heidelberg, Columbia, Yale and Washington and Rockford College. In 1947 he won the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, and in 1950 received the Barnard Medal from Columbia University. That year, he also was elected to the Royal Society of England. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Physical Society and Sigma XI, honorary scientific fraternity. In 1928 Dr. Fermi married Laura Capon. She wrote a book, "Atoms in the Family," describing her life with the famous scientist, which was published this year. The couple had two children, Nella and Giulio. A private funeral service will be held here tomorrow. Memorial services at the University of Chicago will be held at 2 P. M. Friday in Rockefeller Chapel. "Father of Atomic Bomb"More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named "the father of the atomic bomb." It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant. And eight years later, on Dec. 2, 1942, he was the leader of that famous team of scientists who lighted the first atomic fire on earth, on that gloomy squash court underneath the west stands of the University of Chicago's abandoned football stadium. That day has been officially recognized as the birthday of the atomic age. Man at last had succeeded in operating an atomic furnace, the energy of which came from the vast cosmic reservoir supplying the sun and the stars with their radiant heat and light--the nucleus of the atoms of which the material universe is constituted. Enrico Fermi was the chief architect of that atomic furnace, which he named "pile," but has since become better known as a nuclear reactor, the technical name for an atomic power plant. Forerunner of ReactorsDr. Fermi's first "pile" was the forerunner of the giant nuclear reactors at Hanford, Wash., in which the non-explosive form of uranium--uranium 238--is transmuted into the man- made element plutonium, a vital element in both the atomic and hydrogen bomb, along with the natural atomic element, uranium 235. It was also the prototype of the atomic power plant in the U. S. S. Nautilus, first atomic submarine, and of all the atomic power plants now being built and planned for the generation of atomic power for industrial and other peacetime uses. Dr. Fermi, unhappy in Mussolini's Italy, especially from the time the Italian dictator began promulgating anti-Semitic laws to please Hitler, took the opportunity to escape from the Fascist-ridden land when he received the Nobel Prize in physics in the autumn of 1938. Leaving Italy with his wife and two young children to go to Stockholm, ostensibly for the purpose of receiving the prize, he told the Italian authorities he had accepted a temporary teaching post in an American university. He arrived in New York on Jan. 2, 1939, and quietly assumed a permanent post on the physics faculty at Columbia University. He could not have come at a more opportune time. In Germany, unbeknown to him, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who had been repeating the pioneer experiment begun by Dr. Fermi in Rome in 1934, stumbled upon the world-shaking discovery that the shooting of neutrons at uranium resulted in the splitting of the uranium atom, or uranium fission. Two weeks to the day after Dr. Fermi's arrival in New York, another of the world's great physicists, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, Denmark, also came to the United States. Though the news of uranium fission had not yet been officially published when he left Denmark, Bohr had heard about it from two exiled German scientists, Lise Meitner, a famous woman physicist, and her nephew, Otto Frisch. Lise Meitner, before her exile from Nazi Germany in the middle of 1938, had been a long-time collaborator of Hahn, who informed her privately of his startling discovery. She at once left Stockholm for Copenhagen to communicate the news to Dr. Bohr and to Frisch. Dr. Bohr arrived in New York Jan. 16, 1939, and at once communicated the news to physicists in Princeton. Soon it reached Dr. Fermi at Columbia, who communicated it to other colleagues. On the night of Jan. 25, 1939, in the basement of Pupin Hall on the Columbia campus, the first splitting of the uranium atom in America took place. It was not long before the epoch-making experiment was carried out in many other American universities. Dr. Fermi and the other physicists, particularly the exiles from Nazi and Fascist- dominated lands, realized from the beginning that "the world was in for trouble." Called Upon EinsteinAs early as March, 1939, less than three months after his arriving in the United States, Dr. Fermi, armed with a letter of introduction from Columbia to Admiral S. C. Hooper, in Washington, tried to interest the Navy Department in the possibility of an atomic bomb. At that conference the physicist "suggested the possibility of achieving a controllable reaction using slow neutrons or a reaction of an explosive character using fast neutrons." Meantime, Dr. Fermi and the other exiled physicists had learned through former colleagues in Germany that the Nazis had created a special institute in Berlin to which they had assigned some of their top scientists to work on an atomic bomb. Realizing the danger that confronted the free world, they induced the most famous scientist-exile among them, Albert Einstein, to write the historic letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that led to the eventual development of the $2,000,000,000 Manhattan District, as the atomic project was known. Dr. Fermi, in association with Leo Szilard, another exile, then began work at Columbia on the construction of the first experimental atomic "piles." By the time the Government was ready to support the project with substantial funds, the Fermi-Szilard team had laid down the groundwork that made the first chain reaction "pile" possible. Important as his contribution was to the national defense in time of emergency, Dr. Fermi's reputation among the great in physics had been established some years before he set foot in the United States. It was he, when still a young man of 33, who first used the neutron, discovered in 1932 by Sir James Chadwick of Cambridge University, England, as a modern Philosophers' Stone for the transmutation of the elements and the creation of more than forty artificial radioactive isotopes. It was in the course of these pioneer experiments that he bombarded uranium with neutrons and observed the strange phenomena that remained a puzzle for five years, until they were cleared up by the discovery of Hahn and Strassmann in December, 1938. It was then that Dr. Fermi and the rest of the scientific world realized that the strange phenomena they had been observing and could not explain were in actuality the fission of uranium. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Sept. 29, 1901. He was graduated from the University of Pisa in 1922, and in 1924, after study in Germany and the Netherlands, was appointed lecturer at the University of Florence. In 1926 he became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, where he remained until he left Italy to join the physics faculty of Columbia. In 1945, after serving for three years with the atomic bomb project, he joined the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago.

Igor Sikorsky Inventor of the modern helicopter (1939)

Igor Sikorsky.

Vought-Sikorsky VS-300 Early Helicopter

The first, tentative and tethered hover of the 1940 prototypeSikorsky VS-300 which, in May 1940, progressed to free flight. Igor Sikorsky himself, though aged fifty-nine at the time and casually attired, did all the early test flying. The skeletal VS-300 went through many forms and was not as advanced as some of the best contemporary German machines but it possessed two very large advantages: it was American and it introduced a most elegant solution to the problem of overcoming rotor torque with the now classic tail rotor.

Igor Sikorsky, who emigrated to the United States in 1919, was in the 1930s engaged in the design of the only possible form of long-distance airliners then feasihie, the Clipper flying boats. The company for whom he worked was United Aircraft Corporation (UAC). In about 1931 an early interest in helicopters returned and Sikorsky began to experiment in that little-known field. By 1938, possibly as a result of news of the flights of the Focke-Achgelis Fw 61, the UAC board appointed him to the post of engineering manager of the Vought-Sikorsky Division with a remit to develop a practical helicopter. The result, after a great deal of hard, mainly empirical, development work, was the open-framed VS-300, which first flew in free flight in May 1940 with Sikorsky himself at the controls, famously clad in an overcoat and trilby hat. The VS-300 lacked the elegant engineering of the German Flettner or Focke-Achgelis designs but it flew - just.

It is often pointed out that Sikorsky invented nothing new with the VS-300; this may be true, but he assembled the best-known techniques to produce his first practical helicopter. The main difference between the VS-300 and the German machines was Sikorsky's use of a single, three-bladed rotor with a collective pitch head and the small anti-torque propeller set at 90 degrees at the rear of the fuselage, a configuration that was to become universal. In May 1941, after no fewer than seventeen major modifications, the VS-300 was demonstrated to the US Army and Navy. An army captain, Franklin Gregory, an experienced autogyro pilot, flew theVS- 300. He found it very hard to control, describing the machine as a 'bucking bronco and difficult but possible to master, given new piloting techniques and intensive development of the helicopter's control systems.

Laszlo Jose Biro Invented the ball point pen (1938)..by Mary Bellis

A Brief History of Writing Instruments
"No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had" - Samuel Johnson. A Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro invented the first ballpoint pen in 1938. Biro had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. The thicker ink would not flow from a regular pen nib and Biro had to devise a new type of point. He did so by fitting his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its tip. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. This principle of the ballpoint pen actually dates back to an 1888 patent owned by John J. Loud for a product to mark leather. However, this patent was commercially unexploited. Laszlo Biro first patented his pen in 1938, and applied for a fresh patent in Argentina on June 10, 1943. (Laszlo Biro and his brother Georg Biro emigrated to Argentina in 1940.) The British Government bought the licensing rights to this patent for the war effort. The British Royal Air Force needed a new type of pen, one that would not leak at higher altitudes in fighter planes as the fountain pen did. Their successful performance for the Air Force brought the Biro pens into the limelight. Laszlo Biro had neglected to get a U.S. patent for his pen and so even with the ending of World War II, another battle was just beginning.. Historical Outline - The Battle of Ballpoint Pens The first pen-writing instrument was the quill pen dipped into dark paint. There became a need to lengthen the time between dips, eliminate splatter, eliminate smearing and improve pen handling. Early 1800s: The first designs for pens that could hold their own ink patented. 1884: L.E. Waterman, a New York City insurance salesman, designed the first workable fountain pen, the fountain pen becomes the predominant writing instrument for the next sixty years. Four fountain pen manufactures dominate the market: Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman and Wahl-Eversharp. 1938: Invention of a ballpoint pen by two Hungarian inventors, Laszlo Biro and George Biro. The brothers both worked on the pen and applied for patents in 1938 and 1940. The new-formed Eterpen Company in Argentina commercialized the Biro pen. The press hailed the success of this writing tool because it could write for a year without refilling. May 1945: Eversharp Co. teams up with Eberhard-Faber to acquire the exclusive rights to Biro Pens of Argentina. The pen re-branded the “Eversharp CA” which stood for Capillary Action. Released to the press months in advance of public sales. June, 1945: Less than a month after Eversharp/Eberhard close the deal with Eterpen, Chicago businessman, Milton Reynolds visits Buenos Aires. While in a store, he sees the Biro pen and recognizes the pen’s sales potential. He buys a few pens as samples. Reynolds returns to America and starts the Reynolds International Pen Company, ignoring Eversharp’s patent rights. October 29, 1945: Reynolds copies the product in four months and sells his product Reynold's Rocket at Gimbel’s department store in New York City. Reynolds’ imitation beats Eversharp to market. Reynolds’ pen is immediately successful: Priced at $12.50, $100,000 worth sold the first day on the market. December, 1945: Britain was not far behind with the first ballpoint pens available to the public sold at Christmas by the Miles-Martin Pen Company. The Ballpoint Pen Becomes a Fad Ballpoint pens guaranteed to write for two years without refilling, claimed to be smear proof. Reynolds advertised it as the pen "to write under water." Eversharp sued Reynolds for copying the design it had acquired legally. The previous 1888 patent by John Loud would have invalidated everyone's claims. However, no one knew that at the time. Sales skyrocketed for both competitors. Nevertheless, the Reynolds’ pen leaked, skipped and often failed to write. Eversharp’s pen did not live up to its own advertisements. A very high volume of pen returns occurred for both Eversharp and Reynolds. The ballpoint pen fad ended - due to consumer unhappiness. 1948: Frequent price wars, poor quality products, and heavy advertising costs hurt each side. Sales did a nosedive. The original asking price of $12.50 dropped to less than 50 cents per pen. 1950: The French Baron called Bich, drops the h and starts BIC and starts selling pens. 1951: The ballpoint pen dies a consumer death. Fountain pens are number one again. Reynolds folds. January, 1954: Parker Pens introduces its first ballpoint pen, the Jotter. The Jotter wrote five times longer than the Eversharp or Reynolds pens. It had a variety of point sizes, a rotating cartridge and large-capacity ink refills. Best of all, it worked. Parker sold 3.5 million Jotters @ $2.95 to $8.75 in less then one year. The Ballpoint Pen Battle is Won 1957: Parker introduces the tungsten carbide textured ball bearing in their ballpoint pens. Eversharp was in deep financial trouble and  tried to switch back to selling fountain pens. Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker Pens and Eversharp's assets finally liquidated in the 1960’s. Late 1950's: BIC ® held 70 percent of European market. 1958: BIC buys 60 percent of the New York based Waterman Pens. 1960: BIC owns 100 percent of Waterman Pens. BIC sells ballpoint pens in U.S. for 29 - 69 cents. The Ballpoint Pen War is Won Today: The highly popular modern version of Laszlo Biro's pen, the BIC Crystal, has a daily world wide sales figure of 14,000,000 pieces. Biro is still the generic name used for the ballpoint pen in most of the world. The Biro pens used by the British Air Force in W.W.II worked. Parker black ballpoint pens will produce more than 28,000 linear feet of writing -- more than five miles, before running out of ink.