How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History

If you want to see a tour de force of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy and design, there’s no need to vis­it a Sil­i­con Val­ley show­room. Just feel around your desk for a few moments, and soon­er or lat­er you’ll lay a hand on it: the BIC Cristal ball­point pen, which is described in the Pri­mal Space video above as “pos­si­bly the most suc­cess­ful prod­uct ever made.” Not long after its intro­duc­tion in 1950, the Cristal became ubiq­ui­tous around the world, so ide­al­ly did it suit human needs at a price that would have seemed impos­si­bly cheap not so very long ago — to say noth­ing of the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, when the art of writ­ing demand­ed mas­tery of the quill and inkpot.

Of course, writ­ing itself was of lit­tle use in those days to human­i­ty’s illit­er­ate major­i­ty. That began to change with the inven­tion of the foun­tain pen, which was cer­tain­ly more con­ve­nient than the quill, but still pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive even to most of those who could read. It was only at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, a heady age of Amer­i­can inge­nu­ity, that an inven­tor called John Loud came up with the first ball­point pen.

Though crude and imprac­ti­cal, Loud’s design plant­ed the tech­no­log­i­cal seed that would be cul­ti­vat­ed there­after by oth­ers, like Las­z­lo Biro, who under­stood the advan­tage of using oil-based rather than tra­di­tion­al water-based ink, and French man­u­fac­tur­er Mar­cel Bich, who had access to the tech­nol­o­gy that could bring the ball­point pen to its final form.

Bich (the for­eign pro­nun­ci­a­tion of whose sur­name inspired the brand name BIC) fig­ured out how to use Swiss watch­mak­ing machines to mass-pro­duce tiny stain­less steel balls to pre­cise spec­i­fi­ca­tions. He chose to man­u­fac­ture the rest of the pen out of mold­ed plas­tic, a then-new tech­nol­o­gy. The Cristal’s clear body allowed the ink lev­el to be seen at all times, and its hexag­o­nal shape stopped it from rolling off desks. Its polypropy­lene lid would­n’t break when dropped, and it dou­bled as a clip to boot. What did this “game chang­er” avant la let­tre cost when it came to mar­ket? The equiv­a­lent of two dol­lars. As an indus­tri­al prod­uct, the BIC Cristal has in many respects nev­er been sur­passed (over 100 bil­lion have been sold to date), even by the ultra-high-tech cell­phones or tablets on which you may be read­ing this post. Bear that in mind the next time you’re strug­gling with one, patchi­ly zigzag­ging back and forth on a page in an attempt to get the ink out that you’re sure must be in there some­where.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Directs & Stars in an Ad Cel­e­brat­ing the 100th Anniver­sary of Montblanc’s Sig­na­ture Pen

Mont­blanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink

Ver­meer with a BiC

Neil Gaiman Talks Dream­i­ly About Foun­tain Pens, Note­books & His Writ­ing Process in His Long Inter­view with Tim Fer­riss

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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  • Andrew Morales says:

    The BIC Cristal is the OG tech min­i­mal­ist icon — no apps, no updates, just per­fect­ly engi­neered ink deliv­ery for less than a buck. In a world of smart­phones and AI, this lit­tle plas­tic stick still does one thing flaw­less­ly: refus­ing to work when you need it most.

  • Jason 7734 says:

    That’s when any smart per­son applies a BIC lighter to it to get the ink flow­ing again. The BIC lighter also one of the most suc­cess­ful inven­tions in his­to­ry too!

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