Great Hungarian Inventions: The Automatic Transmission Shift and the Ball Pen

Did you know that both the automatic transmission shift and the ball pen were invented by the same Hungarian man? It is László József Bíró, who was a very versatile man. He was born in 1899 in Budapest and died in 1985 in Buenos Aires. He worked as a journalist, painter, administrator, and last but not least, was a great inventor.

The automatic transmission shift

It’s rarely mentioned that ancestor of today’s automatic transmission shift was created by him. What happened was that he bought himself a Bugatti sport car but he wasn’t completely satisfied with it. He felt like the transmission by clutch was quite stiff. So he started to work on a new way of transmission which was much more convenient and shut out the possibility of human errors.

The construction was made and became patent in one year. It still needed to be perfected but he didn’t have the fund for it and nobody seemed to be interested in it in Hungary. But then Opel and its owner General Motors heard about his invention and invited him to Berlin to present it. He built it into his motor sidecar and drove 1000 kilometres without a hitch until he reached Berlin.

This in itself impressed them, not to mention the test rides. General Motors bought the rights and promised to pay 200 dollars every month for five years. They also told him that they weren’t going to produce his invention. They only bought the rights to eliminate their competitors. He wrote: “They told me that they aren’t going to produce it because they are working on a hydraulic shifter. This was all just to exclude their competitors…” Unfortunately, neither he nor Hungary profited from his invention.

The ball pen

At this time, he worked as a journalist so he had a close relationship with pen and ink. His idea came from the ink used for printing newspapers. It was much thicker than the one used for writing, dried quickly and didn’t smudge on paper. So he put a little ball into the pen which pressed the ink down to the bottom. As the pen moved on the paper, the ball rolled and picked up the ink which was then transferred to the paper.

The use of this pen was much more easy and practical. It first became patent in 1938 under the name of fountain-pen. In the same year he left to Paris and then Argentina due to the restrictions concerning Jews. This is why he had to finish his experiments there. It became patent in 1943 and he started selling it in 1945 under the name of Eterpen. This later changed to Biropen and made the inventor immortal already in his life.

Written by Alexandra Béni

Source: Daily News Hungary