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.