More often than you’d think, an important and useful thing is invented more than once. There’s often an idea floating around, and any number of people work on it — and more than one succeeds. It’s less common, though, for a device to be invented twice, fifty years apart.
John Loud was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts in the US, on November 2, 1844. He attended Harvard and studied law, but joined his father to work for the Union National Bank. He eventually became a cashier, and kept the job for his whole career. Evidently in the late 1800s, being a bank cashier was a better job than it is today; Loud actually passed the bar and was also qualified to practice law, but stuck with cashiering.
He was quite active in various things outside of work — he was interested in genealogy and local history, and founded the Weymouth Historical Society. He was also a musician and choir conductor, and wrote poetry and music. And apparently he was a sought-after speechmaker in his community too; he delivered orations at events like the launching of the first ship at the local shipyard.
Another hobby was inventing — he invented a “firecracker cannon,” which was probably some sort of toy, and another one just called “toy cannon.” He patented both of them (possibly making use of his law degree). Then in 1888 he invented something we’d recognize today: the ballpoint pen. It worked — but Loud’s intent was to make a pen that could mark rough surfaces, like leather. So his pen was large and while it worked fine on leather and wood, it turned out that his invention solved a problem nobody had. The pen produced a thick, coarse line that wasn’t any good for writing letters — and for some reason (maybe the state of materials and manufacturing in 1888), nobody, including Loud himself, thought to make a finer-line version. So nobody was very interested, the pen was never used, and the patent lapsed.
Loud was apparently unbothered by this — his inventing was more of an avocation — and he lived to be 71, staying in Weymouth his whole life. Then in 1938, fifty years after Loud patented the first ballpoint pen, László Bíró patented the second one, which did produce a line fine enough for letter writing. Part of his innovation was a quick-drying ink, which he formulated with his brother’s help. Bíró probably didn’t know about Loud’s patent — he lived in Argentina, and was motivated by his annoyance with filling fountain pens and cleaning up smudges (he was a newspaper editor).
Ballpoint pens were available in the 1940s, but after initial sales success, they began to fade out. They were quite expensive at the time, and not everybody was as annoyed with fountain pens as László Bíró had been. They didn’t really succeed until the prices came down drastically, mostly driven by the pens manufactured by Marcel Bich. Those pens were named after him, too, but without the “h” — Bic pens.
