The Ingenious Engineering Behind the Iconic BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen

Ewan Cunningham of Primal Space used detailed animation to explain the history and the ingenious vascular design behind the iconic BIC Cristal ballpoint pen, it’s ability to make other early pens obsolete, and how its low price helped to increase literacy rates around the world.

The pen was so perfectly simple and solved every problem that plagued previous pens. Most of all it was cheap, hitting the market in 1950 at just $2. … Over the next 50 years 100 billion of these pens were sold and literacy rates went from 35% to almost 90% …the fact that its design has remained almost exactly the same since day one shows just how perfect it was.