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Milton Reynolds: Milton Reynolds (1892-1976), An American Entrepreneur, Was Born Milton Reinsberg in Albert
Milton Reynolds: Milton Reynolds (1892-1976), An American Entrepreneur, Was Born Milton Reinsberg in Albert
Jump to: navigation, search Reynolds (right) in the Oval Office (1947) Milton Reynolds (18921976), an American entrepreneur, was born Milton Reinsberg in Albert Lea, Minnesota. He is most famously known for the manufacture and introduction of the first ballpoint pen to be sold in the U.S. market in October 1945. He was also inventor of the talking sign promotional placard for retail stores, sponsor and crewman on the twin-engine propeller flight that broke Howard Hughes round-the-world record[1], and among the first investors in Syntex, which pioneered the combined oral contraceptive pill, or birth-control pill.[2] Reynolds business fortunes and personal wealth rose and fell numerous times during his career. He changed his name because he believed that his customers, including major U.S. retailers, were reluctant to buy from Jews. Long before his success with the pen, he had tried several ventures that made and lost considerable sums, including trying to corner the market on used automobile tires and investing in prefabricated houses. A business he built around retail signmaking equipment, Reynolds Printasign[3], was owned and operated by two generations of his heirs.[4]
Contents
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1 Developing the Gravity-Feed Ballpoint 2 Introduction of the Pen 3 The Reynolds International Pen Company 4 Pen Wars 5 Reynolds the Aviator 6 Retirement to Mexico City 7 References
While paying a sales call to Goldblatt's department store in Chicago[7], Reynolds was shown one of the rare Biro pens and apparently recognized it as a potentially hot consumer item for the postwar era. Working with engineer William Huernergardt and machinist Titus Haffa[8], Reynolds came up with a design that did not rely on patented capillary action but caused ink to flow by gravity. However, successful gravity feed required much thinner, viscous ink and a much larger barrel to avoid constant refilling. The thin ink made the pens prone to leakage, but, realizing time was of the essence, Reynolds rushed them to market anyway, touting the high ink capacity. With roller balls repurposed from the metal beads used in war-surplus bomb sights and barrels machined from aircraft aluminum, the Reynolds pens had another feature that captured the popular imagination: In early ads, Reynolds claimed, It writes under water![9] The claim was essentially truthful because his pen wrote successfully on wet paper. Consumers had little use for this bizarre practical application, but a generation of shoppers remembered the slogan long after Reynolds passed into history.[10]
Reynolds knew that it was only a matter of time until the established pen manufacturers Eversharp, Parker Pen Company, and Waterman pens flooded the market with much cheaper models backed up with big national advertising campaigns. Rather than compete and watch his margins dwindle, he sold the company off in pieces. European rights to the name went to a French concern, and the Reynolds pen is a well-known French brand today [15] (although the company is just as well known for its inexpensive fountain pens, which schoolchildren use for lessons in cursive penmanship). However, in Britain especially, Biro has become the generic term for any ballpoint pen. Reynolds sold his tooling to Fisher pens of Los Angeles, manufacturer of the Space Pen. He sold the corporate charter to the U.S. government, which renamed it the Reynolds Construction Company and allegedly passed clandestine payments to foreign governments through the paper entity.[16]