Stuff You Should Know - Ballpoint pens? Heck yes, ballpoint pens!

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

Get ready, folks. The ballpoint pen is far more interesting than you could ever imagine. For real. Brilliant in its simplicity. Took the world by storm. We love our ballpoint pens and you should too. Listen in today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, it's just the two of us today.

And both of us are totally astounded that you press play on an episode called How Ballpoint Pens Work or something to that effect. Yeah, and when I found this, I was like, no, but then I started reading it and it was far more interesting than I thought. I love ones like this.

Where you're just like, this sounds so dull that I wanted to actually pop my eyes out with it by a ballpoint pen, not listen to anything. Yeah. But no, it turns out to be interesting. Like Grass, remember our episode on Grass? Who could forget? The great debate over whether you should flood your lawn

with a quarter inch of water or not? Yeah. Answer, you should not. So Chuck. Yes. To begin, I have a question for you. Okay. Have you ever seen a ballpoint pen?

They have them. That's become one of your great long time running jokes. I don't know what you mean. Chuck, have you ever breathed air? Yeah, I mean, I was using my black, big ballpoint pen. Yeah, I remember. Today.

I remember. Because blue pens are for dopes. You, my friend, are out of your mind. You like blue pens? Blue pen is the only way to go, my friend. And as a matter of fact, the Pilot G2.7 millimeter pen, ink gel pen in blue is the only way to go. That's my favorite pen on the entire planet.

Well, I will say, today I'm using the standard BIC black, like the one that in elementary school you could take apart and make into a great spitball shooter. Oh yeah, that was an off-label prescription for that. Yeah, it's the clear one, not the white plastic case, but the clear case. Sure, yeah. Or the clear pen body.

And I do love that pen, but I know the pen that you speak of and I do love it, because I love it. There's nothing like a pen that just takes to the paper perfectly. Yes. It's magical. That's what gel ink pens do. They're beautiful things. And the reason I like blue, and it comes in black,

if that's your thing, I'm not gonna hate on it. But when you underline something printed out, like our notes, and then you go back over it with highlighter, like I do, the blue really stands out. The black just kind of like blends in with the printed out words. All right, well, here's what I used to do is, and you probably remember the days

when I would be looking at my highlighted text with red ink things written down, because the red really popped, but then I just sort of got tired of it and I'm just a black ink guy. You're sticking and picking. I'm sticking and picking. You're picking and sticking, that's what I mean.

So should we talk about writing over the years? We should. Is anyone listening still? If you are, we're gonna continue on just in case. So let's start about writing over these, because this is pretty interesting, right? Yeah, tuk-tuk, that's where we should start. Tuk-tuk, and we should shout out to Mary Bellis,

who wrote a thought code little brief thing called the Brief History of Writing, that kind of ran down some points that we'll cover. But she points out the tuk-tuk, she doesn't call them tuk-tuk, but that's really what she means. That's because I've trademarked it. Sure, tuk-tuk started writing with basically sharpened stones

by carving things on the sides of cave walls. Sure. Easy peasy, that was probably our first writing implement. Yeah, and like no ink by this point, as with the Greeks when they started writing, they had a little stylus made of bone or metal or something, and they would mark things on wax-coated tablets,

and it would take always, it seems like it's the Chinese, who come up with the great innovations in ancient times, and still, who knows, we're not allowed to read Chinese websites though. No, we're banned. But they invented and really crafted Indian ink. Yes, which is a pretty clever little mixture. It's soot, specifically from Pine Smoke, Vellis says.

Yeah. It's pretty on the nose, if you ask me. And then some oil, lamp oil, and then you take a donkey and squeeze gelatin from it, which I'm wondering like, does that mean that you have to kill the poor donkey or can you just come up and milk it of gelatin? I think the donkey loves that.

Well, I wonder, because I think gelatin's actually made from hooves. I think you're right. And usually, if you start making things from hooves, the animal the hoof used to be attached to is no longer with us. Probably so. So it's a sad way to make ink,

but that's how they made ink for thousands of years, actually. Yeah, there was a philosopher, a Chinese philosopher named Tian Chu, and his ink was the one that really sort of became the go-to ink for many, many, many years. Yes, he called it Chuink. We called it what? Chuink.

Really? No. Oh, okay. No, I'm making stuff up at this point. All right, I can't tell. He had the idea, this was, I think back around 2700 BC, that he started mixing natural dyes and things from berries, different kinds of plants

to make different colored ink. So ink went from just black to colored. And as a result, they started attaching different meanings to these different colored inks. Yeah, he invented the four-color pen. But, oh yeah, I remember that. Oh, I forgot all about this. Didn't they go up to like eight colors too?

Yeah, they got pretty out of hand. And the thing that's stunk about those is they never wrote really well. No, they definitely didn't. The gimmick was more that you could write at all in different colors in the same pen, you know? They were for elementary school kids. So one of the things that happened

as the writing implements, and I hadn't really realized this, but as our writing implements became more and more refined, just better and better. And part of that was not just like the implement, but also the types of ink we were using and how they were delivered. And then the paper, whatever substance we were putting them onto, the original things,

which started out as basically drawings on cave walls, got more and more refined and actually grew more and more abstract. And they became our system of alphabets, letters. And at first, so from what we know, the first alphabet ever created was created in ancient Greece, classical Greece, by a scholar named Cadmus.

And all of the original written alphabets that were invented were all uppercase, nothing but uppercase. So everybody's just shouting to one another. Yeah, at all times. Constantly, right? And I didn't know this, but there's another word for uppercase and lowercase.

It's majuscule and minuscule, the actual technical terms for uppercase and lowercase. And the story goes that the reason they're called uppercase and lowercase is that in the days of typeset printing, you would keep your majuscule letters in a different drawer, usually higher up out of reach because you didn't use them as often,

then you would the minuscule letters, you'd keep those in the lowercase. And that's where the term comes from, from what I understand. Very interesting. I thought so too. Maybe the fact of the podcast, I don't know. We'll have to just keep going and find out.

Has nothing to do with pens. The Romans actually created a reed pen and this makes a lot of sense. It would use stems from marsh grasses, like bamboo type of stuff, which made perfect sense because it's hollowed out already. All you do is sharpen the end of it to come to a point, like a little nib,

then put the ink in there and you've got a very rudimentary pen which worked pretty well for them. Yeah, apparently these things were so tight that you had to squeeze them to squeeze the ink out of the end so it wouldn't just dribble out constantly, although I'm sure it still would.

It's not a perfect system. It isn't a perfect system and there's still room for improvement. And that came in 700 CE, right? About 1300 or so years ago when somebody thought to use a quill from a bird, feathered animal. Yeah, and that was a big one.

It says in here that the longest period in history as far as writing implements goes was the quill pen. Yeah. Pretty amazing, a thousand years. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, it was the best. They basically got to the quill pen and were like, until somebody invents a ballpoint pen, this bird feather is about the best thing going.

Yeah, and I mean, so you could use a bird feather as a quill pen for about a week before it would get gummed up and you'd have to have another one. And they actually figured out that the bird from a, or the feather from a living bird plucked in the spring provided the optimal quills. And even more than that,

depending on whether you were right-handed or left-handed, you wanted to pluck the feather from the left or the right wing. Yeah, because if you're right-handed and you're writing with a quill from a right wing, then that guy's gonna be tickling your nose every time and it may be fun for a little while. But what you really want is a feather from the left wing

and that way, if you're right-handed, and that way that feather swoops to the outside of your face. Yes, having the wrong feather quill would have just been another excuse, not to balance your checkbook, you know? Yeah, and these things lasted for about a week. You needed a special knife to sharpen them.

Took a long time to get it kind of prepared. And they were, you know, like I said, about a week old and they were done. So they were fairly disposable, but they still held down the fort until early fountain pens for over a thousand years. Yeah, and fountain pens are their own thing. They are, surely you know or remember from time to time,

we'll get like a letter from somebody who's like a fountain pen enthusiast. It's like a whole thing. You remember that? Yeah, or you get a graduation gift that's like a nice fountain pen and you're like, geez, really? But no, I'm saying you and I have gotten like letters

from fans who like write these beautiful letters out in fountain pens. I think at least one person has sent us an actual like really good fountain pen. And I've never caught the bug, but there is like, there's a subculture of people out there who are so into fountain pens that they express that by writing letters to one another,

using fountain pens obviously. It's really cool. I mean, I have never, like you'd never taken to it. I'm a ballpoint man through and through, but I get it, you know? Sure. It's cool, it's classy. You're not gonna yuck their yum in other words.

No, and I don't have very nice penmanship anymore either. So it would just, you know, I kind of tie those things together. Like if you're writing a letter in a fountain pen, you don't write like I do, because that would just be dumb. Right, I write like a serial killer in an insane asylum, holding a crayon with a fist.

That's how I write. Should we take a break and jump over to the ballpoint? Yeah, let's. Son of a... Son of a... On the podcast, Hey-Dude the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey-Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey-Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right.

So a ballpoint pen, you say that word over and over and it's, you never really stop to think about what that means. But in the end of that little pen, and it's impossible to not just sort of obsess over this after you've maybe listened this episode or, or researched it like we did. But when I was writing today, I was just constantly thinking about that little ball. You know? We're haunted you. How undersung it is.

Oh, okay. I see. I thought you were just like you, you felt like it was eavesdropping on you. You could feel it like something with the atoms in your hand or something weird like that. No, just thinking of the simple genius of this invention, it's, you know, at the end of that pen is a little small, tiny, rotating ball. A lot of times it's steel or brass, maybe tungsten carbide. And it was revolutionary and completely different than anything that came before it.

Yeah, and to go back to the fountain pen to kind of put a button on that, like, yes, fountain pens are pretty awesome. And when you master using a fountain pen, you probably do like it. But if you were just an average mom who's like, look, just give me a writing implement. I want to write something down. I'm not getting any jollies from this. Looking at it from that perspective, the ballpoint pen is an improvement in a number of ways over the fountain pen.

And specifically, one of the ways that it's an improvement is that you can use it up in an airplane much more easily. Yeah, the ink, there were problems with the ink at high altitudes. In fountain pens. Yeah, and just problems with the ink at any altitude. It doesn't flow super evenly. I mean, if you have a really nice pen and know how to use it, but like a cheap fountain pen, it was no good.

The ink is very slow to dry and smudgy. It would clog a lot. And once it's kind of clogged and gummy, then either have to be really good at cleaning it, or it's just junk. Yes, so one of the ways that the ink comes out of a fountain pen is through air, through capillary action and air. And so since you have air in a fountain pen, that means that since ink dries in the presence of air, which is what you want when it touches the paper, it'll also dry inside the pen,

which is how it gets gunked up like you were talking about. But in an airplane too, when you take a fountain pen that's been down on planet earth for a while, that air that's in the fountain pen gets trapped in the air. So when you take it up in an airplane in a pressurized cabin, it's still like the cabin's pressurized, but it's still much less pressure than it is at sea level, which is where the pen just was. And because of this, the higher pressure air inside the pen wants to move to where it's lower pressure.

Higher pressure always moves to lower pressure, I think, unless there's some rando exception I'm not thinking of that we're going to get a thousand emails about. But like high pressure stuff wants to move to low pressure stuff, so that high pressure air tries to move out of the fountain pen, and as it does, it pushes the ink out. So fountain pens tend to flood on planes, which again, is not that big of a problem these days. But if this was the 1940s and you were a pilot for the Royal Air Force or a navigator or something,

it was a big problem. Yeah, for sure. Which is one of the reasons why ball points came along. Yeah, and the ballpoint idea had been around since the 1800s, but it never really took, like they can never figure out how to make a good working pen that actually was able to go to market. It was, I didn't see that, it's been around since the 1800s, huh? The original idea for the ballpoint pen, yeah,

but they could never fashion a pen that really worked well. Yeah, I would think also it would really depend on the technology of the ink. For sure, I think that was a big part of it. But it would take a journalist, a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro to take a tour of a newspaper facility when he was like, wait a minute, these newspapers are coming out and they're being stacked on each other right after printing, and it's not smudging around like my dumb old India ink does. And he said, why don't we use that kind of ink, put it in a pen, and not only that,

why don't we take a pen that has a little tiny metal ball at the end that rotates, it also seals that tube so the ink doesn't come flowing out. It does double duty. Double duty, and then the rotation is what draws that ink out, that and a little gravitational pull, and I think it might be onto something here. Yeah, and he definitely was, and this article hilariously says that he vowed to make a pen that used fast drying ink, because at the time that was a real problem, like the ink that you had in a pen to keep it from drying out in the pen had to be super watery.

So the idea of making a pen that wasn't a fountain pen, that used fast drying ink, that was quite a vow. I'm sure the person giving him the newspaper tour was like, are you sure? Yeah. He said, I just vowed it, I'm gonna do it. Yeah. He did, he got together, luckily I had a brother, George, who was a chemist. Yeah, that was very helpful.

And in 1943, June 1943, he got that patent with the European Patent Office, made Bero pens, it was the first ballpoint pen to be brought to market, and the British government, you were talking about the Air Force, their Royal Air Force went crazy for it, so they just bought the rights. Okay, so I couldn't find it anywhere else. Oh, really? I saw that the Royal Air Force ordered 30,000 of these, but not that they bought the rights. Well, let's say this, they either bought the rights or all but bought the rights

of being their number one customer. Right, I like how you married the two facts. Yeah, so I mean, not only did they write well at high altitudes, but they were just sturdy, and it was a pen that you could take into battle with you. Yeah, so it wouldn't flood, as they call it, at high altitudes. And yeah, it was a pretty durable pen. And so Bero, he patented it with his brother, George, founded the Bero Pen Company, right? And I think that's so cute, he named it after himself,

even though he and his brother did it, and he very easily, or no, Bero was his last name, I'm sorry. Yeah, he could have named it the last low. Right, that's what I thought he'd done. His last name was Bero. Okay, so that makes way more sense. I thought he'd been like, George, thank you, but I'm naming this pen after myself. It was a pretty big hit.

I don't think it was a commercial success right away, but that big order or the purchase by the Royal Air Force definitely helped the Bero Company establish itself. Almost simultaneously, well, a year or two later, there was a guy in America named Milton Reynolds. And he said, I just found some of these Bero pens on a business trip, I think in like Argentina or somewhere. And he said, I'm going to totally rip this off. And he did.

And he founded a company and created the Reynolds Pen in 1945, which is basically the Bero Pen. Yeah, and these were really successful. I saw articles as 10 bucks, but I found an article from the New York Times from the 1940s that talked about at Gimbles in New York, you could buy one for $12.50, which was super expensive. I mean, $12.50 is expensive for a single pen today. Sure. You know, like a ballpoint pen.

You gotta be a real jerk to pay $12.50 for a pen these days with this economy. But this little article said that people all but trampled one another to get a hold of these pens. Gimbles ordered 50,000 of them and sold 30,000 of them in week one. Eventually, there would be a lot of lawsuits back and forth about the patent. Basically, those never went anywhere because what they were essentially saying is the idea for the ball bearing, which is kind of what makes this all possible, has been around for so long that no one can really claim this to the point where like you can sue one another.

Oh, that's how I could not find how Reynolds got away with it. My idea was that they had just filed the patent. George in Lazlo had filed the patent in Europe and Reynolds was doing it here in the US. Maybe. But I didn't realize that there was actually a patent battle. Yeah. And then there was a battle like Faber came on board. I mean, everybody started making pens like crazy all of a sudden.

Faber then eventually sued Reynolds because they just sued them for a shoddy product. Really? I'm not sure how that quite works because it wasn't like they were a consumer. They said, get that off of the market. But they were kind of right. I don't think I don't know if they won that lawsuit, but a lot of these returns, pens were returned, these initial Reynolds pens were returned because they didn't work. But children with burns on their arms because the pen just suddenly caught fire.

But he made almost $6 million in 1945 dollars in the first six months of his company. So he was set. So by the way, Chuck, I'm on the West Egg Inflation Calculator. Oh yeah, you have it apt. $12. I should just have it as like an app in my brain, you know? Yeah. Maybe that is the first thing I'll do when we start adding apps to our brains. But $12.50 in 1945 would be $173.16 last year.

That's crazy. Yeah. That is a little crazy for a brand new pen. A ballpoint pen. If people had been living with fountain pens and they were sick of them, the idea of something that improved that much would, I could see, running in droves to gimbals. Being like, you're going to go out of business eventually and Macy's will stick around. So sell me all your pens.

They also did, you know, it was a lot of advertising, Hullabaloo, like they called them the pen of the atomic era and sort of all that futuristic stuff that people went wild for. It was a healthy glow. But as far as my own BIC pen, this was a revolution because, like we said, $12.50 is a lot of dough back then. In 1945, a Frenchman named Marcel, would it be Biche, B-I-C-H? I think it's BIC. Is it BIC?

That's why he dropped the H is so people could pronounce it. Yeah. He developed a process for making these things really cheap per unit. And all of a sudden you could get a pen for 29.35 to 35 cents. And he called it the BIC pen. And that really changed things. Because in 10 years later, he came to the United States and everyone was like, man, we've been buying all these credit expensive pens.

For $12.50? Yeah. Mr. BIC comes along. These aren't great early on, but they only cost 25 cents. Yeah, but so these BIC pens were, I mean, they made quite a splash. And one of the ways that they did was the lower prices not only offered these pens for much lower prices than the other pens, they created competition among all the ballpoint pen manufacturers. And all of a sudden you could get a ballpoint pen for like 10 cents.

When three years before, you would have paid $12.50. And it really changed the industry. And as it just kept going and going and manufacturing got better and better, so did these highly disposable cheap ballpoint pens, thanks to BIC. Yeah. Have you ever taken a good look at the BIC logo? It's freaky, man. It's like a little school kid.

With a ball head, right? Yeah, a ballpoint head. Yeah. And there's like a light reflecting off of the sphere of the ball. But it also just kind of, you know, looks like a Cyclops. And he's holding a pen behind his back, too. Like, what are you going to do with that pen, kid? I wonder if that's how a young Marcel BIC saw himself.

Maybe so. I don't know. He was into Dada art. So let's talk about the design of these things, the brilliant simplicity of the ballpoint pen design. Like we mentioned, the little ball there is a buffer between the paper and the ink. It rolls around. It fits very tightly in this socket, but not so tightly that it can't roll because there's nothing more annoying than a ball that's stuck in place, which happens from time to time.

I mean, your pen is toast, probably. Probably so. But this little socket, like, I'm glad this article pointed this out. It's really small and it might be hard to sort of imagine it, but if you get in a time machine and go to your dad's bathroom in 1983, you might find a deodorant called a roll-on deodorant. Uh-huh, band. Band roll-on. And it's the same exact thing, same technology, in that you have a ball keeping that fluid

inside in the reservoir, you know, from leaking out. And then as it rolls around your disgusting armpit, some of that juice goes onto your disgusting skin. Yeah, and burns a hole clear through it. Yeah. Yeah. I think you used roll-on. Yeah. Did you?

No, I was never into roll-on because it burns a hole in your skin because mine. Did you use the spray ever? No, I don't think I ever had any spray. No, I've always been like a solid stick dude. I can't even use, like, the speed stick stuff that's like... The gel? Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be like solid stick.

White? Yeah, if it's not like great, but I mean, it can't be like gel, it has to be solid like that. Yeah, see, I can only use the unscented gel stuff. I can't find unscented sticks anymore, I used to use Shure because that was the only unscented stick you could find. I use Menon unscented gel. Wow, well, I might have to give that a try because it's been a while since I really gave

my underarms a chemical burn. But all that stuff is not supposed to be great for you, you know, like... No, I know. Emily gives me the natural stuff and, you know, you know what that means, it means Chuck Stinks. Chuck Stinks. Tom's makes this great one, it's, I think, apricot scented. It's wonderful.

Yeah, it's not bad. Yumi uses it sometimes. You use it? I've used it before, but it's hard to find the unscented natural stuff. Yeah, that's true. And then, I don't know man, you know, I just, I need a little extra. No, same here, man, I need powerful chemicals to overcome the stink from my underarms. I use Axe because I'm in eighth grade, but it's the only stuff that's like a good solid

stick that works with a minimum amount of application. Do you really? Isn't that the stuff that just stinks to high heavens? Well, I mean, if you really slather it on or you use the body spray, it's going to smell, but it has a scent to it, yeah. I'm using black sugar right now. We've either gotten three new sponsors or ensured that we will never be sponsored by a deodorant.

That's true. We're doing a lot of buzz marketing right now, it's true, but anyway, roll on any perspirant technology and ballpoint pen technology are the exact same. I think that's the point we're trying to make. Exactly. So with this ballpoint pen ball, it's extraordinarily small, like on my Pilot G2s, since I use a 0.7 millimeter, the ball is so small that it makes a line that's just 7 tenths of a millimeter wide.

Yeah, that's what that means, I never knew that. It's a very, very tiny, tiny little ball. When you look at the end of a pen, you don't really see the ball, the ball in the ballpoint. It's that small. You have to really look. And that's a 0.7? Yeah. You ever used a 0.1?

No, I haven't. I'm not crazy Chuck, come on. I don't want to line that unless it's something super specific I'm trying to do, I like a nice 0.5. Yeah, I've tried 0.5, I like it a little thicker than that, so I go with the 7. It's not like I'll never use a 0.5, but 0.7's my favorite for sure. Blue 0.7. One would be, if you're doing like cross-hatching on an illustration or something, I could see

it for that. I don't even know what that means. You know, when you make the lines for shading on a drawing, that's cross-hatch. So I want everyone to go to YouTube and type in close-up of a ballpoint pen. And somebody went to the trouble of doing like an extreme close-up, it must be through some sort of microscope video camera of a ballpoint pen making a mark on a piece of paper and it's really fascinating. Interesting.

So what you're talking about, getting back to the way that these work, the ball holds the ink above it, keeps it from spilling out, also keeps it from drying out, but when pressure is applied to the ball by pressing the pen to the paper or whatever you're writing on, it releases the ball or spins the ball so that the backside of the ball that's covered in ink spreads across the paper. And that same part of the ball that just spread ink on the paper rolls back up into the socket where there's more ink to be spread onto it and for this process to be continued on again and again wherever you're rolling the ball on the paper.

Because when you're writing, what you're doing is rolling a tiny ball with ink on it all over a paper. I love it. That's it. That's a ballpoint pen. All right. Well, let's take another break here and we will talk more about ink and space pens right after this.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, let's talk Inc. Baby. All right.

You're a blue man. Yep. I go for the black. That means I like iron. You like carbon basically. So when you're talking to Inc. In a ballpoint pen, uh, you've got a pigment or some sort of a dye that's dispersed in a liquid called a vehicle, so it's not like you can just take a bunch of pigment and throw

it in a pen. It needs to be, it needs to have some juice that it's mixed with, uh, and that's called the vehicle. Yeah. And it can be any number of things. I actually found this really, really confusing and I looked all over the internet and just got even more confused. But tannins, which I thought were pigments, apparently are vehicles and something you

want to look for in a vehicle like a tannin, which is a, like something you would get from fermenting leaves or something. Like there's a lot of tannins in your kombucha or your wine, right? Um, those tannins, it basically adhere, they carry the ink from the writing instrument to the paper and as the, as the ink dries, the tannins bind the ink to the paper, making a permanent mark. That's what you're looking for. So you've got your pigment, you've got your dye, you have your agent, whatever it is that's

coloring the ink, it can be anything from like a chemical, um, an inorganic chemical like, uh, cadmium or, uh, it could be carbon or it can be iron and it would be dissolved in that vehicle, tannins. And then you might also add additives, which are things that create, um, other properties of ink that you're looking for. Like they use gum Arabic to kind of, um, increase the viscosity of the ink and to make it so that once it dries, it doesn't crack as much as stays kind of bendy on the paper. Yeah, and these vehicles, so does that mean like if you have a vehicle, a plant-based

vehicle that's like linseed oil, does that mean linseed oil is a tannin? That's what I'm saying. Like there's not a lot of specific information that explains this out there. I don't know in other words. Are we going to have to do a show on tannins? As pennants? Please say no. No.

Okay, good. We're going to stick by this. But like you were talking about the organic pigments, you mentioned earlier, I'm a carbon man, you're an iron man. The carbon is the black, the iron is the blue. Other inorganic compounds like chromium is where you get your yellow, greens and oranges. And then, uh, or maybe cadmium, red and yellow, it kind of just depends. So the thing that what you're looking for though, if you, if it's a pigment, it won't

dissolve in water, but it will dissolve in some other stuff like maybe alcohol or something like that. Coins will dissolve in, in solvents like alcohol, but also water. And then you have lacquers where you actually take the coloring agent and it, marry it to powdered aluminum and that's lacquer. So those are like the three color ways of delivering colors that you can, you can use. But so with this vehicle, whatever it is that you can dissolve the coloring agent in that will deliver this coloring agent from the pen to the paper.

That's what you, you want. So maybe the tannin is an additive or maybe the tannin just pulls dual duty and it will deliver that stuff and dissolve, um, something like iron salts in it and bind to the paper as well. Who knows? We'll never know. We're gonna die not knowing. The beauty of this show is someone smarter than us will clear up what tannins are.

I hope so. Cause I mean, I really looked this up, man. I looked up like, I looked it on like, um, like I think a UK chemical societies blog post on inks and they didn't explain it very well. I just don't, I don't get it. Well, regardless of what a tannin is or is not, what you're doing with a ballpoint pen and the ink is, you know, a lot of R and D goes into that dance between thick and thin because you want it to be thick, uh, but you also want it to dry quickly and you want it

to work with, you can't be so thick that it doesn't respond to gravity. Right. Cause that's not a pen anymore. No, it's really not. And the reason why, uh, you can't write upside down is because it responds to gravity. If you're laying in your bed as a 14 year old writing a love letter, uh, you know, holding the pad above your head, staring at the ceiling, you know, if you think about that pen rolling around that ink, you know, there's a air pocket in that cartridge and it's gonna reverse

itself and that air is going to be at the top and you're not going to be able to write very long upside down. Right. Exactly. And yeah, you might be able to make a, like a mark for just a moment and then it just turns into a scratch and what you've just done is used up whatever ink was on that roller ball for a second and then now there's no more ink, which is, I never really thought about it, but yes, of course that's why you can't write upside down with a ballpoint pen.

Yes, but we got space pens and, uh, they're pressurized and that's kind of pretty cool. Do you have one of these? No. Have you? Yeah, I got one as a gift once. Oh boy. So do you remember our space race episode? I do.

I cannot for the life of me remember Chuck, if we continued this legend or debunked it, do you? I don't know if we even mentioned it. I am almost certain we talked about the story. Oh really? Yeah. Hopefully we said that it was apocryphal, but there's this, this legend from the space race that, um, the American, um, space agency, NASA spent years and years and years trying

to figure out how to get a pen into space, um, because they wanted to, for the astronaut something to be able to write with in space, but because of zero gravity, because you need gravity with a ballpoint pen, if it's in zero gravity or microgravity, that ink ink and a flow downward, and you got a problem, so NASA spent so much money on funding and years of research trying to come up with a pen, and one day some, uh, American astronauts were talking to some of their Soviet counterparts, and we're telling them how much trouble NASA was having, and the cosmonaut said, well, we just use pencils. They went, and the NASA astronauts were like, wah, wah, and NASA looks stupid and the Soviets

look good, and, um, America just did a big face palm. Does that all bunk? Apparently, it's totally bunk, 100% bunk. Because the Russians used our pens, right? They did, and initially everybody used pencils, but there was, there was something where you can find like a kernel of truth to that, like there's always a kernel of truth on, on any urban legend, um, and this one is, NASA spent a lot of money on some mechanical pencils, not years of research or anything like that, but I think back in the early 60s, they ordered

like, um, 40 pencils, mechanical pencils from a company out of Houston that charged them the modern equivalent of $1,000 each, and the public found out about this and was not very happy, right? So there was a big, there was a big to do about how to replace these pencils, because they didn't want to use regular pencils, because the Apollo 1, um, uh, launch had, had gone horribly, or I think a test had gone horribly, and some of the astronauts had burned a death in the capsule. So they didn't want anything that could burn aboard their, um, capsules, right?

So they, the, but now mechanical pencils were out, so they needed some sort of replacement. Well, they didn't spend any money on looking for a new pen or any years of research, because in 1965, they were approached by a guy named Paul C. Fisher, and he said, I got a pen for you. It's called a space pen. Have a look. And they went, it's almost as if you have, have made this just for us, because you even called it the space pen, and did he actually name it the Fisher space pen?

He named it the AG7, anti-gravity space pen. Yeah. And like I said, at the onset of this little part, these were pressurized, and it was, it kind of solved all the problem. They're pressurized to the reservoir, that is, to about 40 pounds per square inch. And there's also a special ink. It's what you would call a viscoelastic ink, and they liken it in our own article to like a thick rubber cement.

And it actually still needs that ball, though, that ball point, in this case, is necessary to liquefy it, and kind of get that action going. But they say you can even write underwater, which I'm not sure how that would come into play, but maybe it's just a fun little advertising point. Yeah. But the fact that it's pressurized overcomes microgravity, so it actually works, and it will work here on Earth upside down, too. Yeah.

And there's also no hole in these reservoirs, like there are regular fountain pens. So not only are you not wasting any ink, but there's no chance of leakage. Yeah, they're very widely touted as lasting 100 years, because the air is not going to get in and dry them out. You remember the erasable pen? I do, man. I'd totally forgotten about those until this article came along. Yeah.

Like, I'm sure you do, too. Remember, when they came on the market, it was the early 1980s, and all of a sudden, you could have a little eraser mate, like the paper mate became the eraser mate. Yeah. And you could write stuff in pen, and as long as you got back to it within, and chances are it was usually right away, but supposedly about 10 hours is how much time you had to go in there and erase the ink. And you could erase it, like, 90% of the way.

Yeah, it was definitely not a perfect thing, but pencils are sort of the same, well, they're sort of the same way. Yeah, I guess so. Well, I mean, it kind of depends. I think you can definitely erase a pencil better, but it depends on the kind of paper, whether or not you want to leave no trace that anything had been written. But it's definitely better than pens. So the trick with erasable pens, the way that they were erasable, is that they weren't

actually using ink, so there wasn't something to bind them to the paper. I mean, there was, but it took a very long time to be bound, about 10 hours. And the ink that they used was actually liquid rubber cement. And so when you would write in this liquid rubber cement, you had that set amount of time before it really bound, and you could conceivably erase it. Totally forgot about those. But it said it's not made from dyes, like, how did they color it, you know? I don't know.

I would say that it was probably one of the top 10 wonders of modern chemistry. Yeah, I'll buy that. Okay. Why not? Somebody's got to, right? They're still out there, too. I think people are as knocked out by them as they used to be. It's not the 80s, everybody was really coked up back then, and it was really easy to impress

people. Yeah, including me as a 12-year-old. You were coked up as a 12-year-old? No, of course not. I've got one last one. What you got? Have you heard of rollerball pens? Yeah, what are those?

It's basically like my pilot, it's considered an ink gel pen, but you could also make the case that it's a rollerball pen. But a rollerball pen, it sounds like something different. It's actually just a type of ballpoint pen. The difference between a rollerball and a ballpoint pen is the ink. So a rollerball pen has slightly more liquid ink, whereas a ballpoint pen's ink is going to actually be paste. That kind of like that space pen is activated and liquefied a little more when the ball

starts rolling on it, but they're both ballpoint pens. It's just the ink inside that differentiates the two. Well, I do like those. My God, I cannot believe we got as much out of this episode as we did. And sometimes it's the paper too that you're writing on. Have you ever gone to sign for a check at a restaurant and it's the smoothest, most wonderful writing experience of your life? I think it's the, I don't even know what it's made out of, but that kind of shiny receipt

paper in some restaurants. Like Golden Corral? Combined. Oh, yeah. Combined with the kind of spongy check book, what do you call those things? Carbon paper? No. Well, yeah, but I'm talking about the thing they deliver your check in, the little check

book thing. Oh, oh. I don't know what that's called. I'll bet there's a name for it. But the little pad, like, you know, like writing on a piece of bare paper on a wood table is not nearly as pleasurable as if there's a stack of paper. No. No, certainly not.

So there's something to all that combination of all those things with the right check from the right restaurant. But the little check book, though, can't, it can't be too puffy or else then you risk poking through the paper if your pen's too sharp. Sure. Agreed. So since I don't know the name of what they deliver the check in, the little booklet, I will say that the little things on the ends of the shoelace are called aglets, just in

case anyone out there didn't know that one. And if you go to, you know, some farm to table hipster restaurant, they may deliver your check in a clam shell, you know? I've not seen that one. People get all cutesy with it. Like, here, we're going to deliver your check in an old 18th century wooden clothespin and clip it to your tie. And pinch your cheeks.

Yeah, just give me the check. Clip it to your tie. I'm not wearing a tie. You will be. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about ballpoint pens, there's nothing left to know. So just go out, find your favorite, buy a few of them and use them happily and in good

health. Or maybe give fountain pens a try. See if that's your thing. Sure. And since I said, if that's your thing, I think I said something like that. It's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Colorado SAR follow up search and research, search and rescue. That's what we do, search and research.

That's true. Peat and repeat. Hey guys, Colorado's population has been growing by roughly 17 percent every decade, which is pretty amazing. When I was, we were out there for those shows, I remember Denverites talking about the population boom over the past like 20 years. That's me talking by the way. He said, there are a lot of new residents now wanting to experience our awesome mountains

that combined with the health renaissance across the country has created a lot of interest in the 14ers and he goes on to explain as follows. The trail has 58 peaks that are over 14,000 feet. So that's what he's talking about the 14ers. Some of them are easy and only a few miles with the trailhead already at 11,000 feet. Others are brutal hikes of 20 plus miles, extremely loose rock, ropeless climbing and death. If you fall sometimes, it's really easy to research information on the routes.

But in spite of all this information out there, the allure of the mountain calls and many people head out unprepared. Every year people are rescued or died due to dumb mistakes that many websites will blatantly tell you not to make and teach you how to avoid because of the easy availability of information. And I think there's like 14er.com or something is what he recommended. There's a healthy debate taking place among the hiking community as to whether or not Colorado should begin charging for search and rescue. Your podcast hit the nail in the head with the pros and cons, but you might be interested

in a little insight. Little Peak is the deadliest and most dangerous of the 5814ers and has killed six people in the past year alone. However, five of them made an obvious mistake by taking what they thought was a shortcut that doesn't exist. Oh God. Yeah man. I'm planning on attempting it in two weeks as I have done 38 of the 58 peaks.

That is from Tyler Nespar and he went to might two of the Denver shows. Oh nice, Tyler. Thanks a lot for coming out. Hope you liked it. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tyler, dude. For sure. Yeah.

Actually, as a matter of fact, drop us a line after you're done to let us know you made it back safe and we'll tell everybody, okay? Yeah. It sounds like Tyler's doing it right. Okay. But just in case, you know. Agreed. Just in case.

Thanks again, Tyler, for getting in touch. If you want to be like Tyler, well then, bye goodness. Go to our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com, look up all of our social media links, or do it the old fashioned way, and send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90's called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.