Editing The Pen Addict 177/transcript (section)

== The Illusionist Podcast ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Related to that, I got a bunch of links to a podcast called The Illusionist. Have you ever heard of that?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I have heard of this show, actually. I've never listened to it, but I know the name.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's basically a show about words. You know, what different word meanings, things like that. I forget the lady's name who does it, but she was fantastic. Is it Helen Zoltzler? It's Helen. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, she was fantastic. I really like her style. But they did a show on eponyms, which is, gosh, I guess you would explain it as, you know, the word has two different meanings kind of thing. It's, you know, where, like, they're taking, what's his name? Marcel Bick is his last name. And then Bick also is the company name. And Bick is also ubiquitous with a ballpoint pen. And same thing with Laszlo Biro, who first patented the pen. So they kind of go through the origin stories of how the ballpoint came to be. They have on, she has on James Ward, who wrote the book Adventures in Stationery, which I have not read yet. The team over at Erasable went through the book on one of their episodes. We'll have to find that episode number where they went through and talked about a lot of the pencil and stationery things in that book. I'll have to get that book to read. But it was an interesting little backstory that James gave about how Laszlo Biro came up with the idea of the ballpoint, patented it, started trying to make it, had a lot of failures. You know, and how he worked through all those failures into making, like, a really valid product. And then got into business with Marcel Bick, who licensed the technology from Biro. And how that ended up in a bunch of lawsuits. And then, you know, Bick ended up becoming, like, the most famous, essentially the most famous ballpoint pen company in the world, right? And probably still is to that. So it was interesting to see. It was interesting to hear a little bit of that background. I kind of knew the story a little bit. James Ward goes into it a little bit more detail than that. But it's like a 17-minute podcast, and there's probably, like, 10 or 12 minutes of this story. So it's worth it to jump in there, hear the story. James was saying that, to this day, the Bick Crystal, you know, the clear, the most famous Bick? Like, basically, it still accounts for half of all ballpoint pens sold on a daily basis.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It doesn't surprise me. Like, you know, if I think about me in my work life, my old work life, there was just every stationary closet just had boxes and boxes and boxes of Bick's.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. There was an interesting point during the podcast where he was talking about how when the ballpoint started becoming really popular, they ran up against a huge community that felt they were actually going to hurt handwriting. So because they don't have the line variation and the flair that you could get with a fountain pen at the time because that was what everyone was using. You know, the ballpoint just generally had a straight fixed-width line. And that was – they were – you know, the complaints at that time were that, well, that's going to ruin handwriting because you can't get all this variation. And you can't – don't have, like, all the smoothness and all the flair that you get with the fountain pen. So they argued about pens back then just like we're arguing about them now, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Totally the same thing. But that's a good – check out that podcast. You know, like I said, it's a 17-minute long podcast. It was good to listen to. And the previous article is, like, a 10-minute interview. So you can knock both of those out, hear what they have to say. I think they both make some good points and some interesting things. One of the hot items in my Instagram feed and on Twitter, and it's something I should have spoken about earlier because I'm interested to see which of our listeners do this. And I know several of them do. And that's Inktober. Are you familiar with Inktober? I remember this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We've spoken about it before.