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1938

Modern Ballpoint Pen was developed by Hungarian journalist László Bíró. Frustrated with the smudging of fountain pen ink, he created a pen that used quick-drying ink and a tiny ball bearing in the tip to dispense ink smoothly.

Bíró László

Bíró was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1899 to Mózes Mátyás Schweiger and Janka Ullmann. The Schweigers changed their Jewish name to Bíró in 1905. After leaving school, Bíró began work as a journalist in Hungary.

While working as a journalist, Bíró noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen, but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. In 1930 he observed children playing with marbles in a puddle, noticing that the marbles left a trail of water in their wake. This gave him an idea: Why not use a ball-shaped metal nib for writing, which became the initial design idea for the ball pen.

Bíró's innovation successfully coupled viscous ink with a ball-and-socket mechanism that allowed controlled flow while preventing ink from drying inside the reservoir. Bíró filed for a British patent on 15 June 1938.This design significantly improved the writing experience and made the pen more practical for everyday use.

Tip of a ball point pen

Post-World War II Popularity: After World War II, the ballpoint pen gained widespread popularity due to its reliability and convenience. It became a preferred writing instrument in schools, offices, and homes around the world, largely replacing fountain pens.

Continued Innovation: Over the decades, various improvements have been made to the ballpoint pen, including advancements in ink formulation and pen design. Today, ballpoint pens are available in numerous styles and colors, catering to a wide range of preferences and uses.

Ballpoint pen ink is normally a paste containing around 25 to 40 percent dye. The dyes are suspended in a mixture of solvents and fatty acids. The most common of the solvents are benzyl alcohol or phenoxyethanol, which mix with the dyes and oils to create a smooth paste that dries quickly. This type of ink is also called "oil-based ink". The fatty acids help to lubricate the ball tip while writing. Hybrid inks also contain added lubricants in the ink to provide a smoother writing experience. The drying time of the ink varies depending upon the viscosity of the ink and the diameter of the ball.

In general, the more viscous the ink, the faster it will dry, but more writing pressure needs to be applied to dispense ink. Although they are less viscous, hybrid inks have a faster drying time compared to normal ballpoint inks. Also, a larger ball dispenses more ink and thus increases drying time.

The dyes used in blue and black ballpoint pens are basic dyes based on triarylmethane and acid dyes derived from diazo compounds or phthalocyanine. Common dyes in blue (and black) ink are Prussian blue, Victoria blue, methyl violet, crystal violet, and phthalocyanine blue. The dye eosin is commonly used for red ink.

In the 2000s, China ballpoint pen production skyrocketed. In 2017, China produced 38 billion ballpoint pens per year, 80% of the global market. But the country had a problem in precision engineering the ballpoint pen tip, which had to be imported from Germany, Switzerland, and Japan for the cost of ¥ 120 million a year

It is generally believed that gravity is needed to coat the ball with ink. In fact most ballpoint pens on the Earth do not work when writing upside-down because the Earth's gravity pulls the ink inside the pen away from the tip of the pen. However, in the microgravity environment of space a regular ballpoint pen can still work, pointed in any direction, because the capillary forces in the ink are stronger than non present gravitational forces.

Technology developed by Fisher pens in the United States resulted in the production of what came to be known as the "Fisher Space Pen". Space Pens combine a more viscous ink with a pressurized ink reservoir that forces the ink toward the point. Unlike a standard ballpoint's ink container, the rear end of a Space Pen's pressurized reservoir is sealed, eliminating evaporation and leakage, thus allowing the pen to write upside-down, in zero-gravity environments, and underwater. Astronauts have made use of these pens in outer space.

The world's most popular pen is the Bic Cristal, with the 100 billionth model sold in September, 2006. The Bic Cristal was launched in December 1950 and roughly 57 are sold per second.

Bic Cristal

1939

Start of world war II, a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated, with many nations mobilizing all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war.

World War II is the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 70 to 85 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

The causes of World War II included unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I, the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan. Key events preceding the war included Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland.

World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland, after which the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania. After the fall of France in June 1940, the war continued mainly between Germany and the British Empire, with fighting in the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Middle East, the aerial Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and the naval Battle of the Atlantic. Through campaigns and treaties, Germany gained control of much of continental Europe and formed the Axis alliance with Italy, Japan, and other countries. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front and initially making large territorial gains.

First automatic transmission, referring to the first transmission to not use any kind of clutch at all, was the famous Hydra-Matic four-speed automatic.

The Hydra-Matic transmission was invented in 1939 by General Motors, and was first included as an option in several models under their Oldsmobile brand. Originally, the cost of the optional Hydra-Matic was $57 ($1,152 adjusted for inflation), but by the following year the price had been raised to $100 ($1,912).

The General Motors Hydra-Matic became the first mass-produced automatic transmission following its introduction in 1939 (1940 model year). Available as an option in cars such as the Oldsmobile Series 60 and Cadillac Sixty Special, the Hydra-Matic combined a fluid coupling with three hydraulically controlled planetary gearsets to produce four forward speeds plus reverse. The transmission was sensitive to engine throttle position and road speed, producing fully automatic up- and down-shifting that varied according to operating conditions. Features of the Hydra-Matic included a wide spread of ratios (allowing both good acceleration in first gear and cruising at low engine speed in top gear) and the fluid coupling handling only a portion of the engine's torque in the top two gears.

In 1956, the General Motors Hydra-Matic was redesigned based around the use of two fluid couplings to provide smoother shifts. This transmission was called the Controlled Coupling Hydra-Matic, or "Jetaway" transmission. The original Hydra-Matic remained in production until the mid-1960s at GM, with the licensed Rolls-Royce Automatic transmission soldiering on until 1978 on the Rolls-Royce Phantom VI. In 1964, General Motors released a new transmission, the Turbo Hydramatic, a three-speed transmission which used a torque convertor. The Turbo Hydramatic was among the first to have the basic gear selections (park, reverse, neutral, drive, low) which became the standard gear selection used for several decades.

1940

Penicillin begins mass production, Benzylpenicillin, also known as penicillin G or BENPEN, is an antibiotic used to treat a number of bacterial infections. This includes pneumonia, strep throat, syphilis, necrotizing enterocolitis, diphtheria, gas gangrene, leptospirosis, cellulitis, and tetanus.

Discovered by the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming as a crude extract of P. rubens. Fleming's student Cecil George Paine was the first to successfully use penicillin to treat eye infection (neonatal conjunctivitis) in 1930. The purified compound (penicillin F) was isolated in 1940 by a research team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at the University of Oxford. Fleming first used purified penicillin to treat streptococcal meningitis in 1942. The 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by Chain, Fleming and Florey.

With the onset of World War II, the US government funds the mass production of penicillin as a way to treat wounded soldiers. The drug is produced in large quantities using deep-tank fermentation, which allows for a more efficient and cost-effective production process.

This discovery revolutionized medicine and helped to save millions of lives by treating bacterial infections. Over the next few decades, other antibiotics were discovered, including streptomycin, tetracycline, and erythromycin. However, the overuse and misuse of antibiotics led to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which have become a major public health concern. In recent years, efforts have been made to promote responsible antibiotic use and find new ways to combat antibiotic resistance.

Beginning of artificial intelligence (AI), It all started back in time of World War II. Allied forces were desperate to crack German military codes. Alan Turing built a machine called the Bombe, which helped decrypt messages from the German Enigma machine.

Turing’s machine could scan through thousands of possible code combinations in a flash. It saved countless lives and proved one key thing: machines can solve problems faster than humans - if built right.

A few years later, 1950, Turing posed a question that still fuels debates today: "Can machines think?" And to answer it, he came up with a clever experiment - The Turing Test.

It was like chatting with someone behind a screen. You don’t know if it’s a human or a machine. If you can't tell the difference, the machine has passed the test. Pretty cool, right? Turing basically gave us the blueprint for evaluating artificial intelligence before the term even existed.

In 1955, John McCarthy proposed the term 'Artificial Intelligence,' which was officially introduced in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference.

He believed machines could one day think, learn, and solve problems like humans. It was a bold idea back then. He wasn’t just dreaming - he was building. In 1958, McCarthy also created LISP, a programming language still used in AI today.

He was the one who hosted the first AI conference at Dartmouth, where pioneers gathered to bring this wild concept to life.

Robots weren't just science fiction anymore. In 1961, Unimate became the world’s first industrial robot. It worked at a General Motors factory, moving hot metal parts and doing risky tasks that were dangerous for humans.

It was a bulky arm that weighed over 4,000 pounds. But it was a game-changer. After Unimate’s success, more factories began using robots to handle dangerous or repetitive work.

In 1964, ELIZA was born at MIT. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was designed to simulate a conversation with a therapist. She wasn’t exactly deep, but she was clever.

Next came a robot with a little brain of its own. Shakey was different. Built in 1969, he could actually make decisions. He looked around, figured out where he was, made plans, and even adjusted them if something went wrong.

He didn’t just follow instructions - he thought through his actions, which was unheard of back then. Shakey was the first robot that could "see," "think," and "move" all by itself. Basically, he was the great-grandfather of smart robots and autonomous vehicles.

By the ‘90s, chatbots had gotten smarter. ALICE, created by Richard Wallace, took things up a notch. Unlike ELIZA, she used natural language processing to hold more human-like conversations.

She could respond to a wide range of questions and even had a bit of sass. ALICE won multiple awards and inspired the movie Her, where a man falls in love with an AI assistant. Yep, chatbots were officially getting personal.

1997 gave us one of AI’s most iconic moments. IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, went head-to-head with world champion Garry Kasparov - and won. It was a dramatic battle of man vs. machine.

AI wasn’t just getting smarter - it was learning emotions. Meet Kismet, a robot developed at MIT 1998 that could mimic human facial expressions and emotional responses. It had moving eyes, eyebrows, and even a mouth to show surprise, happiness, or frustration.

Kismet wasn’t just about logic; it was about emotionally connecting with people. It paved the way for emotionally intelligent AI, like the ones in customer support and caregiving robots today.

In 2002, Roomba arrived—a little round robot that could vacuum your home by itself. It had sensors to avoid walls, fall off stairs, and navigate your living room like a pro.

In 2011, millions met Siri, Apple’s brand-new voice assistant. You could ask her about the weather, set reminders, or even joke around with questions like, “Do you love me?” And yep - she’d answer. Sort of.

Siri wasn’t the first voice assistant ever, but she was the first mainstream AI you could talk to. Apple integrated her into the iPhone 4S, and suddenly, talking to your phone became normal.

She changed how we thought about interacting with tech. Honestly, it felt like having a little AI buddy in your pocket.

Next in the AI timeline is Alexa 2014, an Amazon virtual assistant. You say “Alexa,” and it lights up, even in a noisy room. It can play music, give you news or weather updates, control smart devices, and even help you order from Amazon.

It’s on everything now; smartwatches, speakers, TVs, even in cars. Yep, Alexa’s everywhere.

Amper was the first AI to write 2017, produce, and release music. It helps musicians by creating original tracks using AI and music theory. In fact, Amper teamed up with singer Taryn Southern for a groundbreaking album called I AM AI. The song “Break Free” marked their first human-AI collaboration.

In 2025, AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a teammate. It helps us think faster, create smarter, and do more with less. Whether you're a student, artist, or business owner, AI is now your co-pilot. It is always there, guiding, generating, and learning with you every step of the way.