Wednesday, September 19, 2007 Yap: Ballpoint pen By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
I’M not sure where the story came from, but I draw it out each time I raise a point about one language issue. A group of astronauts was devastated when the ballpoint pen they brought to space failed to write. At the crux of need, the puny gadget simply refused to deliver. They swore come hell or high water to lobby for a large-scale, grandly funded research for scientists to invent a ballpen that would write in space.
The wish was granted, and pain stretched for a decade just to squirt one little thing from the labs: a ballpen that writes in space. Man, ten years. And all those times, the Russian cosmonauts were making do with the lowly pencil.
Ballpens and pencils are like cockroaches. They survived evolution. In the age of touch-screen technology (and when, in a not too remote surprise, SSD artist Josua Cabrera is yielding his art to the inebriated flow of potent bahal on his Stradmore), those two inventions still share the same level of utility as your toothbrush. Our newsroom’s resident techie Max L. writes on Moleskin using ballpen. It was on Moleskin where Ernest Hemingway might have sketched the Old Man and the Sea.
No matter the aspirations for a paperless workflow in the newsroom, the ballpen is the omnipresent piece of miracle. On hard copy, the editor magnifies the flaws with the reddish curlicues, striking out a few odds and ends here and there. On heavy copy, a hint of the red sea goes high tide, but well, that automatically signals a good excuse to grab bottles and peanuts for a post-work powwow. But that’s another story.
It was the Hungarian named Ladislas Biro, with his brother Georg, who pushed a 50-year earlier ballpoint pen patent to some progress in design.
Aside from his pursuits in medicine, art and hypnotism, the guy also tried his hand on editing a small newspaper. At once, Biro might be some kind of a curious metaphor: the journalist as a medicine man, an artist and a hypnotist. But Biro it was who, out of his bespattered affair with the fountain pen, developed the ball-point pen. The trick was the ink’s consistency and, being a chemist himself, he solved it via some tricks in balancing equation.
Of pens, I like this Parker print ad some years ago: “The pen is mightier than the sword. But some pens are mightier than the others.”
One night in the newsroom, widespread panic ensues as you search for one ballpen that you were pretty sure sat within peripheral vision, unless it grew feet and hopped to the next desk. But it is nowhere to be found, and while Ruffa Gutierez weeps on the newsroom TV, the sense of urgency heightens.
Where’s that friggin’ ballpen?!
God does not play dice with the universe, once said Einstein. But just when you blow your top, you feel something tucked on your ears. It was there all along, trying to whisper the age you wanted to forget.
There was the quill and then the typewriter, symbols of the writing life. The pencil is inseparable from the artist. The ballpen, because utilitarian, is helplessly universal—from jueteng to copyediting.
But in the occasion of the Press Freedom Week, I take the thankless ballpen, and along with it the unsung desk-bound heroes of the newsroom who wrestles with owl-eyes the very words you’re reading today, to a rare date where the sole thing we do is pat each other on the back.
In your hands rests the very ballpen that writes in space.
