Background
Milton Reynolds was born in 1892 in Albert Lea, Minnesota, where his father was a threshing-machine salesman.
Milton Reynolds was born in 1892 in Albert Lea, Minnesota, where his father was a threshing-machine salesman.
He dropped out of high school.
He became an automobile salesman, and at the age of twenty was an independent tire dealer. By 1918 he was a millionaire, only to become bankrupt within four years. During the next eight years Reynolds rode a financial roller coaster, which resulted in three bankruptcies.
Reynolds moved to Chicago in the early 1920's and became a stock market speculator. He was nearly wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash. After two days of searching for new business ideas he purchased a printing shop that sold commercial signs with the intention of manufacturing the equipment used in sign making. The company, Print-A-Sign, proved another of Reynolds's successes. During World War II, Reynolds engaged in several businesses, the most successful being the importation of silver cigarette lighters from Mexico, which earned him at least $500, 000. While on a business trip to Buenos Aires in 1945, Reynolds came upon an early ballpoint pen invented by László Biro, a Hungarian journalist.
While ballpoint pens were new on the market, they dated to 1888, when John Loud patented a version of them that never went into production. A type of ballpoint pen was invented in Czechoslovakia by Frank Klimes in the early 1930's and manufactured by him and Paul V. Eisner. The first of these instruments, called the Rolpen, was produced and marketed in Prague, in 1935, but this patent expired during World War II, when Klimes was in a concentration camp. Biro, who had fled to Paris when Germany invaded Hungary, went to Argentina and sold the rights to Henry George Martin, a British promoter, who then organized a company to manufacture the pen, called the Eterpen.
Some pens were produced and given away to the United States government for distribution to servicemen. The pen was a novelty. Not only could it write on almost any surface (as well as underwater) but it was leakproof, which made it a favorite with airmen. The Biro interests licensed its patents for American production to Eversharp Inc. and Eberhard Faber in May 1945.
Stories of the new pen were featured in the press, but Eversharp and Eberhard Faber did not move swiftly into production. Without revealing his motives to Biro or Martin, Reynolds returned to the United States, where he obtained a patent on a pen that delivered ink by gravity flow rather than the capillary action method featured in the Biro patent. Reynolds began production on October 6, 1945, before the Biro interests could enter the American market. Reynolds marketed the pens through the Gimbel Brothers department store in Manhattan, where they went on sale on October 29, 1945, for $12. 50.
The pens were an instant success; Gimbels sold $100, 000 worth of them the first day, and then notified Reynolds it would take all he could deliver. In the first three months Reynolds was able to sell 2 million pens through 60, 000 retail outlets in the United States and thirty-seven foreign countries. Reynolds's company, Reynolds International Pens, had been capitalized at $26, 000; after this three-month period, it had earned total revenues of $5. 7 million, with a net income of $1. 6 million.
Gimbels accounted for the sale of 100, 000 pens itself. It was one of the most successful new-product introductions in American history. Stung by Reynolds's success, Eversharp and Eberhard Faber moved into production in December, which prompted Reynolds to seek a preliminary injunction against them for harming his sales.
The injunction was denied, with Judge Paul Leahy concluding there were too many conflicting questions to act without a jury trial. Eversharp and Eberhard Faber introduced the Repeater pen in May 1946. But Eterpen was able to ship ballpoint pens manufactured in Argentina to the United States in March, where they were sold as Biromes at R. H. Macy and Company for $19. 95. Reynolds responded that he soon would introduce a second pen with an improved ink chamber that would permit the pen to write for four years without refilling. Other companies also entered the field, which was saturated by autumn of 1946.
In February 1947, Macy's was able to advertise the sale of a Reynolds pen, the Rocket, for 98 cents; the next day Gimbels advertised the Rocket for 94 cents. The great ballpoint pen bonanza had ended. By 1948, the pens were selling at 39 cents. As legal threats faded and pen production slowed, Reynolds turned to other interests. In mid-1947 he announced that he intended to break Howard Hughes's record of a round-the-world flight of ninety-one hours and fourteen minutes. Reynolds claimed the flight was also scientific in nature, since he intended to investigate rumors of mountains higher than Mt. Everest.
Reynolds refitted a surplus Air Force light attack bomber and teamed up in 1947 with veteran flyer William P. Odom to make the flight in less than seventy-nine hours. At refueling stops Reynolds mingled with well-wishers and distributed more than 1, 000 ballpoint pens. Soon after his return Reynolds sold his pen business and returned to manufacturing machinery and signs, but his business was more a hobby than anything else.
Reynolds died in Chicago, and his body was returned to Mexico for burial.
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, and among the first investors in Syntex, which pioneered the combined oral contraceptive pill, or birth-control pill.
Sometime in the early 1920's, Reynolds married Edna Loeb, who died in 1952. They had two children. In 1953, after the death of his first wife, he married Manuela Selas and relocated to Mexico.
