Milton Reynolds (1892–1976), an American
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...
, was born "Milton Reinsberg" in
Albert Lea, Minnesota
Albert Lea is a city in Freeborn County, in southern Minnesota. It is the county seat. Its population was 18,492 at the 2020 census.
The city is at the junction of Interstates 35 and 90, about south of the Twin Cities. It is on the shores of ...
. He is most famously known for the manufacture and introduction of the first
ballpoint pen
A ballpoint pen, also known as a biro (British English), ball pen (Hong Kong, Indian and Philippine English), or dot pen (Nepali) is a pen that dispenses ink (usually in paste form) over a metal ball at its point, i.e. over a "ball point". ...
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
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, record-setting pilot, engineer, film producer, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in th ...
' round-the-world record, and among the first investors in
Syntex, which pioneered the
combined oral contraceptive pill
The combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP), often referred to as the birth control pill or colloquially as "the pill", is a type of birth control that is designed to be taken orally by women. The pill contains two important hormones: proges ...
, or birth-control pill.
Reynolds’ business fortunes and personal wealth rose and fell numerous times during his career. He changed his name because he believed that his customers, including major U.S. retailers, were reluctant to buy from Jews. He had previously tried several ventures that made and lost considerable sums, including trying to corner the market on used automobile tires and investing in prefabricated houses. A business he built around retail signmaking equipment, Reynolds Printasign, was owned and operated by two generations of his heirs.
Developing the gravity-feed ballpoint
A rolling-ball mechanism for marking leather was conceived as early as 1888 by American inventor John Loud. In 1938, newspaper editor
László Bíró
László József Bíró (; born László József Schweiger; 29 September 1899 – 24 October 1985), Hispanicized as Ladislao José Biro, was a Hungarian-Argentine inventor who patented the first commercially successful modern ballpoint pen. Th ...
, a Hungarian-émigré to Argentina, and business partner Henry G. Martin patented a device for marking printers' galleys. The Biro pen used gelatinous ink combined with capillary action to draw the ink out as it was deposited on paper by the rolling-ball tip. Because the pen did not leak at high altitude, the Biro venture sold a quantity of pens to the Royal Air Force for keeping flight logs, under a contract with Myles Aircraft. Subsequently, Biro's company Eterpen, S.A. licensed manufacturing rights in the US to a joint venture between
Eversharp
Eversharp is an American brand of writing implements founded by Charles Rood Keeran in 1913 and marketed by Keeran & Co., based in Chicago. Keeran commercialised ''Eversharp'' mechanical pencils (manufactured by two companies, Heath and Wahl), the ...
and
Eberhard Faber.
While paying a sales call to
Goldblatt's
Goldblatt's was an American chain of local discount stores that operated in Chicago, Illinois, as well as Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. Founded in 1914, the chain grew to more than twenty stores at its peak, gradually closing some stores in th ...
department store in Chicago, Reynolds was shown one of the Biro pens and recognized it as a potentially hot consumer item for the postwar era. Working with engineer William Huernergardt and machinist Titus Haffa, Reynolds came up with a design that did not rely on patented capillary action but caused ink to flow by gravity. However, successful gravity feed required much thinner, viscous ink and a much larger barrel to avoid constant refilling. The thin ink made the pens prone to leakage, but, realizing time was of the essence, Reynolds rushed them to market anyway, touting the high ink capacity. With roller balls repurposed from the metal beads used in war-surplus bomb sights and barrels machined from aircraft aluminum, the Reynolds pens had another feature that captured the popular imagination: In early ads, Reynolds claimed, “It writes under water!” The claim was essentially truthful because his pen wrote successfully on wet paper. Consumers had little use for this bizarre practical application, but a generation of shoppers remembered the slogan long after Reynolds passed into history.
Introduction
Although Eversharp had plans to introduce a pen modeled after Biro's, Reynolds introduced his pen first. Before and during the war, when he sold signmaking equipment to retailers, Reynolds had cultivated personal relationships with the heads of all the department stores. Among these was Fred Gimbel, whose family owned
Gimbels in Manhattan, the arch-rival of
Macy's
Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American chain of high-end department stores founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It became a division of the Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, through which it is affiliated wi ...
. Through an exclusive deal with Gimbel, the Reynolds pen debuted at the 32nd Street store on the morning of October 29, 1945.
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
had just ended (
V-J Day
Victory over Japan Day (also known as V-J Day, Victory in the Pacific Day, or V-P Day) is the day on which Imperial Japan surrendered in World War II, in effect bringing the war to an end. The term has been applied to both of the days on ...
was on August 14), so public exuberance was high. The pen sold for . The day the pen went on sale, an estimated 5,000 shoppers stormed Gimbels, and approximately 50 NYPD officers had to be dispatched for crowd control.
Reynolds International Pen Company
The Chicago-based
Reynolds International Pen Company
Reynolds Pens is an Indian brand and a former American manufacturing company of writing instruments, mainly pens. Products commercialized under the Reynolds name include ballpoint, gel, rollerball, and fountain pens, and mechanical pencils.
...
made 8 million pens in six weeks, cranking out lathe-turned pens in a manufacturing facility converted from an indoor tennis court. Thereafter came an era chronicled in the print media of the time as the “Pen Wars,” as latecomer Eversharp finally entered the market. Eversharp then sued Reynolds for patent infringement, and Reynolds countersued on the grounds of illegal restraint of trade. Ultimately, the main result of the legal battle was to generate reams of free publicity for both products. Reynolds capitalized on his sudden success by introducing a new model dubbed the “Reynolds Rocket” from the Reynolds International Pen Company. He shipped pens overseas while making partnership overtures, even buying a French estate,
le Château du Mesnil-Saint-Denis in 1947, as an intended base of European operations.
Pen wars
Reynolds knew that it was only a matter of time until the established pen manufacturers Eversharp,
Parker Pen Company
The Parker Pen Company is a French manufacturer of luxury writing pens, founded in 1888 by George Safford Parker in Janesville, Wisconsin, United States. In 2011 the Parker factory at Newhaven, East Sussex, England, was closed, and its productio ...
, and
Waterman pens
The Waterman Pen Company is a major manufacturing company of luxury fountain pens and inks, based in Paris, France. The firm was established in 1884 in New York City by Lewis Waterman, being one of the few remaining first-generation fountain pen ...
flooded the market with much cheaper models backed up with big national advertising campaigns. Rather than compete and watch his margins dwindle, he sold the company off in pieces. European rights to the name went to a French concern, and the Reynolds pen is a well-known French brand today (although the company is just as well known for its inexpensive fountain pens, which schoolchildren use for lessons in cursive penmanship). However, in Britain especially, “Biro” has become the generic term for any ballpoint pen. Many of the parts for the Reynolds Rocket were made by Fisher-Armour Mfg in Chicago. When Reynolds decided to stop selling,
Paul C. Fisher, later to found Fisher Pen Company and invent the Fisher Space Pen, decided to try to improve the pen. He sold the corporate charter to the U.S. government, which renamed it the Reynolds Construction Company and allegedly passed clandestine payments to foreign governments through the paper entity.
Aviation
Reynolds took his profits and indulged his hobby, a lifelong love of flying. In the 1930s, he owned a
Stinson Reliant biplane he named the "Flying Printasign" after his signmaking company. Even as he was planning to exit the pen business, he bought a used B-26 bomber. He had the armor removed and retrofitted the plane with commercial engines, christening it the “Reynolds Bombshell.” He hired war-hero Bill Odom as pilot, Tex Sallee as copilot, and in 1947 the three of them flew around the world in 78 hours, 55.5 minutes, making four stops for refueling, to set the world record for twin-engine propeller aircraft. (The previous record, set by Howard Hughes, was 91 hours, 14 minutes. Both records were surpassed in 1957.) Reynolds had timed the flight to coincide with the international introduction of the Reynolds Rocket, a pen that wrote in two colors.
Reynolds and crew made one more newsworthy intercontinental flight, an expedition to the
Amne Machin mountain range in
Tibet
Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa, Taman ...
and
K2, the second highest mountain in the world, between China and Pakistan. He renamed his retrofitted bomber the "China Explorer." He believed (wrongly) that K2 was taller than
Mount Everest
Mount Everest (; Tibetic languages, Tibetan: ''Chomolungma'' ; ) is List of highest mountains on Earth, Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China–Nepal border ru ...
in the Himalayas and hoped to leverage the publicity he'd get from establishing that fact.
The Chinese government detained the flight near Nanking and then sent fighter planes to escort it across the Sea of Japan. In the intervening period, Reynolds and the China Explorer had diverted their guards, taken off from Lunghwa Field, and completed a quick flyover of K2. Reynolds family lore has it that Reynolds had made a secret deal from the outset with the US government to look for evidence of Chinese nuclear tests. No one involved with the expedition admitted knowledge of such a plan. For many years thereafter, the clandestine payments passed through the Reynolds Construction Company by US intelligence were part of an operation code-named "KK Mountain".
Reynolds sold the "Reynolds Bombshell" in 1948. After passing through several owners, it ended up in Iran, used by
Bell Helicopter
Bell Textron Inc. is an American aerospace manufacturer headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. A subsidiary of Textron, Bell manufactures military rotorcraft at facilities in Fort Worth, and Amarillo, Texas, as well as commercial helicopters in M ...
as a transport. It was abandoned there at the time of the
Iran Revolution
The Iranian Revolution ( fa, انقلاب ایران, Enqelâb-e Irân, ), also known as the Islamic Revolution ( fa, انقلاب اسلامی, Enqelâb-e Eslâmī), was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynas ...
of 1979 and remains on display there in the Aerospace Exhibition Centre, in Tehran.
Retirement
Reynolds Printasign was bought out by his son James, and subsequently run by his grandson Thomas. Milton Reynolds retired to a
hacienda near Mexico City, called the "Milton Hilton." Reynolds and investor Charles Allen speculated in land and invested in Iranian oil,
[Rosenberg, Robert L., "Qum-1956: A Misadventure in Iranian Oil," The Business History Review, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 81-104.] and Reynolds traveled the world on commercial flights as an unofficial "goodwill ambassador" for the United States. Reynolds authored a book entitled "Hasta La Vista" in 1944, which was a story of his travels in South America. In 1944 the first edition was printed by the Greenville Publishers. An alternate "special" first edition (signed and issued only for his special friends) of the same book was printed in Mexico by the Chicago Packet Company and is highly prized by collectors.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reynolds, Milton
American aviators
American manufacturing businesspeople
1976 deaths
1892 births
People from Albert Lea, Minnesota
American aviation record holders
20th-century American inventors
American expatriates in Mexico