Design
The Bic Cristal's industrial design has been acknowledged by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of the museum's permanent collection. Its hexagonal shape was taken from the wooden pencil and yields an economical use of plastic along with strength and three grip points giving high writing stability. The pen's transparent polystyrene barrel shows the ink-level. A tiny hole drilled in the barrel's body keeps the same air pressure both inside and outside the pen. The thick ink is pulled down by gravity from a tube inside the barrel to feed a ball bearing which spins freely within a brass/nickel silver tip. In 1961 the stainless steel ball was replaced with much harder tungsten carbide which is vitrified by heat, then ground down and milled to an accuracy of one tenth of a micron between spinning plates coated with industrial diamond abrasives. Since 1991 the pen's iconic streamlined polypropylene cap has had a small hole. This hole serves two purposes: first, it minimizes the risk of suffocation if the cap is inhaled by a child; second, it equalizes pressure inside and outside the pen to prevent ink leakage. The pen is also one of the world's most efficient pens, able to write over 2km or 100,000 words.
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“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
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“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
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