Something caught my eye on the BBC News webpage today, the Bic Biro turns 60 today!

That’s amazing considering how ubiquitous the biro is, and how much for granted we take such an invention. Still, you learn something every day: the first people who used the biro were RAF pilots who used it as a replacement for their ink pens. Apparently ink pens were prone to leaking or exploding at higher altitudes.

The other thing that I’ve heard before is:

There is an old and oft-repeated rumour that because standard pens don’t work in zero-gravity, Nasa spent millions devising a space pen, while the Russians used pencils.

And the other thing I learned it:

But this has been debunked, not least because - strange to say - pencils pose dangers in space, from broken-off tips floating about and graphite and wood being flammable in a pure oxygen atmosphere. And it was not Nasa which developed the space pen, but inventor Paul Fisher, and it was adopted by both sides in the space race by 1968.