Is the ball of a ballpoint pen really difficult to make? Why are there only three countries in the world?

When I was young, China didn't have much productivity. At that time, we used ballpoint pens. Now many students are not familiar with this tool, because we can already produce gel pens. But some time ago, many news reports said that the reason why China always used gel pens was mainly because we couldn't produce ballpoint pens. At that time, many people thought that the production of ballpoint pens was a high-tech process, but in fact, so many countries did not produce ballpoint pens because they did not need to make great efforts to do this research.

We all know that every technology will produce a patent. All the ballpoint pens we used before were patented by others. In the past few decades, we have paid little attention to the research of ballpoint pens. First of all, let's take a look at the core component of the ballpoint pen, which is the ball at the front end of the ballpoint pen. In fact, the whole manufacturing process is extremely simple, and this step is more difficult. Because this step requires a particularly high degree of accuracy. At first, some extremely sophisticated instruments were needed to produce it, but the price of ballpoint pens was particularly cheap.

So at that time, few factories would study this aspect. After all, the benefits brought by spending a lot of money were minimal, and naturally no one would do anything to please. So far, only three countries have the technology to make ballpoint pens. These three countries are well-known industrial powers, and Swiss, Japanese and China are among them. In fact, we have never studied this aspect before, and it was only in recent years that we gradually broke through this technology.

Although the technical difficulty of ballpoint pen is not high, it reflects the progress of China industry from another aspect. You know, at the beginning, our industrial accuracy could only be kept at 100 mm, and now it can be close to several microns. The production of ballpoint pens can't bring great benefits, but it can guarantee that we won't be controlled by others. In this research process, the benefits are far lower than technological innovation.