Ballpoint pens are stationery that can be seen everywhere in our lives. They are cheap and practical, and they are usually inseparable from students and businessmen. Ballpoint pens are very cheap, and you can buy a lot with very little money, but there are fewer countries in the world that can make ballpoint pens than those that can make atomic bombs. Why? Because ballpoint pens are hard to make!
The biggest and only difficulty in manufacturing ballpoint pens lies in the nib, that is, the production of ink pen beads. Five grooves need to be carved on the small pen bead, and the error is not more than two microns. This kind of precision can't be directly observed by naked eyes, which requires high-precision machines. There are only a handful of high-precision machines in the world.
Switzerland and Japan, as mentioned above, are both traditional manufacturing powers with a long history, and their citizens are also rigorous and meticulous. It is natural to make such a pen bead. Another country is China. In the past, it cost a lot of money to import pen beads from abroad to make ballpoint pens, so it was not worth the candle. So we worked hard and spent five years trying to find our own pen beads, thus breaking through the patent restrictions in Japan and Switzerland.
Since then, only Switzerland, Japan and the United States have been able to make their own ballpoint pens.
Why can't the United States do it? I think besides the technical problems mentioned above, there is another reason that ballpoint pens are cheap. It is not as cost-effective for the United States to spend time building it itself, so it has never been built. After all, we are now the largest industrial power in the world, and it is not surprising that the United States can't do what we can do.