It may take a back seat to word processors these days, but today in 1943 two Hungarian refugees in Argentina patented the ball point pen. While the idea wasn't exactly novel—there had been fountain pens and permutations of ball points before it—this version of the pen wrote smoothly and distributed ink evenly.

The pens went on sale in 1945, and orginally cost $12.50 a pop—about $150 in today's dollars, says Wired. In a 3G-like moment, people apparently descended on NYC department stores like locusts on the ball point's first day of sale, swooping up 8,000 pens.