Take out your "biro" and drop me a line.On this date in 1943, Hungarian Laslo Biro patented the ball-point pen, still known in some countries as the "biro." It's a pointed reminder of how things have changed and how they have stayed the same.
Patent "Pen"ding
Take out your "biro" and drop me a line.On this date in 1943, Hungarian Laslo Biro patented the ball-point pen, still known in some countries as the "biro." It's a pointed reminder of how things have changed and how they have stayed the same.
Take this Editor, for example. As the paste pot and scissors attest, "cut" and "paste" had quite a literal meaning to him when this portrait was taken in the mid-nineteenth century. The tools have changed, but the editor's job is still much the same.
In most occupational portraits the instruments of the sitter's profession are casually held in the hand or discreetly placed on a table at his or her elbow. In the case of this editor, the profusion of tools threatens… to overwhelm the sitter.
To see more occupational portraits, visit our online exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype.
Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).
Pictured: Unidentified, active 19th century, Editor, ca. 1855, daguerreotype with applied color (1/4 plate), 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Charles Isaacs.