The ballpoint pen is a much loved (and often, much too casually discarded) invention.
In OTL, it took until the late 1930s for
László Bíró to improve upon some existing ballpoint pen concepts with his own patent. Then, in the 1950s, French enterpreneur
Marcel Bich bought the rights to produce Bíró style ballpoint pens and started producing them en masse under the now-famous
Bic brand. They were produced in very high quality, at low prices, creating a real ballpoint pen revolution after the second world war. Nowadays, we can hardly imagine going back to fountain pens, whenever we still need to use ballpoint pens for writing by hand.
However, the first person to patent a ballpoint pen was John J. Loud, in issuing
his patent on the 30th of October 1888. Due to his pen being an early take on the concept it had some design imperfections, despite showing promise. It was also created for more specialised, workshop-oriented tasks: Writing on harder materials, such as leather and wooden surfaces. Loud was frustrated by the flaws of using fountain pens or brushes for a task like that, and thus developed his own specialised pen for such a purpose. The earliest of ballpoints. The system he used was that of a small rotating steel ball, held in place by a socket. However, as Loud himself noted, his ballpoint was still a bit too rudimentary for good enough use for writing on paper, so if it was to move away from its strict specialisation, it would need further improvement. It wasn't pursued much, and the idea largely faded into obscurity.
This is where the POD discussion comes in.
What if Loud's patent hadn't fallen by the wayside ? What if he or someone else had perfected it, with the best manufacturing techniques available in the late 19th century ?
Would it be feasible to manufacture Loud ballpoint pens with 1890s technology, at an adequate level of quality ? Thus getting ballpoint pens into reasonably common (albeit possibly
not ubiquitous) use several decades earlier than in OTL.
What would be the major technological or economic stumbling blocks of trying to improve Loud's patent and radiate it out into more public use ? Would the precision manufacturing of the day be up to the task ?