The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  24 ~ Gissa Job, Siegmund

  One place where graphology persisted was in one of the chief money-making endeavours of early proponents – the advice over careers. The astute ones quickly realized that there was more money to be made advising employers over a choice of employee than telling people what jobs they ought to pursue, which most people can work out for themselves anyway. Graphological analysis of job applicants has always seemed somewhat morally dubious, and is now considered probably illegal in many places by most legal authorities. After Merrill Lynch acquired Mercury Asset Management in 1997, for instance, the American bank’s lawyers ruled that Mercury’s habit of using graphology as part of its recruitment procedures had to stop; handwriting analyses, they said, could be construed as discriminatory if they were obtained under the Freedom of Information Acts by employees in dispute with the company.1 As long ago as 1989, the Washington Post was recording actions made by the American Civil Liberties Union against firms using graphologists in employment practices, saying they were ‘strongly oppose[d to] all arbitrary pseudo-science employment practices’.2

  For this reason, it is impossible to gather any firm information about the levels of use of graphology in professional recruitment, now or in the past. What figures have been produced seem wildly at variance, and sometimes intrinsically implausible. A recent commentator on the practice said that between 38 per cent and 93 per cent of French firms used graphology in selecting staff, a range so wide as to make the statement more or less meaningless.3 A 1979 academic study4 claimed that graphology was at the time routinely used by 85 per cent of European firms hiring staff, which can’t possibly be true. On the other hand, thirty years later, the use of handwriting analysis by firms was declared by another study as a ‘total myth’, and that nobody at all did it.5 Is this any more true? Certainly, as the author of this study acknowledged, anyone who was asked to supply a handwritten letter automatically assumed that it was for graphological analysis. As well they might – employers, even if they don’t plan to subject a letter to formal graphological analysis, could feel that they had more of a sense of a candidate once they had seen their handwriting.

  There is a famous case of an important figure who had, to his contemporaries, what often seemed like an eccentric faith in graphology as an insight into character. The financier Siegmund Warburg, it was well known, demanded to see the handwriting of applicants to his bank, as described in jeering tones by Private Eye in 1970. ‘Apparently the young gentlemen are instructed to write out 500 words with pen and ink on stout paper and this is then dispatched to old Siegmund Warburg’s Swiss lady graphologist.’6 This is a more or less accurate account. Warburg’s Swiss graphologist was a woman called Theodora Dreifuss. Niall Ferguson, Warburg’s biographer, who has looked into Warburg’s faith in graphology with open incredulity – ‘Not a single former Warburgs director I interviewed shared my scepticism [about graphology]. I began to wonder if I was writing the history of a bank or of a cult’ – thinks that Dreifuss had a standard and undisprovable formula for these analyses. It ‘consisted of asserting that intelligent men had buried weaknesses of various sorts’. Ferguson has no difficulty in finding examples of Dreifuss’s analyses which, in the light of subsequent developments, are comically inaccurate. ‘“Tiny” Rowland* was “very careful and circumspect in his business dealings.”’

  But there is the point that, since Warburg used graphology over rather a long period to filter out employees and would-be associates, he could easily test the accuracy or shrewdness of Dreifuss’s analyses. He funded an Institute of Graphology in Zurich, to be headed up by Frau Dreifuss, and made a startling public statement in a speech at its opening: ‘Many sciences have started as myths. The knowledge of the stars began as astrology and only gradually became the accurate science of astronomy. Today no one would call an astronomer a crank. Eventually, I am convinced, graphology will become hoffähig.’7 †

  Clearly, however, some myths start out as myths and turn into end-of-the-pier party tricks, or get completely forgotten – phrenology, palmistry, mesmerism. Would that happen to graphology? There is a curious fact here, which is that even the most bluntly sceptical writers about graphology are sometimes taken aback at the accuracy of graphological analysis when it is applied to them. Even Niall Ferguson, who was required to undergo formal handwriting analysis before he could be signed off as Warburg’s biographer, confesses himself truly surprised by the perceptiveness of the result – it is impossible to imagine someone as smart as Ferguson being taken in by the flattery of palmistry or astrology. There is, too, a surviving account of Warburg’s own, a graphological/psychological portrait of the Conservative leader Edward Heath, embarked upon while he was still in opposition in 1968, before he became Prime Minister in 1970: ‘Basically weak – self-indulgent, almost narcissistic . . . very intelligent but without character. Much too easily influenced by people who fascinate him. His own opinions are not founded strongly enough . . . He is not good at defending himself in face of unexpected and hard difficulties. He will change his standpoint not because of unreliability as such but because the necessary inner force in him is lacking.’8 The analysis is absolutely spot on, but the interesting thing is that it has an element of prediction contained in it. The ‘unexpected and hard difficulties’ came not in the 1960s for Heath, but in 1972, when he was Prime Minister, upon which he did exactly what Warburg said he would do: he changed his standpoint out of weakness, self-indulgence and narcissism in one of the most celebrated and disastrous U-turns in British history. One can’t know which elements in this were contributed by Warburg’s beady eye over the lunch table and which from a glance at Heath’s handwriting. But I think you would expect a devotee of graphology to follow those principles, and probably get some things dramatically wrong through a too-dogmatic approach. Warburg is right about Heath from top to bottom. That is one of the very weird things about graphology – it really does sometimes know much more than it reasonably could be supposed to.

  25 ~ Witness

  Interviewer: ‘Where did you go to school?’

  A: ‘Bangladesh. Where did I pick up my handwriting from? Well, I had a bit of an unconventional schooling. My parents took me out of proper school because you have to choose a religion when you go to school. So they put me into a tutorial where my mother was a teacher, and some of the other mothers were teachers, and they taught me to write. It wasn’t really a formal thing. What does that prove? I’m so intrigued.’

  Interviewer: ‘Your handwriting’s really beautiful – it looks like American handwriting, but the sort of American handwriting you just don’t see from Americans your age.’

  A: ‘Oh! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, B—? Do you find it difficult to read? See? See? B— can’t read it. Did you hear what he said, B—? There are lots of people who can’t read it. And you know, for finals, if they can’t read your paper, you have to read it out while they type. I had to do that.

  ‘I learnt to write with a group of mothers, yes, that’s right, I suppose that was it. We didn’t have special handwriting lessons in Bengali, just as part of the lessons. Not separate handwriting lessons. I suppose they taught us to form the letters – I can’t really remember.’

  Interviewer’s husband: ‘Did they teach you to make AWWW and ARRR?’

  A: ‘There were books, but no, I never did that. I never had those. Now tell me! What’s going on?

  ‘If B— has to write a letter, he types it out first – that gets him flowing, he’s more comfortable like that. Then he writes it out.

  B: ‘My handwriting is slow and bad. I probably wasn’t taught properly, or taught up until the age of ten, then I slackened.’

  Interviewer: ‘Do you judge other people by their handwriting?’

  B: ‘I’m sure I don’t. Well, unless it’s very childish. I judge A— a bit for being a bit of a pain.’

  Interviewer: ‘Surely not.’

  B: ‘Her handwriting’s beautiful, but it’s a pain. Nobody can rea
d it.’

  Interviewer: ‘I can totally read it!’

  B: ‘I think you’re among a special club. I was taught. It wasn’t a rebellion, slackening off. I think the standard, the level of pressure to maintain it wasn’t there in my later teenage years. I worry that people might judge me when I write a letter. I worry that they might not think of me to the high standard that I would perhaps like. A— writes our Christmas cards, because her handwriting is actually pretty.’

  A: Political activist, female, 28

  B: Financier, male, 28

  26 ~ Biros and Not-Biros

  If you refer to a ballpoint pen as a biro, as we all do, in lower case, then lawyers will descend on you in droves, demanding that you withdraw the calumny of suggesting that all ballpoint pens are biros. So this chapter is about Biros REGISTERED TRADE MARK, as well as ballpoint pens.

  The biro, in popular parlance, is named after a person, like hoovers, quislings, boycotts and peach Melbas, or peaches Melba, if you prefer. It is one of those moments where the inventor is commemorated when, perhaps, the commercial exploiter performed just as remarkable a task. Someone, sooner or later, was going to invent the ballpoint pen, and it might as well have been László Biró. The dedication of Marcel Bich, the man who bought the patent and turned the ballpoint pen into one of the most remarkable commercial successes in history is, in its way, as impressive. We say ‘Pass me that biro’; we ought just as readily to say, as the French actually do, ‘Is this your bic?’

  László Biró was Hungarian, born in 1899. His famous invention was only one of several in his life – including an automatic washing machine. His obituarists tell us that, in early life, he developed an interest in the use of hypnotism for pain relief after having to leave medical school after a year. Tantalizingly, we also hear of an interest in handwriting analysis – a fashionable interest in the 1920s, of course.

  From the late 1920s onwards, Biró was developing a ballpoint pen. His initial interest came not from a desire to create a simpler pen than the fountain pen, but simply from wondering about ink. Ink for writing by hand was slow-drying, and needed blotting paper if there was any haste in the matter. On the other hand, Biró observed, printers’ ink dried almost immediately. Why could not ordinary people write by hand using printers’ ink?

  The initial answer was that printers’ ink was far too viscous to flow through an ordinary pen nib. Through trial and error, Biró came to the insight that a rolling ball, held lightly at the tip of an ink reservoir in a loose cradle, would move easily across paper without leaving a wet trail of ink or smudging. Biró was not the first inventor to think up the marking possibilities of a ball moving in this way; there are some patents dating back to the 1880s which work on similar principles. In 1938, Biró patented the ballpoint pen in France and Switzerland. At the outbreak of war, he moved, with his brother Georg, to Argentina to escape Nazi persecution. In Argentina, he took out a new patent in 1943, and his invention came to the attentions of the British.

  Biró is a national hero to the Argentinians, who celebrate something called Inventors’ Day on his birthday, and I am sorry to say that Argentinian biographies of Biró1 omit all mention of the support which the British armed forces lent to Biró’s invention, for reasons of their own. The British Air Force had been frustrated by the ways in which ordinary pens tended to run out of ink or leak or freeze at high altitude. Biró’s invention came to their attention in 1943 through an English accountant called Henry George Martin, who was working in Argentina. The RAF bought 30,000 pens after Biró’s design. Licensing rights to Biró’s pen were bought by the British, and the success of the Biro pens popularized the product. It’s important to remember, though, since we so take ballpoint pens for granted, that at this point many people thought of them as an extraordinary futuristic invention rather than a mass-market one. When ballpoint pens began to be sold in Britain by the Miles Martin Pen company in 1946, they cost £2.15s, the equivalent of a secretary’s weekly wage.2

  By this point, the ballpoint pen was out of Biró’s hands. In 1944, Biró sold the American patent to Eversharp Faber for two million dollars, and the European patent to a man called Baron Marcel Bich. Bich was one of a rare number of men who genuinely transformed the world. When he died, Stephen Bayley observed that ‘if the mass-market had a patron saint it would be Bich: for mere pennies the ordinary man can write more clearly, shave more closely and have more reliable access to fire than a renaissance prince.’3

  With his business partner, Edouard Buffard, Bich had been manufacturing penholders and pencil cases from a leaky shed in Clichy, north of Paris. He acquired Biró’s ballpoint patent, without, apparently, immediately seeing the potential. Corporate legend tells of a eureka moment: Bich was pushing a wheelbarrow one day when he realized that ‘the ballpoint running over paper was as revolutionary as the wheel’.4 More to the point, he realized that there was a possibility of selling this remarkably reliable invention very cheaply. This insight, and the Bic Cristal which he began to sell in 1950, would make him a very rich man indeed.

  The Bic corporation makes its money now not just out of stationery, but out of razors, which I don’t recommend, and small disposable lighters, which are as good as any, I suppose. It is the original product, however, which possesses the true poetry. You probably have a Bic Cristal somewhere not very far away. It’s probably as familiar to you as the back of your hand, so take a moment to look at this marvellous object. It has hardly changed at all in any visible way since 1950. The major change, which the company highlights as a significant step in its development, was that in 1990 the cap was pierced to guard against suffocation in the case of ‘involuntary ingestion’. That’s more or less it. It was perfect when it was invented, and it is still perfect now. It weighs 5.8 grams – just enough so as not to feel flimsy, but not enough to feel heavy. Some thought has gone into the barrel – its hexagonal form means that it won’t roll off the desk, and won’t hurt your fingers – five sides would be painful, and seven unstable. It was a stroke of genius to make the barrel transparent, showing you how much ink you have left, always assuming you haven’t chewed it to bits long before the ink runs out.* The ball, since 1961, has been made out of tungsten carbide, an incredibly hard substance.† The one alteration not very obvious to the naked eye is in the ink, which has gone on being improved over the last sixty years – a great deal of thought has gone into extending what is known as ‘cap-off time’, or the time you can leave the lid off the pen without the ink drying up. The ink, as Biro had hoped, dries almost instantly on contact with the paper, in less than two seconds.* By 2005, 100 billion pens had been sold worldwide. In 1970, with six million Cristal pens being sold daily, Bic was not only the most successful pen brand in the world, but the best-selling brand of any sort. At the present moment, I can buy 50 of these miraculous objects for £7.78 on Amazon.co.uk, or 15½p each. Incredible.†

  An early advert for Bic pens.

  In the past, the story of Baron Bich and the Bic Cristal has been told in the form of a graphic novel by Christian Rossi and Xavier Séguin. I wish I could get hold of a copy of La Très Véritable Histoire du stylo Bic, first because I don’t think there are enough stationery-based comics out there, secondly because it looks a whole lot of fun (‘Clement is right! The ballpoint is the future! It rolls over the paper! Writing is easier!’) and thirdly because it really is an exciting story which deserves celebrating.

  Marcel Bich’s spirit is well summed up by a gloriously up-yours letter which he sent to the shareholders of the newly public company Bic, explaining exactly what is wrong with French society, though nothing that a sufficiently can-do entrepreneur, such as, for instance, a certain Baron Bich, might put right. I’m going to quote it in French, because it has such a pungent flavour that my translation can’t really convey.

  Nous sommes férocement anti-technocratiques. On ne tient pas de prix de boeuf en contrôlant les bouchers, on tient le prix du boeuf en produisant du boeuf. La technocratie est
le mal de notre époque; partie du plus haut (E.N.A.)* elle gagne tous les échelons; elle séduit particulièrement les français – cartésiens de nature – elle aboutit à une pléthore de gestionnaires, d’organisateurs, mais quand il s’agit de faire le ‘boulot’ il n’y a plus personne. Cette technocratie entraîne un coût de production élevé et ce qui est bien plus grave, elle rend les gens moroses parce qu’ils s’ennuient dans leur travail sans initiative.

  Or:

  We are fiercely anti-technocratic. One does not hold down the price of beef by controlling the butchers; one holds down the price of beef by producing beef. Technocracy is the evil of our age, emanating from on high (E.N.A), it holds every level of society; it particularly tempts the French – Cartesians by nature – it ends up in a plethora of administrators and managers, but when it’s a question of ‘elbow grease’, there’s no one to be seen. This technocracy leads to a raised cost of production, and, more seriously, it crushes the people, because they’re bored with their work without responsibility.

  That’s the stuff to frighten Giscard. Bich launched the Bic Cristal in 1951. It’s doubtful whether even he saw the full potential of the cheap ballpoint pen to begin with. Strikingly, the first press adverts don’t try to appeal to everyone, or to suggest the democratic revolution about to be launched by the Bic Cristal: the earliest one is of a concierge-type, or perhaps a superior sort of shop-woman, looking up and saying, ‘C’est déjà noté, Madame.’ If Bic first imagined that the ease and cheapness of their pens would appeal to the hardworking servant classes, they quickly came to understand the potentially universal appeal of the object. Of course, by 1953, they were linking their company’s product to that most national of excitements, the Tour de France. You can trace the spread of their appeal, or the company’s grasp of their product’s potential, through their advertisements – they are delightfully preserved on the company’s website. There are some space-age modern graphics, suggesting speed through sport – ‘It runs, it runs – the ballpoint BIC!’ Then a moment of sheer class in the form of a cinema advert. It is rather a period piece of abstract ballet, as the pens, without the help of human hands, congregate, dance, circle and construct patterns with that very 1950s-chic soundtrack, ‘un fragment musical de J.S. Bach’. The pen is still an exotic, even futuristic triumph; the camera here occasionally swoops down for a fascinated examination of the ballpoint. It must be a cinema advert, and I like to think of this early colour advert diverting Jean-Luc and Solange before their Saturday-night date, say Jules et Jim.