László Bíró

Born László József Schweiger in Hungary on 29 September 1899, he eventually took the surname Bíró and carried it to Argentina. John J. Loud had patented a ballpoint pen around 1888, but it went nowhere commercially. Bíró revisited the concept and engineered a version that actually functioned reliably enough to sell. That patent, filed in his adopted country, launched the modern ballpoint pen into mass production. He died in Buenos Aires on 24 October 1985, having turned a fifty-year-old failure into the thing in everyone's pocket.