László Biró was born in Budapest in 1899. After he left school, he studied medicine at university, but he didn’t finish his studies. He did a number of different jobs and then became a journalist in the 1930s.He noticed that newspaper ink dried very quickly on the paper, and put the ink into his fountain pen. However, it didn’t work because the ink was very thick. He and his brother Gyõrgy then invented a new type of pen with a small ball at the end. The new pen worked with the thick ink. It quickly became popular all over the world. In 1939, Biró moved to Paris and then to Argentina. Biró invented many other things but the most important was the ball-point pen, or “biro”. László Biró died in Buenos Aires in 1985.

Emö Rubik’s father was an engineer and his mother was a poet. He was born in Budapest in 1944. After leaving school, he studied architecture and design at the Technical University. In the 1970s, he worked as an architect and in his spare time he invented a mechanical puzzle. Rubik called it the “Magic Cube”. It soon became popular in Hungary and the rest of Europe. In I975, he taught architecture, but he continued to invent puzzles. In the early 1980s, the cube became popular in the USA too, and got a new name: “Rubik’s Cube”. It is the world’s best- selling toy - some people say there are 300 million cubes in the world. Rubik became very rich and went on to invent many more games and puzzles.

What was the special feature of László Biró’s invention?