How it began
Slavoljub Eduard Penkala was born in 1871 in Liptószentmiklós, now Liptovský Mikuláš in Slovakia, and studied at the Royal Saxon Polytechnic Institute in Dresden before moving to Zagreb, where he took the Croatian name Slavoljub. On January 24, 1906, a patent for an automatic pencil from his workshop at Trg kralja Tomislava 17 in Zagreb was registered in Budapest under number 36946. Wikipedia describes the work as a further development of the mechanical pencil, then called an automatic pencil.
What changed first
Penkala followed the pencil in 1907 with what is described as the first solid-ink fountain pen. Working with the entrepreneur Edmund Moster, he started the Penkala-Moster Company and built a pen and pencil factory in Zagreb that was one of the biggest in the world at the time. As the business grew, a second factory was set up in Berlin.
What lasted
Penkala went on to hold a total of about 80 patents. They included a thermos bottle called the Termofor, a bluing detergent, a rail-car brake and an anode battery. He also built the Penkala 1910 Biplane, the first Croatian aircraft to fly in the country, which was flown by Dragutin Novak, the first Croatian pilot. Penkala died in Zagreb in 1922 at age 50 after catching pneumonia on a business trip.
Where it stands today
The company that Penkala and Moster founded still exists under the name TOZ Penkala. Penkala is buried at Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb, and the Croatian National Tourist Board presents the pencil as a Croatian invention tied to his workshop on Trg kralja Tomislava. The 1906 patent date and the Zagreb address remain the fixed points of the story as the sources tell it.
