I love it when a gimmicky invention gets legs that just won’t quit. The BIC 4 Colours pen arrived in 1970, created by Marcel Bich at BIC, and on the surface it looked like a simple consolidation of four pens into one. That’s sure not how it felt. As a kid, I remember thinking this thing was pretty magical, and when I finally got my own, I probably spent more time clicking between the colours than actually writing. There was something deeply satisfying about the mechanism, the smart way that...