He had previously tried several ventures that made and lost considerable sums, including trying to corner the market on used automobile tires and investing in prefabricated houses.

A business he built around retail sign making equipment, Reynolds Printasign,[3] was owned and operated by two generations of his heirs.

[5][6] In 1938, newspaper editor László Bíró, a Hungarian-émigré to Argentina, and business partner Henry G. Martin patented a device for marking printers' galleys.

[citation needed] While paying a sales call to Goldblatt's department store in Chicago,[7] Reynolds was shown one of the Biro pens and recognized it as a potentially hot consumer item for the postwar era.

Working with engineer William Huernergardt and machinist Titus Haffa,[8] Reynolds came up with a design that did not rely on patented capillary action but caused ink to flow by gravity.

With roller balls repurposed from the metal beads used in war-surplus bomb sights and barrels machined from aircraft aluminum, the Reynolds pens had another feature that captured the popular imagination: In early ads, Reynolds claimed, “It writes under water!”[9] The claim was essentially truthful because his pen wrote successfully on wet paper.

Consumers had little use for this bizarre practical application, but a generation of shoppers remembered the slogan long after Reynolds passed into history.

Before and during the war, when he sold sign making equipment to retailers, Reynolds had cultivated personal relationships with the heads of all the department stores.

The day the pen went on sale, an estimated 5,000 shoppers stormed Gimbels, and approximately 50 NYPD officers had to be dispatched for crowd control.

He shipped pens overseas while making partnership overtures, even buying a French estate, le Château du Mesnil-Saint-Denis in 1947,[14] as an intended base of European operations.

In the intervening period, Reynolds and the China Explorer had diverted their guards, taken off from Lunghwa Field, and completed a quick flyover of K2.

[22] For many years thereafter, the clandestine payments passed through the Reynolds Construction Company by US intelligence were part of an operation code-named "KK Mountain".