The famous inventor was born in Liptovsky Mikulas (in what is now Slovakia) on 20 April 1871 as Eduard Penkala. He moved to Zagreb in the early 1900s after graduating in chemistry at Dresden's Technische Universitaet and working in the chemical industry in Kosice.
In Zagreb in 1908, Penkala began constructing an airplane which should have been so easy to pilot that anyone could do it with no special preparation or training. He patented his invention in 1909 and the airplane was finished in 1910. Because of the plane, he also organised the first air strip in Croatia from which the first Croatian pilot, Dragutin Novak, took off only a few years after the historic flight of the Wright brothers.
Striving to make its inventions usable, Penkala founded several companies, the most famous being Penkala–Edmund Moster & Co, which built in Zagreb a factory for automatic mechanical pencils, fountain pens and other writing supplies according to Penkala's patents. The factory soon became one of the world's biggest stationery manufacturers and the mechanical pencil was a big success, sold under the name Penkala.