Written by Henry Petroski, 1989
It's hard to believe that this is pretty much the only book written on the pencil.
I have a lot of notes; it's all over the place, but that's never stopped me before from posting it all up here.
- The original pencils were made with lead, but they were literally a lump held in the hand; later the lump was put in holders, and later still graphite was discovered (1560's England), although it was called black lead, plumbago, or English antimony at the time, though Germans called it white lead or bismuth, and others still called it Flemish stone, and it didn't get it's name graphite until two hundred years later (1779) when they had good microscopes to see the chemical structure and realize it wasn't lead at all; the word graphite means graph - to write - in Latin, with -ite at the end to denote it's a mineral.
- Thoreau doesn't include pencils on his list of items for going into the Muir Woods.
- The origin of the word pencil is penis, which means tail in Latin; the original use of the word pencil was more like a paint brush. Also, codex is Latin for tree trunk, on which a codex would have been written.
- Early writing used a stylus on wax tablets backed with ivory.
- Much later, guidelines or blind lines as they were called were put on paper in lead, but the words were written in ink
- Homemade quill pencils circa 1800s America
- The pencil as we know it today is called the "cedar and graphite" pencil.
- 1560s Borrowdale England - graphite mine is discovered (but called black lead, plumbago, etc.)
- 1675 Nuremburg - Staedtler was making pencils exclusively, and as a joiner (wood cabinet maker), so he was making his own leads
- 1760 Germany? - Faber
- 1790 France? - Conte instigates the revolution in pencil making when a restriction in supply from a war in 1790 made him turn the graphite into powder and add it to "potter's clay and water", which was shaped and fired like clay; Conte had experience making ceramic graphite crucibles for lead cannon balls; today it's called the Conte crayon, but then it was called ceramic lead. Germany never took up this method, and fell behind.
- 1800s American - they're using quill pencils made with a goose quill, a lead bullet, a melting ladle, and a turnip - the quill was cut to length of a couple inches, the end thrust into a turnip and held upright, the bullet melted and poured into the quill ready for use (and the quill was whittled away at increments to reveal the lead?)
- 1810 America - William Munroe a cabinetmaker who makes pencils uses a slurry but not exactly Conte style because it wasn't baked.
- 1821 Briton New Hampshire - a graphite mine is discovered
- 1830s Concord Mass - Henry David Thoreau's dad John ran one of America's first pencil companies making graphite and clay pencils, but by 1853 they were making more money selling their ground graphite for electrotyping and gave up on pencils.
- 1843 - a Thomas Telford grounds graphite, mixes with water, and pressurized to reform as natural graphite, but it was too expensive.
- 1857 Jersey City Dixon Crucible Co. - Dixon was at it since 1820, but the crucibles made to melt and mold cannonballs for the Mexican America War were of graphite, and Dixon had so much because his dad owned a shipping company that called in Ceylon, where a graphite mine was, and where they straight used the graphite as ballast in the ship, so he set up shop for the War; at this time, some Dixon advertising materials compare their product against fraudulent Germans pretending to make their pencils in America said Dixon used "purely American principles" where "every manipulation is by machinery instead of by hand labor; producing perfection and absolute conformity." (Makes me think of the American food system though.)
- 1851 World's Fair Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London - this changed a lot of things
- 1856 Siberia - AW Faber, who was failing by 1850s due to lack of good graphite, finds a graphite mine in Siberia, and by 1896 a Faber granddaughter marries a Castell and the company becomes Faber-Castell; note that by 1849 Faber was represented in the US, w a factory by 1861, which caught fire, moved to Brooklyn 1872, then to Wilkes-Barre PA 1956.
- 1870 Germany - JS Staedtler's red conte crayon pencil made since 1851 gets popular, but by 1912 Staedtler is sold by a grandson named Kreutzer
- 1873 Ticonderoga New York - Dixon buys the American Graphite Company in Ticonderoga New York, and is making real and good pencils; and continues to do so until 1980 when the buildings are sold to developers; the business remains, headquartered in Florida and w facilities all over.
- 1900s Japan - They have an entire pencil industry by then.
- ***There is a great passage here, "Where Did the Graphite from Borrowdale Go?" AKA "Black Entropy" - The plumbago from Borrowdale had certainly been absorbed into the universe at large over the three centuries since it had been discovered: being blown in dust from all the sawing and rubbing, being deposited on the furniture of pencil factories and on the hands and clothes of their workers, being carried in fabricated veins of lead in millions upon millions of wood-cased pencils made and exported around the world, being buried with the stubs of pencils no one wanted to hold onto, being laid down in notes in the margin of books like trail markers through forests of thought, being redeposited in thin lines of thoughts and images on countless sheets of paper, being twisted and crushed in the lines of crumpled manuscripts and sketches, being burned with the thoughts and images no one wanted, or no one wanted to remember or build. So by the mid-1800s what had once been the world's purest source of plumbago was essentially worked out and had been diffused throughout the world in a three-centuries long fit of black entropy. (p140)
- ***1860s - Erasers are already on pencils, but it was used, and named, by the 1770s, for "rubbing" out black lead (graphite); and by 1900s erasers got so popular that people got paranoid about their marks on paper being erased either accidentally or intentionally, that there were recipes for fixing the graphite, one with skim milk; further: a Dixon catalog early 1900s has a paragraph about erasing in schools, called "The Philosophy of Rubber", about how having an eraser changes the way students think [perhaps a perennial example of our initial interfaces with new technology].
- Erasers on pencils were and are not popular in Europe
- Until 1880, European pencils had square lead.
- There's a war between whittling and rotary sharpeners, and square and round leads; of course we see the rounds win. But people were real into their whittling; the paper wrapped pencil, an alternative to using wood, never took off because people wanted to whittle.
- 1890 - The yellow pencil is made to match the Austria-Hungary flag, but also in reference to the Orient where the Siberian graphite was coming from; by 1950s America, yellow and pencil go so well together, there's an apocryphal story of a manager distributing half green and half yellow pencils to his thousands of employees, and getting far more complaints about the green pencils ... because we are basically brainwashed at this point, and he, Petroski, poetically calls it psychosomatic (p163)
- Pine was used for the cheapest pencils, then Red Cedar, then Florida Keys Cedar for the finest; wood was chosen for its strength, freedom from warpage, and smooth cutting qualities.
- English closet chest makers in 1700 got red cedar from Virginia and Florida
- Incense red cedar from California works, but it's white not red, so it's dyed, and impregnated with cedar oil for fragrance, and a wax for better handling in production.
- There is also a wood from India that is dyed violet.
- There's a good illustration on p223 with the author saying the pencil drawings are so wrong they couldn't be produced "by a drunken machinist on a rubber lathe".
- BOPPS - Broken off pencil points
- The diameter of the leads are thinner as they get harder to adjust for breakage at the point.
- A 1600s teacher was whittling goose quills for their students before class.
- People saved their pencil shavings to drive a way moths.
- There's a Sherlock Holmes bit where he used his knowledge of pencils to deduce a suspect.
- Colored leads have more wax and less clay, and so aren't baked as hard, and break easily; and colored leads, which often were broken in the wooden shaft, tended to leave loose pieces in the machine to revolve with the cutters and prevent another pencil from being sharpened (bane of my existence as an art teacher).
- There was a pencil made from the wood of a preserved tree near a mastadon in a marl bed in Orange County, the pencil's knob made from the mastadon's tooth.
- Some novelty pencils were made with companion toothpicks or earspoons
- Mechanical pencil names circa 1930s and 40s - Eversharp, Scripto, Autopoint
- The first Russian pencil was the Diamond by Hammer
- By the 1900s the British call pencil leads pencil strips
- There is a standard for pencil manufacturing - R-151-34
- On Dec 8 1941, the Eagle Mikado became the Mirado.
- They spun a drum of paper against a pencil to see how "far" it goes (35 miles)
- There's Blackfoot Indian made pencils, by hand, in 1971
- Pencil workers could reach into a pile and grab exactly 12 pencils, every time, and that's something a machine can't do in one motion.
- Hemmingway "wearing down sever number 2 pencils is a good day's work"
- Pencils are general word processors, Byte magazine
- "The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible, and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of successful engineering." p343
- The die for extruding graphite is made of sapphire.
- Author says he's tried, and it's hard finding old pencils, but pencil collector societies do exist.
- Butchers used ribbed pencils in their slippery hands, and Kosher butchers pig-free pencil products.
- [Personal thoughts] Every industry is secretive. And because trees are so integral to so many industries, they too are secretive, and a young student first learning about trees would notice it strange how little people know about trees, including experts. But after reading this book it makes more sense. From pencil makers to cabinet makers, to the wood for ships, or for buildings, or basically anything, suppliers know how to get the wood you wanted but they would not tell you how they grow, or where they grow. One way they kept secrets, in pencil making at least, was to keep the process in subdivisions, but so no subdivision knew more than its part, and only family knew "the whole" put together. p281
Image credit: Christopher Payne - Christopher Aparicio unpacking crucibles after heating graphite cores in an oven General Pencil Jersey City NJ - 2017
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