On our pencil
The history of the pencil
Pencil is the most common tool used to write and design but it is not the oldest one. The archetypal pencil may have been the stylus, which was a thin metal stick, often made from lead and used for scratching on papyrus, a form of early paper. The ancient Egyptians and Romans used it extensively. The word pencil comes from the Latin word pencillus, which means "little tail."
Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite near Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. The value of graphite was soon realized to be enormous, mainly because it could be used to line the moulds for cannon balls and the mines were taken over by the Crown and guarded. Graphite had to be smuggled out for use in pencils. Graphite is soft, so it requires some form of case. Graphite sticks were at first wrapped in string or in sheepskin for stability. The news of the usefulness of these early pencils spread far and wide, attracting the attention of artists all over the "known world." England continued to enjoy a monopoly on the production of pencils until a method of reconstituting the graphite powder was found. The distinctively square English pencils continued to be made with sticks cut from natural graphite into the 1860s. Today, the town of Keswick, near the original findings of block graphite, has a pencil museum. The first attempt to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662. It used a mixture of graphite, sulphur and antimony.
It was the Italians who first thought of wooden holders. An Italian couple in particular, named Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, were believed to be the ones to create the first blueprints for the modern carpentry pencil for the purpose of marking their carpentry pieces; however, their version was instead a flat, oval, more compact type of pencil. They did this at first by hollowing out a stick of juniper wood. Shortly thereafter, a superior technique was discovered: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the two halves then glued together—essentially the same method in use to this day.
In 1795 Nicholas Jacques Conté discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mixture into rods that were then fired in a kiln. By varying the ratio of graphite to clay, the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied. This method of manufacture, which had been earlier discovered by the Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth of Koh-I-Noor in 1790, remains in use.
American colonists imported pencils from Europe until the end of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin advertised pencils for sale in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729 and George Washington used a three-inch pencil when he surveyed the Ohio Territory in 1762. It is commonly said that William Munroe, a cabinetmaker in Concord, Massachusetts, made the first American wood pencils in 1812. Munroe's method of making pencils was painstakingly slow and in the neighbouring town of Acton, a pencil mill owner named Ebenezer Wood set out to automate the process at his own pencil mill located at Nashoba Brook along the old Davis Road. He used the first circular saw in pencil production. He constructed the first hexagon- and octagon-shaped pencil cases that we know today. Ebenezer did not patent his invention and shared his techniques with whoever asked. One of those people was Eberhard Faber of New York, who became the leader in pencil production. On March 30th 1858, Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil.
The majority of pencils made in the United States are painted yellow. According to Henry Petroski, this tradition began in 1890 when the L. & C. Hardtmuth Company of Austria-Hungary introduced their Koh-I-Noor brand, named after the famous diamond. It was intended to be the world's best and most expensive pencil and at a time when most pencils were either painted in dark colours or not at all, the Koh-I-Noor was yellow. As well as simply being distinctive, the Austro-Hungarian flag may have inspired the colour; it was also suggestive of the Orient, at a time when the best-quality graphite came from Siberia. Other companies then copied the yellow colour so that their pencils would be associated with this high-quality brand, and chose brand names with explicit Oriental references, such as Mikado (renamed Mirado) and Mongol.
Not all countries use yellow pencils: German pencils, for example, are often green, based on the trademark colours of Faber-Castell, a famous German stationery company. Pencils are commonly rounded, hexagonal or sometimes triangular in section.
(Text based on: Wikipedia)