How the Pencil Was Invented: History and Interesting Facts

Pencils: history of origin, interesting facts

“Even what seems the simplest, smallest, and most familiar of all objects, under certain conditions, can manifest itself as something as grand and complex as a spacecraft or a large suspension bridge.”

Henry Petroski, American engineer,
author of the book “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance”

Let's start by debunking an old myth about the harmfulness of the pencil lead. What happens if you chew on a pencil? Nothing bad—except you might get a reprimand.

Pencils do not contain lead—and never have. They contain graphite, one of six pure forms of carbon—no more toxic than the wood it is “wrapped” in. Even the paint today is lead-free.

This confusion arises because, over 2000 years ago, sharpened graphite was used for writing on papyrus and paper, which in English is referred to by the same word as lead, “lead”.

Pencils: history of origin, interesting facts

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Pencils are divided into simple and colored. A simple pencil has a graphite core and writes in shades of gray, from light to almost black (depending on the hardness of the graphite).

The only deposit of pure hard graphite in the world was accidentally discovered in 1564 in Borrowdale, Cumberland (England). It was guarded by strict laws and armed guards, and mining was allowed only six weeks a year.

The mined “black graphite” was cut into thin rectangular sticks, from which the cores of the first pencils were made. The English pencil quickly spread throughout Europe. The first person mentioned in written documents to use a pencil was the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner in 1565.

Henry David Thoreau—the author of the famous book “Walden, or Life in the Woods”, in which he described two years of living as a hermit in the woods by Walden Pond—was the first American to burn graphite with clay and produce a pencil core.

However, the true commercial breakthrough occurred in 1827 when Joseph Dixon from Salem, Massachusetts (USA), introduced a machine that began mass-producing rectangular graphite pencils at a rate of 132 pencils per minute. By the time of Dixon's death in 1869, the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company had become a world leader, producing 86,000 round pencils a day. Today, this company, known as the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, remains one of the world's leading pencil manufacturers.

Pencils: history of origin, interesting facts

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The traditional yellow pencil dates back to 1890 when Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth produced the very first one at his factory in Prague. He named his factory Koh-i-Noor, after the world-famous 105-carat yellow diamond Koh-i-Noor, which belonged to Queen Victoria (who, in turn, named Hardtmuth's elite product line “Koh-i-Noor pencils”).

In 1802, the Koh-i-Noor company patented the first graphite pencil made from clay and graphite. At the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, the company introduced pencils under the new brand “Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth”. These new pencils, soon becoming the world standard, featured a thin graphite core encased in a cedar wood body. Other manufacturers simply copied Joseph Hardtmuth's idea.

Interesting fact

Today, 75% of all pencils sold in America are yellow.

Pencils: history of origin, interesting facts

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Interesting Facts About Pencils

The average pencil can be sharpened 17 times and write 45,000 words or draw a line 56 km long.

The pencil core casing can be made of wood, plastic, paper, or string. These pencils are considered disposable.

Sometimes, the opposite end of the pencil has an eraser held by a device known as a ferrule. The patent for it was first issued in 1858, but in schools, pencils with erasers were not very popular: teachers believed they encouraged laziness.

The eraser on most pencils is made from vegetable oil with a small amount of real rubber as a binder.

Pencils with wooden and plastic casings can have round, hexagonal, or triangular sections. Construction pencils have oval or rectangular sections with chamfered edges and a flat core.

Pencils vary in the hardness of their core, which is usually indicated on the pencil and denoted by letters. However, unlike Europe and Russia, the US uses a numerical scale to indicate hardness.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the pencil, its production process is complex, requiring a variety of materials for manufacturing (depending on the production method and product requirements), namely: white clay (kaolin), graphite, a binder (cooked starch for graphite, cellulose-based for colored), after firing, the cores are immersed in oil (coconut, sunflower), melted wax, paraffin, stearin, fat (food, confectionery), wood for the slats (alder, poplar (low quality), linden (medium quality), pine, cedar, jelutong (high quality)), glues for bonding (PVA, synthetic (SV gluing)), paint (pigments for cores, for final painting).

To learn more about the process and nuances of manufacturing colored and simple pencils, we will select several educational videos for you and, as usual, place them at the end of the article.

Pencils: history of origin, interesting facts

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The Largest Pencils in the World

The largest yellow pencil measuring 7.91 meters and weighing 446.36 kg was made on May 28, 2001, in the UK. This giant pencil is now in the Derwent Pencil Museum in Keswick, northwest England (see photo below). Today, the museum is visited by over 80,000 people a year from all over the world.
In Casey, Illinois, USA, there is a local roadside attraction—a giant pencil (see photo below) 9.9 meters long. Interestingly, this pencil is so sharp that the city put a plastic cone on its tip to prevent tourists from getting hurt.
In 2001, the German company Faber-Castell, a manufacturer of pencils, pens, and other stationery, built the Pencil Tower in Subang Jaya, Malaysia, near its factory, which houses the tallest pencil in the world. It is 19.75 meters tall and 0.8 meters in diameter (see photo below). This pencil was recorded in the Guinness Book as the longest pencil in the world.
On January 18, 2007, the City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, became home to another of the world's largest pencils. The giant pencil is equivalent to 1.9 million regular pencils. The pencil contains over 1800 kg of Pennsylvania graphite and has a real eraser weighing 113 kg.
On September 3, 2007, Guinness World Record holder Ashrita Furman of the USA unveiled his giant pencil costing $20,000 USD. It is 23 meters long and weighs 8200 kg, with the eraser alone weighing 90 kg and the graphite core weighing 2000 kg. Furman and a team of 40 enthusiasts created the world's largest pencil in 3 weeks. It was made as a birthday gift for teacher Sri Chinmoy. Watch how it was created in the video below.