It's time to sharpen your knowledge of pencil history! (Bet you can't guess what the first erasers were made of.)
9 Surprising Facts About the History of Pencils
On March 30, 1858, inventor Hymen L. Lipman patented the first pencil with a built-in eraser—then sold it for $100,000. Believe it or not, this is not the first time in history that a little stick of graphite has made or broken men’s fortunes. The humble pencil’s history has been peppered with quite a few interesting anecdotes and tidbits that you may not know of.
Sure, wood-encased graphite gave way to mechanical pencils that are now stuck on the shelf as more and more people opt for digital forms of writing. But the progress of time hasn’t made pencils’ history any less fascinating. Read on for nine bizarre tales of the world’s favorite writing instrument throughout history.
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1. Yellow represented Chinese royalty
Yellow pencils have been a tradition since the late 1800s, when the best graphite in the world was produced in China. Western pencil tycoons wanted their customers to know their pencils were filled with top-quality lead, so they painted their instruments in the color associated with Chinese royalty: yellow. Remind your children of this regal heritage from pencils’ history the next time they’re scribbling dead stick figures all over their math homework.
2. Breadcrumbs once did the work of erasers
Before erasers became a stock pencil accessory in 1858, you’d often see a writer carrying around a stale baguette with his papers and gear. That’s because breadcrumbs were the writing world’s most popular erasers from 1612 to 1770.
The first rubber eraser was allegedly used by accident when a writer was reaching for his crumbs and instead picked up a hunk of what the French called caoutchouc—a stretchy sample of the newly discovered Para tree. The substance proved great for rubbing pencil marks off of paper. Since then, we’ve called it rubber.
3. NASA developed (then ditched) mechanical pencils
As schoolkids and space explorers are well aware, pencils are amazing for their versatility. They can write underwater, upside down and even in zero gravity. That last bit is important: The mechanical pencil is among the many everyday items that NASA invented.
Despite myths that NASA spent millions developing a space pen while Russian cosmonauts relied on good old graphite, the agency was quick to tap the pencil’s potential. (And for the record, NASA did develop a space pen, but it didn’t cost taxpayers millions.) As Scientific American reports, “NASA ordered 34 mechanical pencils from Houston’s Tycam Engineering Inc., in 1965. They paid $4,382.50 or $128.89 per pencil.”
Following the obvious public outcry—and the Apollo 1 cabin fire of 1967—pencils were forever grounded for being too flammable. According to NASA, every mission since Apollo 7 has used space pens, and there are dozens of them on the International Space Station.
4. Hemingway wrote his books in pencil
Not only do pencils have a history with space exploration, but they’ve long had a tryst with literature too. A single pencil is said to hold enough graphite to draw a line 35 miles long or to write 45,000 words. If that’s true, Ernest Hemingway could have written The Old Man and the Sea (27,000 words) in a single stroke—and for all we know, he did.
“If you write with a pencil, you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to,” Hemingway wrote in a 1935 Esquire article. “First, when you read it over; then when it is typed, you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is 0.333, which is a damned good average for a hitter.”
5. Graphite was initially mistaken for lead
Pencil cores are a mix of graphite and clay, fired in a kiln at more than 800 degrees Celsius (1472 degrees Fahrenheit). So where does the “lead” come from? Blame a few lost sheep for this interesting point in pencil history.
Legend has it that in 1564, some shepherds from Borrowdale, England, were hunting their lost flock through a storm when they stumbled upon a massive deposit of pure graphite under a lightning-scorched tree. Inspectors decided the shiny black crystals must be a rare vein of “plumbago”—Latin for “lead ore”—and an enormous mining industry exploded around the find. Shepherds marked their sheep with the “lead,” housewives rust-proofed their stoves with it and unfortunate miners drank it with ale and wine as a home remedy (not recommended). And of course, it made a few people really, really rich.
The misnomer has had a lasting impact—more than four centuries later, and people were still talking about pencil “lead.”
6. Stealing a pencil once meant prison time
The price of England’s rare “plumbago” was originally set around 100 pounds per ton, but after some savvy engineer discovered you could coat cannonballs in it, the price skyrocketed to 5,000 pounds per ton by 1830. Armed guards were stationed outside the Borrowdale mine day and night, and workers were forced to strip before heading home lest they steal some valuable graphite flakes in their trousers.
A graphite black market emerged, and con men called stümplers made a killing on fake pencils that were essentially just wooden sticks with blackened tips. The graphite boom got so rowdy that Parliament passed an act to make plumbago thievery a crime punishable by seven years in a penal colony. (Remember that the next time you “forget” to return a co-worker’s Ticonderoga!)
7. Pencil sharpeners were once banned
During World War II, rotary pencil sharpeners were banned in Great Britain because the waste of wood and graphite was considered too excessive. If you had a blunt pencil, you would have had to sharpen it the old-fashioned way: with a knife.
8. War led to a pencil breakthrough
When France declared war on basically all of Europe in the 1790s, one unfortunate side effect was the whole country losing access to Borrowdale’s excellent graphite connection. With pencil supplies running scarce in 1795, the French minister of war asked one of his officers—a brilliant young inventor/artist/balloon pilot named Nicolas-Jacques Conte—to cobble up a substitute. Sounds like a tall order, right? Not for Conte.
After barely a week, the inventor shot back with a kiln-fired cocktail of French graphite powder and clay, inventing a pencil-baking system that became an integral part of pencil history and continues to be used today. We can only imagine the giddy doodles Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte made in his diary that night.
9. Only Americans use No. 2 pencils
Before he retreated to Walden Pond, writer Henry David Thoreau worked in his old man’s pencil factory. Among the Thoreau family’s contributions to pencil-craft: a near ecological crisis when the red pine trees famous for that “new pencil smell” proved so popular they became endangered. (The Thoreaus later switched to incense cedar and just painted it red.) But more to the point, Thoreau also introduced a new system for measuring the hardness of pencil lead in America, marking them with numbers one through four instead of letters like the rest of the world still does.
The No. 2 pencil every standardized test asks you to use is a medium-thickness option native to the United States; ask for one in Canada, and you’ll likely hear, “You mean an HB, eh?”
Now that you have sharpened your knowledge of pencil history and trivia, you’re sure to appreciate it in a new light!
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Sources:
- Google Patents: “Combination of lead-pencil and eraser”
- The New York Times Magazine: “Who made that build-in eraser?”
- Scientific American: “Fact or Fiction?: NASA Spent Millions to Develop a Pen that Would Write in Space, whereas the Soviet Cosmonauts Used a Pencil”
- Esquire: “Monologue to the Maestro: A High-Seas Letter”
- The Marginalian: “The Surprising History of the Pencil”
- National Trust Heritage Records: “Graphite (Wad) Mine on Seathwaite Farm, Borrowdale”
- Pencils: “What is a No. 2 Pencil?”
Originally Published in Reader's Digest
