A discovery in Cumbria
The pencil began with a mineral. Graphite, a soft, dark form of carbon, was found in a large deposit at Borrowdale, in what is now Cumbria in northern England. The usual dating places the discovery in the 1500s, and a popular tale says a storm uprooted trees and exposed the black material. That detail is local tradition rather than a documented fact, but the deposit was real and unusually pure.
Local people found that the material left a clean, dark mark. At first it was used to mark sheep, and it was valuable enough to be cast into molds and used in foundries. Because it looked a bit like lead ore and marked in a similar way, it came to be called “black lead” or “plumbago,” and the name stuck long after the truth was known. A modern pencil does not contain lead. The word “lead” for the writing core is a leftover from this early confusion.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had written with a lead stylus on some surfaces, which may also have contributed to the idea that lead was involved.
From lump to pencil
Raw graphite is soft and dirty to hold. People wrapped it in string or sheepskin, or slid sticks of it into hollow holders. A well-known early image appears in a book on fossils by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, published in 1565, which describes and illustrates a writing instrument made of graphite fixed into a wooden holder. This is among the earliest clear references to something resembling a pencil.
The idea of enclosing a graphite stick in a wooden casing developed gradually in several places. Italian craftspeople are sometimes credited with early casing in which a stick was fitted into a hollowed piece of juniper or similar wood, and the practice spread to other European countries. Wood gave a safe, clean grip and allowed the writer to sharpen the end with a knife.
Supply problems
Borrowdale graphite was so useful and valuable that access was controlled. Mines were guarded, and extraction was limited to certain periods, with the output sold in London. Because the deposit was rare, other countries found it hard to obtain pure graphite, especially in times of war. Sticks cut from solid Borrowdale graphite gave the best marks, and imitation products using poor graphite scratched and smeared.
The clay and graphite method
A major step came in the 1790s. In France, where supplies of English graphite were disrupted by conflict, the inventor and officer Nicolas-Jacques Conte developed a method that mixed powdered graphite with clay, shaped the mix into rods and fired them in a kiln. Around the same time, Joseph Hardtmuth in Vienna is credited with a similar approach. Dates and priority vary between accounts, and it is plausible that these were partly independent developments.
The technique had important advantages.
- Use of lower-grade graphite. Powdered graphite could be taken from sources that were not pure enough for solid sticks.
- Control of hardness. More clay made a harder, lighter-marking core, and more graphite made a softer, darker one. This is the basis of the grading system with letters such as H for hard and B for black, in various forms.
- Consistency. Cores had uniform strength and were less likely to break.
The same method is still the basis of most wood-cased pencils.
Making pencils in quantity
Pencil making in the 1800s moved from workshops to factories. In Germany, the area around Nuremberg became a hub, and makers such as Faber built large businesses. In the United States, producers such as Eberhard Faber, whose factory in New York dates to 1861, and companies in New Jersey and elsewhere grew with demand from schools, offices and soldiers.
A common manufacturing method used for much of the period works like this. Slats of wood, often cedar because it sharpens cleanly, are cut with grooves. Cores are laid in the grooves, a second grooved slat is glued on top, and the sandwich is cut into individual pencils, shaped, painted and stamped. Machinery for this job meant that large numbers could be made at low cost. Pencils became cheap enough for ordinary classrooms, and they remained popular for architects, carpenters, artists and others.
Erasers and other additions
Rubber for rubbing out marks was described in the 1770s, and pieces were sold for this purpose in England. An American, Hymen Lipman, received a patent in 1858 for a pencil with an eraser fixed at the end. The patent was later ruled invalid in a US Supreme Court case in 1875, since it combined existing parts without a new function, but the idea of the attached eraser, in the form of a metal ferrule, was widely adopted.
Pencils alongside other tools
The pencil never replaced ink. Writers who wanted permanent records used iron gall ink and later the fountain pen, and the ballpoint pen took over much everyday writing in the twentieth century. Yet the pencil kept its place because it is cheap, erasable and works without a flow of liquid. Papers also changed, and cheaper wood pulp paper made sketching, notes and drafts affordable for more people. For a broader view of the surfaces and substances people wrote with, the history of writing materials shows how each tool fits a different job.