THE HUMBLE PENCIL

This is a fun piece I did for our community magazine. My posting is a bit late for National Pencil Day - that was March 30th. When I was googling for pictures this morning, I came upon this entry from Graf von Faber-Castell for the "perfect pencil" Perfect that is if you've a mind to spend a mere $10,000.00 for it. Really?  I'll take two.

Prefect: pencil, sharpener, and eraser.
I'd think folks who own this pencil would make no mistakes.

Behold the humble pencil, an item we take for granted until we need one and can’t find one. Behold the humble pencil eraser, another item we take for granted until we need to erase what we just wrote and find we’ve made so many previous mistakes that the eraser is useless.

Just a pencil

 It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact birthday of the pencil. Man has been using various writing tools for ages, one of them was the stylus, and that was usually made of lead. The people at pencils.com tell us that in 1564, a large deposit of what was thought to be lead was discovered in England. It proved to be graphite, a form of carbon, a mineral that could be processed to form a writing or drawing stick. The first such sticks were wrapped with sheepskin, but soon there came the invention of the wood casing for the graphite. In the late seventeenth century, pencils went into mass production.

Shortly after the discovery of that graphite deposit, there were ideas for holders for replaceable pencil sticks, what we call leads. The earliest known mechanical pencil was found on a ship that sank in 1791. The first refillable mechanical pencil as we know it today was patented in England in 1822. Now there are custom mechanical pencils that sell for hundreds of dollars, not-so-humble solid gold versions that sell for thousands, and the ubiquitous plastic-barreled versions that sell for about five for a dollar. They all write well, they all have erasers. 

It isn’t difficult to pinpoint the exact birthday of the pencil eraser: March 30, 1858. On that day, the clever Hyman Lipman patented the first eraser attached to a pencil. This Philadelphian could be the hero of American school children, but not of European school children: most of their pencils are eraserless. (Pencil tops, caps, or separate blocks, we call them erasers. The British call them rubbers. We wear rubbers or rubber boots, they wear Wellies. But I digress…)

The spread of electronic communication has not diminished the need for pencils. The major pencil manufacturers report that worldwide sales are growing nicely. All this leads us to the fact that the “powers that be,” having an exact date for Lipman’s invention, declared March 30 to be National Pencil Day. Chew on a pencil to celebrate.

This could be a bunch from my husband's workshop.
All carpenters and woodworkers love pencil stubs

Pencil Trivia

·        Lead pencils are now made using a mixture of clay and graphite.

·        Hyman Lipman’s patent, sold for a small fortune, was later invalidated because it was deemed to be only a combination of two existing items.

·        Henry Thoreau, when he wasn’t writing, made pencils.

·        Though many authors preferred writing in pencil, John Steinbeck used over 300 pencils while writing one of his novels. (Who counted them?)

·        Eraser caps were invented to prolong the use of a pencil after its original eraser was worn away.

·        While colored pigments, chalks, and waxes were used for art work from ancient times, they didn’t appear in pencil form until the early twentieth century.

·        Common pencils can be used as pipe tobacco tampers, back scratchers, bookmarks, chignon holders, chopsticks, drum sticks, even splints. (Handy, aren’t they?)

·        One of the few sports that relies on pencils is golf, and golf pencils are short so that they fit easily in a pocket in the golfer’s pants or bag. They are handy to clean off golf cleats, and they’re eraserless, we suppose, to discourage cheating.