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WOODEN PENCIL
Tim Harford in his ‘50 Things’ BBC Radio 4 programmes recounts a 1958 essay ‘I Pencil‘ by Leonard Read who used this simple object to illustrate the complex supply chains that he saw as a ‘triumph of modern capitalism’.
Graphite from Sri Lanka was combined with Mississippi clay and tallow then reacted with sulphuric acid to form the lead. The cedar wood casing was from a tree felled, sawn, seasoned and machined before being assembled in the pencil factory. The many layers of paint had to be formulated, blended and applied. This pencil had a metal ferule mined, smelted, formed, coated and pressed. This supported the eraser which was not a rubber but made from rapeseed oil and sulphur chloride, coloured with cadmium sulphide and mixed with Italian pumice. All of these elements required excavation and refining before being prepared, shaped and assembled.
According to microblife.in !4,00,000,000 pencils are used world wide every year. It has been calculated that about a 170,000 pencils can be made from one tree so this represents some 82,000 trees.
HISTORY
Around 1560 an Italian couple, Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, made the first wood-encased pencil. They hollowed out a juniper twig and inserted a stick of natural graphite.
In 1795 Nicolas-Jaques Conte discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay which could be formed into a long cylindrical lead. Joseph Dixon then mass produced the first wooden pencil in 1829 and, in 1858, Hyman Lipman received a patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil.
MAKING
A timber plank is machined to produce a series of grooves on one side. The moulded leads are inserted into the grooves and an identical timber half glued on the other side. These blocks are then dried, shaped and cut into individual pencils before they are painted or varnished.
DRAWING
The minute forms of the shiny brass cylinder which holds the rubber must be carefully noted, along with the bright highlights and the deep shadows which convey the metallic quality. These are contrasted by the soft rounded shape of the worn rubber. The light falling on the hexagonal shaft denotes the structure and emphasises the edges. As this pencil is well used the chips and scratches are important features.
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The wooden pencil provides a cheap and robust writing implement that is easy to use and simple to maintain. Mellissa Gouty on the medium.com website writes ‘they don’t bleed, burst, run dry or freeze like pens do’. They have, therefore, empowered people and improved literacy across the world. They have also provided the ideal writing tool for many famous authors including John Steinbeck who used up 300 pencils writing East of Eden.
It is, however, an urban myth that whilst the USA spent millions developing a pen that would work in space the Russians simply used a pencil. Scientific American tells us this is unfounded as both used pencils in early missions. Pencil leads can break and graphite dust is highly conductive so in a low gravity situation this could easily damage vital electric connections. We also learn that since the late 1960’s both American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have used the Fisher Space Pen rather than a pencil.