Pencils are accurate and precious instruments, they are economical and readily available for everyone, but it wasn’t always like that. In this entry I am going to share a bit of their story which includes – as expected – historical and political reasons.

Before the pencil as we know it today, there was an instrument called stylet, a metal stick that was used during Roman times to scrape the papyri. In later times, animal feathers were used together with ink, which constituted the prototype of the modern fountain pen.

It is therefore not strange that the Derwent brand feels so proud of its origins, since it was in Borrowdale, Cumberland (England) where the modern pencil was created. There was found a graphite stone deposit that turned out useful to mark sheeps. The Borrowdale deposit gave way to the discovery of other graphite stone deposits in the world, but none as big and solid as the Borrowdale one, not then, nor now. Graphite is hard, but it can be easily cut into bars. The chemicals of the time thought it was related to lead, so they originally called it plumbago. Even though nowadays we know these two materials have nothing to do with each other and graphite is harmless, we continue to use the word “lead” for the pencil’s pigment bar.

Graphite was originally treated as a valuable material, so it ended up being guarded by the British Crown. So valuable it was that smugglering was common. Whoever trafficked with it ended up with black hands, and thus the expression “black market” was created.

Since graphite is solid but fragile, it needed a coverage, and this was initially made of leather. Because of the purity of the Borrowdale deposits, England enjoyed the monopoly of manufacturing pencils for a while, which concluded when it was invented a system to reconstitute the graphite power. It was in 1662, in Nuremberg, (Germany) where it was initially manufactured a pulverized graphite lead using a mixture of antimonium and sulfur. The English pencils kept using the same formula of graphite bars until 1860.

In 1760, Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti from Italy substituted the leather covering the lead for a wood wrapping, thus creating the prototype of the carpenter’s pencil. The first pencils were oval and rounded, but the technique improved thanks to 2 cylindrical halves that held the lead inside and were glued together. This method is the one we still use nowadays.

While England and Germany already used pencils during wartime, French people didn’t enjoy that advantage. During the Napoleonic wars, an official called Nicolas-Jacques Conté invented a method to harden the pulverized graphite by mixing it with water and clay and baking it later. Conté believed to be the inventor of this method, but Josef Hardmuth (founder of Koh-I-Noor) had invented it in Austria five years prior (1790).

Meanwhile, the American settlers imported European pencils, a situation that continued until after the USA Independence War. It was in 1812 when the ebanist William Munroe created the first wood pencils in Concord, Massachussets. But his manufacturing process was slow so, in a nearby town, a miller called Ebenezer Wood automatized the process in his own mill which was in Nashoba, Acton. In this process he used the first circular saw and built the first hexagonal and octagonal barrels. Because he didn’t patent the idea and shared his techniques with whomever wanted to listen, Eberhard Faber, a New Yorker, became the leader in pencil manufacturing.

But the first pencil mass producer was Joseph Dixon in Massachussets, who was already an entrepeneur involved in the Tantiusques granite deposits. Thus, his company called Joseph Dixon Crucible became the biggest distributor and consumer of graphite in the world, and later changed the name to Dixon Ticonderoga, which is still used nowadays.

The wood pencil was soon improved with different features, such as Hymen Lipman’s eraser on top of the pencil in 1850.

The standard classification for pencils follows the European system of H (hard), B (bland) and F (fine), a system developed at the beginning of the XX century by an English manufacturer called Brookman. H pencil strokes are almost imperceptible on the paper, and they produce a sharp and thin stroke, ideal for sketches and technical drawing. B pencil, on the contrary, produce much softer strokes and smudges the paper, which makes it ideal for details and shadowing, especially in portraits and landscapes.

The system is at it follows:

9H  8H  7H  6H  5H  4H  3H  2H  H  F  HB  B  2B  3B  4B  5B  6B  7B  8B  9B

Where 9H is the hardest, HB is medium (considered the best one for writting) and 9B is the softest. This system is not unique, there are others with slightler variations.

There are brands such as Koh-I-noor that offers 20 gradations for their 1500 series, while other companies such as Staedtler use 19, all of them having the artist in mind as the main consumer, for whom it is necessary to dispose of a complete range of grey and black tones.

Regarding the outer shell of the pencil, there are also some interesting facts worth mentioning. Most of the pencils manufactured in the USA, for example, are painted in yellow because in 1890, the L&C Hardmuth company from Astrohungarian Empire introduced the Koh-I-Noor brand, named after the famous Indian jewel. The aim of comparing this jewel to the pencil was to produce the best existing pencil, and because most pencils at the time were painted in dark colours, yellow was an ideal colour to stand out from the rest (as well as looking like the Astrohungarian flag). It also suggested an Oriental overtone, because the best quality graphite at the time came from Siberia. Other companies soon adopted the same colour for their pencils to be associated to this quality brand and used Asian-inspired names for their brands, like Mikado or Mongol. German pencils, on the other hand, adopted the green colour to distinguish themselves from that trend.

Depending on the material, pencils are classified into: graphite pencils, carbon pencils, coloured pencils, grease pencils and water-colour pencils.

Graphite pencils are the original ones, and they are also the most common. They are made with a mixture of graphite and clay, and they vary from light grey to black. Their nature allow lighter strokes.

Carbon pencils are darker and richer than the graphite ones, but they are abrassive, softer, and therefore they smudge. They offer better lights and shadows than the graphite pencils.

Colour pencils have a wax or an oil-based lead together with pigments and other substances.

Grease pencils or Chinese markers write on any surface, such as plastic or glass, and they are commonly wrapped in paper, although they can be presented as a normal pencil, like for example the Koh-I-Noor ones.

Water-colour pencils are the alternative for traditional watercolours, but more accurate than those and better for detailed work. Plus, they can be used dried.

According to their usefulness, pencils are clasiffied into: carpenter’s pencils, copy pencils, colour erasable pencils, non-reproducible pencils, stenographers and golf pencils.

Carpenter’s pencils are oval (which prevents them from rolling) and possess a stronger lead than average.

Copy pencils are made of graphite with a touch of ink, which creates a stain that cannot be erased. They were invented during the XIX century for the printing press, as a substitute for the quill. Copy pencils traces cannot be discriminated from normal pencil traces, but once wet they dissolve and become a coloured ink that is transferred to another paper. These pencils were substituted by ball point pens.

Coloured erasable pencils are wax-based, but they can be easily erased. They are used in sketches and, since they smudge less than graphite pencils, they are the animator’s favourites.

Non-reproducible pencils are blue and they produce traces that cannot be reproduced by photoprinters.

Stenographers have a break-resistant lead and they sometimes can be sharpened from both sides.

Golf pencils are shorter than average, and they are cheap. They are the typical disposable pencils that are found in many libraries.

Depending on their shape, pencils can be classified into: triangulars, hexagonals, rounded, flexible (plastic), oval and irregular pencils.

In their modern version, pencils have gone mechanical with engines that push the lead through one hole to the extreme. They often include a removable eraser that covers the hole through which the leads are inserted. The leads can be of different thickness, and they can also be in the shape of traditional points. They are called everlasting pencils because they never have to be sharpened.
The thickness of the leads vary from 0,3 mm (the finest) to 1,6 mm, although there are bigger thickness available for illustration and designing purposes. Since these leads are thinner than those of the wood pencils they are easier to break, particularly if we press them too much against the paper. Because of this, the traditional pencil continues to be the favourite of many.

Sources: Wikipedia | ConArtecontemporaneo