The pencil owes its lead to a guarded Cumbrian mine that was never lead
Around 1565, people near Seathwaite in Cumbria found a deposit of graphite so pure and solid it could be sawn into sticks. Nobody knew what it was, so they called it plumbago, lead ore. The name stuck, which is why we still talk about pencil lead, though a pencil has never contained any lead at all.
That Borrowdale deposit remains the only large one of solid graphite ever found, and it soon became precious for a reason unrelated to writing: graphite could line the moulds used to cast cannonballs. The Crown took over the mines and posted guards, and once enough had been stockpiled, the workings were flooded to deter thieves until more was needed. Graphite for pencils first had to be smuggled out of England, and because it is soft, early sticks were simply wrapped in string or sheepskin. Around 1560 an Italian couple, Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, hollowed out juniper to hold the core, and soon pencil makers were gluing two carved wooden halves around a graphite stick, much as they do today.
England kept a near monopoly until Nuremberg craftsmen worked out a way to reconstitute powdered graphite in 1662, using sulphur and antimony. The real breakthrough came from war. Cut off from both English and German pencils by the British naval blockade, France turned to Nicolas-Jacques Conté, an officer in Napoleon's army. In 1795 he mixed graphite powder with clay, shaped rods and fired them in a kiln, discovering that changing the ratio changed the hardness. The Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth had found the same method a few years before, and it is still used.
Americans took it from there. Benjamin Franklin advertised imported pencils in 1729, and William Munroe, a Concord cabinetmaker, made the first American wooden ones in 1812; the philosopher Henry David Thoreau later worked out how to make good pencils from poor graphite for his father's firm. By the end of the century Americans used over 240,000 pencils a day, and when red cedar ran short, makers salvaged it from old fences and barns.
Hymen Lipman patented the attached eraser on 30 March 1858 and sold the rights for 100,000 dollars, but the Supreme Court later ruled the patent invalid. Today more than 14 billion pencils are made each year.
Source: Pencil
