From a Shepherd's Mark to a Pencil

It is hard to think of an object more ordinary than the pencil, yet few everyday tools have a more interesting past. Its story begins in the sixteenth century, after a storm in the English county of Cumbria is said to have uprooted a tree, uncovering a dark, shiny mineral in the ground beneath. The local shepherds soon discovered that it left clear, black marks, and they began using lumps of it to label their sheep. The mineral turned out to be graphite, a form of carbon that was extraordinarily pure in that particular valley, Borrowdale. It was so valuable that the mine was guarded, and the graphite was taken out only at certain times of the year. Early users found it too soft and dirty to hold directly, so they wrapped it in string or sheepskin, and later set thin sticks of it into wooden holders. This is the origin of the modern pencil, although the confusing English word "lead" has never gone away. People used to believe that graphite was a kind of lead, and the old name has simply stuck. The next breakthrough came in 1795, when the French inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté devised a new method. Supplies of English graphite were difficult to obtain at the time, so he ground low-quality graphite into powder, mixed it with clay, shaped it into rods and baked them in a kiln. By adjusting the proportion of clay, he could control the hardness of the finished product, which is why we can choose between soft pencils for shading and hard pencils for fine lines. A similar system of hardness grades is still marked on pencils today. The pencil had already acquired its wooden coat by then, but the final addition was surprisingly late. In 1858, an American named Hymen Lipman received a patent for a pencil with a small piece of rubber fixed to one end. Not everyone welcomed the idea; some people felt that a writer who needed an eraser was admitting to carelessness. Nevertheless, the design proved so practical that it spread worldwide. The word "pencil" itself comes from the Latin for "little tail", a name originally given to a fine artist's paintbrush. It is a reminder that many things we take for granted have been shaped slowly, by accidents, shortages and a great deal of ingenuity.