The yellow pencil has a murky origin. One account says a Koh-I-Noor pencil shown at the 1889 Paris World's Fair was painted yellow, perhaps to honor the Austro-Hungarian flag, and that copycats followed. Another account dates the Koh-I-Noor to 1890 and says only that the color may have been inspired by the flag. The two accounts differ by a year, and neither says for certain why yellow was chosen beyond that possible link to the flag. Pencils were originally painted to mask the low quality of their wood, and only the fanciest ones went unvarnished; one account says yellow then became linked with quality after the Koh-I-Noor, until copycats painted their own pencils yellow too, which is how a signal of luxury became ordinary.
The metal in the name has an equally tangled history. One history says graphite was first discovered in Europe in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century; because people thought it was a form of lead, it was called plumbago, a word that shares its root with plumber, or black lead; it was named graphite only in 1789. In 1779, German chemist K. W. Scheele had shown that the black material was pure carbon, so the lead in a pencil has never contained the metal lead, whatever the old name implied. Even the word pencil changed meaning; it comes from the Latin pencillus, meaning little tail, a small ink brush used in the Middle Ages. Until the end of the 1700s, pencil more often meant a brush, especially a small one; the lead pencil took its name from the lead point it replaced and is first heard of in the 1560s. Greeks and Romans drew faint lines on papyrus with flat pieces of lead, and the earliest direct ancestor of today's pencil appeared in the late 1400s.
The tool itself was assembled slowly. Surveyors and artists wrapped sticks of graphite in string or sheepskin, and in 1565 a Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner, drew a strip of graphite inside a wooden tube, the earliest known picture of a wooden pencil. In the 1790s, with France cut off from English graphite, Nicolas-Jacques Conté mixed poorer graphite with clay. Because the cores are made from clay and graphite, hardness is a choice, not a fixed trait. German makers tried different clay and graphite proportions after Conté and made softer and harder pencils that left darker or lighter marks. Today a maker simply adjusts the clay-to-graphite ratio to set the grade; the letters stand for that choice: H means hard and B means black, with HB in the middle, and the higher the B number, the more graphite is left on the paper; the grade on the barrel is therefore a statement about a recipe, not about the mineral.
An eraser completes the system by friction. Most erasers are rubber or vinyl, which grip graphite better than paper does. Rubbing loosens the graphite, and the eraser picks it up and sheds small crumbs. Before rubber, people used balled-up lumps of bread; the American Hymen Lipman received a patent in 1858 for attaching an eraser to a pencil, which put the correction on the same stick as the mistake.
Colored pencils follow the same path with a different core: pigments or dyes and a binder replace the graphite, clay and gum are added to the pigment as bonding agents, and the mixture is soaked in wax for smoothness. People also wanted pencils that never needed sharpening; the first patent for a refillable pencil with a lead-propelling mechanism was issued in Britain in 1822. In a mechanical pencil, twisting the cap moves a rod down a spiral and pushes the lead toward the tip. Whatever the case around it, even the pencils that do away with the wooden case still rest on a core of marking material that is made by recipe. The pencil therefore remains a product of choices about recipes, binders and coatings rather than of a single raw material.
Words to know
- plumbago: old name
- friction: rubbing force
- papyrus: reed paper
- mechanical: machine-like
