Pencil Day!

sjmuseum

Mar 30

Did you know that 30 March is Pencil day? In this blog post Sarah Dale has been finding out more about this important writing tool, and we take a close look at Johnson's own pencil from our collection

The pencil is an under-rated invention, and deserves both to be more celebrated and to have its own special day. Samuel Johnson gives three definitions for the noun pencil in his dictionary:

A small brush of hair which painters dip in their colours

A black lead pen, with which cut to a point they write without ink

Any instrument of writing without ink

Johnson's Dictionary

The etymology is from Latin, penicillus, painter's brush, diminutive of peniculus, little tail (and closely related to Latin penis, originally meaning tail). So "pencil" is a good example of a word whose meaning has been changed to accommodate a new invention, in just the same way that "plastic", defined by Johnson as an adjective meaning having the power to give form, has come to mean a whole new class of material first invented by Leo Baekeland in 1907.

The earlier relative of what we now call a pencil was a metal point stylus, often made of lead, tin or silver and used for writing on soft surfaces such as wax, drawing lines and under drawing on parchment and drawing on prepared paper. These worked because the soft metal left lines on the drawing surface. An example of this technique is Albrecht Durer's Self-Portrait at the Age of 13, dated 1484, drawn in silverpoint

Albrecht Durer's Self-Portrait at the Age of 13, dated 1484 https://www.albertina.at/en/collections/drawings-prints/

The history of the humble pencil throws an interesting sidelight on the history of Europe, with important discoveries being made by English, German, Italian and French inventors and manufacturers, often driven by scarcity caused by wars and social upheaval.

The pencil that we know and love today owes its origins to the discovery in 1565 of a large deposit of graphite on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale, Cumbria. This deposit was very pure and solid and could easily be sawn into sticks. Remarkably, this is still the only large scale deposit of graphite in this form ever found. The science of chemistry hadn't developed enough at this period for people to know exactly what this mineral was, so it was thought to be a form of lead, as this was what it looked like and was called plumbago, Latin for "lead ore". It's because of this that the black core of a pencil is called a lead, even though no lead is actually involved. The words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (peann luaidhe) and Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raṣāṣ) literally mean "lead pen".

In fact graphite is a pure form of carbon and chemically identical to diamond – in terms of physical structure. However, in other ways they are very different, as will be immediately obvious if you have a diamond ring to hand and compare it closely with the inside bit of your pencil!

People quickly realised how useful graphite was, mainly because it could be used to line cannonball moulds, so the mines were taken over by the Crown and guarded. Safeguarding supplies was taken extremely seriously, and when sufficient stores of graphite had been dug out the mines were flooded until more was needed.

Although it was clear that graphite was also very useful for drawing cannonball moulds had priority and for some time graphite for pencils had to be smuggled. Also, because graphite is very soft it has to be wrapped in something to make it into a usable writing tool. The first solution was to wrap the sticks in string or sheepskin. In around 1560 an Italian couple, Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, came up with what are probably the first blueprints for a modern-style wood-encased pencil. The first solution was to hollow out a juniper stick and insert the graphite into that. It was then discovered that it was easier to carve 2 wooden halves, put the "lead" in the middle and glue the wood together. This is the way most modern pencils are made

Pencil manufacturing. The top sequence shows the old method that needed pieces of graphite to be cut to size; the lower sequence is the current method using rods of graphite and clay.

Thanks to the Cumbrian graphite mine England enjoyed a pencil monopoly until 1662, when a German innovator in Nuremburg found a way of making graphite powder into solid sticks by mixing it with sulphur and antimony. Original English square cut pencils including "leads" cut from natural graphite were made until the 1860s. Pencils are still made in a factory in Keswick, which is on the same site as the Derwent Pencil Museum.

The beautifully situated Derwent Pencil Museum in Cumbria

During the French Revolutionary Wars (1792 – 1799) closely followed by the Napoleonic Wars (1800 – 1815), France, under British naval blockage, was unable to access either Cumbrian pure graphite pencils or the (rather inferior) German substitute. Necessity being the mother of invention, in 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté, an officer in Napoleon's army, worked out a way to mix powdered graphite with clay and form the mixture into rods that could then be baked in a kiln. One advantage of this technique was that by varying the ratio of graphite to clay the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied. This method had been independently discovered earlier by an Austrian, Joseph Hardtmuth, who founded the Koh-I-Noor Company in 1790. The Koh-I-Noor Company patented the process in 1802.

While in England, pencils continued to be made from whole sawn graphite, Henry Bessemer's first successful invention in 1838 was a method of compressing graphite powder into solid graphite which made it possible to reuse what had previously been a waste product. When you look at the end of your pencil (especially if it's been made in the UK or Europe) you will usually see 2 capital letters, H and B, either together or singly preceded by a number from 2 - 9. H stands for Hardness and B for Blackness, while the higher the number the more of that particular quality the pencil has. So, for example, an HB pencil is an average writing pencil, while a 9H would be very hard, producing a fine, light line and a 9B very soft, making a wider, darker line that will also tend to smudge. This classification has been used from at least as early as 1844.

A final fun pencil fact is that during the Second World War the Cumberland Pencil Factory made secret map and compass pencils for airmen – both map and compass were concealed in the pencil.

The theme of concealment brings us back to Samuel Johnson and his own pencil from the Birthplace Museum collection. Hidden in the top of the binding of his Moroccan-bound writing tablets is the holder for a pencil. These tablets are pocket-sized and marked with days of the week, with a reusable surface. It is incredible to think that Johnson may have pulled this out and used the cut pencil it would have contained to jot down his thoughts and reminders.