Pencil Drawing
A History of the Pencil
If you have a pencil nearby, pick it up and look at it closely. You might note its hexagonal or its round sides. You might note a piece of crimped metal holding an eraser to one end, or you might note that your pencil has no eraser. You might note its yellow color, or its blue color, or its black color, or another color.
You might note the text running along a side of the pencil, text that includes the name of the company that made it, or the country in which the pencil was made. You might note a barcode or serial number. You might also note an individual number or a letter and number combination. If you have a yellow writing pencil, it probably has the number 2. If you have a drawing pencil, it might have an H or a B, probably preceded by a number.
If you look even closer at the sharpened end of the pencil, you might note the thin gray graphite cylinder extending forward from the pencil’s wooden case, and you might see that the wood has a slight texture or a barely visible grain. You might even note a very thin line running down opposite sides of the visible wood or a slight variation in the coloring of two sides of the wood.
We tend to take common items for granted because we are so used to having them in our lives, but those common items have a history. Those commons items, even pencils, did not just come into existence at once, but evolved over time. The pencil, for example, has a complex history that dates back five centuries. As we look at the history of the pencil, we will see just how complex and important this basic drawing and writing tool truly is.
Our history begins with the graphite, the part of the pencil that makes the physical marks on a piece of paper or other surface. In the 16th century, a deposit of fine, high quality graphite was discovered in Cumbria, in the northern part of England. When the graphite was discovered, people believed that it was a form of lead, and they used the term plumbago to label it. Plumbago was derived from the Latin word for “lead,” plumbum. It was not until later that scientists discovered that graphite was made of carbon. We still, however, sometimes refer to the graphite in pencils as lead, a carryover from earlier times. The term graphite comes from the German word Graphit and dates back to the late 1700s; the term was derived from the Greek word for “write,” graphein.
After its discovery, people developed a variety of uses for this fine graphite, including its use in a compressed form as a tool for writing or drawing. Because graphite was messy, writers and artists would wrap it with string or sheepskin in order to hold it. By the 1600s, inventive minds came up with other ways to hold the pencil. Conrad Gessner, for example, developed an idea in the mid-17th century for a wood pencil holder. It was not like our modern wood pencils, but it was an early idea for using wood to contain the graphite.
The earliest forms of our modern pencil were developed in Europe around the turn of the 19th century. In France in 1795, Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1804) was asked to develop a better writing tool using the graphite to which the French had access. Six years after the French Revolution began, England had placed a shipping blockade around the French coast. The French Republic had started fighting with its neighbors in Europe, and the British worked to weaken their position with the blockade. As a result, France did not have regular access to England’s graphite pencils.
In response, Conté experimented with the graphite that he did have access to, mixing it with clay and pressing it into thin cylinders in between two pieces of wood. If you noted a fine line on opposite sides of your pencil’s wood or a slight difference in color between two sides of the wood, that is because your pencil is also made from two pieces of wood pressed together around a thin graphite cylinder.
As he mixed the graphite with clay, Conté noticed that the graphite-clay combinations led to different values for the pencil marks. The pencils with more graphite and less clay made darker marks than the pencils with more clay and less graphite. Conté would developed pencils in a variety of values and even three different colors: black, red, and gray.
At approximately the same time, an Austrian architect and inventor named Joseph Hardtmuth also experimented with mixing graphite and clay to create pencils. Having started his own stationary company in 1790, Hardtmuth patented his pencil developments in 1802. In order to differentiate the values of the pencils, the company came up with a labeling system with numbers and letters (H and B and F). H may have originally stood for Hardtmuth, B for Budejovice (the city in which a new factory was built in the mid-1800s), and F for Franz (Joseph’s grandson who was an engineer and who improved the process for making pencils).
Other companies soon began using this system. Today, we refer to H as meaning “hard” because the lead is harder, containing more clay and less graphite. The higher the number before the H, the harder and lighter the lead. We refer to B as “black” or “bold” because the lead is softer and contains more graphite, leaving a darker mark on the drawing surface. The higher the number before the B, the softer and darker the lead. An HB pencil is essentially in-between the lighter and darker pencils. The F pencil is still produced and is often placed between the H and HB on the value scale. We sometimes refer to the F as “fine.”
The Hardtmuth company is also responsible for yellow being the most popular color for pencils. Near the end of the 1800s, Hardtmuth began marketing a newer style of pencil which it called the Koh-I-Noor (“mountain of light” in Persian). Koh-I-Noor was the name of a very precious diamond that was part of the English royal crown. Both diamonds and graphite are made from carbon, and Hardtmuth decided to emphasize that idea with this name. Hardtmuth also chose to emphasize the quality of the new pencil by painting it yellow. The new pencil lead was made from graphite mined in eastern Russia, north of China. Making a connection to Chinese tradition, Hardtmuth decided to color the pencil yellow because yellow was connected to Chinese royalty. Not long after, other companies began making yellow pencils as well.
In the United States in the early 1800s, there were several companies making pencils though not of good quality when compared to the better European makers. That began to change when a deposit of good quality graphite was discovered near Bristol, New Hampshire, by Charles Dunbar. Dunbar soon went into business with his brother-in-law, John Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1823, Thoreau began making a better quality pencil by compressing the graphite with bayberry wax or spermaceti as a binder holding the graphite together.
John Thoreau’s son, David Henry Thoreau, worked in the family business while growing up; the business was located behind their house. The pencil-making company helped put David Henry through Harvard University; he would switch his first and middle names around after graduation and had a brief stint as a teacher before returning to the family business in the 1830s. Researching the developments of the pencil in Europe while at Harvard, Henry David Thoreau began experimenting with pencil lead himself, creating different combinations of graphite and clay which led to better quality pencils. Later on in his life, Henry David Thoreau would write a variety of poetic, philosophical, and environmental works, including Walden.
Thoreau’s experiments with graphite and clay would lead to the system of numbering pencils 1 through 4, the system that we use primarily in the United States, especially for writing pencils. The number 1 pencil is the darkest; the number 4 is the lightest. You might even find a 2.5 pencil. The number 2 pencil that most of us use for writing, however, is the most common.
If you look at a number 2 writing pencil, you might note the letters HB on the pencil as well. In this case, the company is stating that their number 2 pencil is approximately the same value as an HB pencil. Different companies use slightly different mixtures of graphite and clay (and possibly other ingredients such as wax), so their pencil leads may not create the same values as another company’s equivalent pencils. In the art room here, we have Dixon Ticonderoga writing pencils, and General’s and Blick Studio drawing pencils. The writing pencils have erasers; the drawing pencils do not.
In the art room, we use erasers that are separate from the pencils, especially kneaded erasers. The crimped metal holding erasers to the end of writing pencils dates back to the mid-1800s. Erasers are made primarily of rubber, although they may have other ingredients. If the rubber is mixed chemically with sulfur and heated to a higher temperature (vulcanized), it becomes more solid. Rubber car tires, for example, are vulcanized to make them strong. Solid erasers have been vulcanized so that they retain their shape. Kneaded erasers have not been vulcanized so they can be twisted and reshaped. By twisting and reshaping kneaded erasers, we are able to clean and reuse them many times.
Rubber itself was used by Native Americans such as the Maya several centuries ago. Among other things, the Maya used rubber to make balls for a game they had developed. By the 1770s, some Europeans began using rubber as an eraser. Edward Nairne is often credited with marketing rubber as an eraser, selling small cubes of rubber for that purpose. Before rubber erasers, writers and artists used breadcrumbs to remove marks they did not want on their papers. Seeing its use as an eraser in the 1770s, the scientist Joseph Priestley (who is better known for isolating and categorizing eight gases, including oxygen) used the word “rubber” to describe these new erasers because they rubbed the marks off of the paper surface. In England, you will still hear people use the term rubber instead of eraser. Today, some erasers are made from synthetic (manmade chemical) rubber, vinyl, or similar materials.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of the pencil, take a look at your own pencil again. Do you see the parts of the pencil in a different way? Do you know what pencil lead is made of? Do you know what that number or that number-letter combination on your pencil means? Do you know what that eraser is made of, if there is one? Can you walk up to another person and tell them something about the pencil that they probably did not know before?
Sources for further reading:
A thorough study of the history of the pencil: Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (Knopf, 1990)
A short video on the pencil: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/11/492999969/origin-of-pencil-lead
An online article about Thoreau and pencils: https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/thoreau-pencil-wrote-paid-walden/
An image of a Thoreau Pencil from the New York City Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/40f7c3b0-7a59-0132-6cf1-58d385a7b928#/?uuid=40f7c3b0-7a59-0132-6cf1-58d385a7b928
Video on pencil manufacturing by Insider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqs3fxfmWr4