National Pencil Day – March 30, 2023

History of National Pencil Day

Who would have thought that a graphite core closed inside a wooden casing could perform such numerous and extremely important tasks? 

Before the invention of the pencil as we know it, people still wrote, only, they used things like a fine brush of camel hair or the stylus (ancient Romans). Back in the 1st century B.C., the Greek poet Philip of Thessaloníki wrote about ‘leaden writing instruments’.

Pencils are one of the first writing tools and they are known to have originated in the 16th century when the world discovered graphite. This crystallized form of carbon was found somewhere around 1565 or even earlier, near Keswick, England. Legend says a storm uprooted a tree here, and clinging to the tree roots was a shiny black substance — graphite! There is no evidence that this is how graphite was discovered; what we do know is that this site was transformed into a commercial graphite mine a few decades later. This is around the time people began using a piece of graphite wrapped in a string to write.

18th-century German chemist A. G. Werner was responsible for naming it ‘graphite’, from the Greek word ‘graphein,’ which means ‘to write’. In the early days after the discovery, local shepherds were the only ones using graphite to mark their sheep. Because it looked so much like lead, people would call it plumbago — the Latin word for lead, i.e., ‘plumbus’ — or even ‘black lead’. This connotation stuck to graphite, and consequently, pencils too.

After Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his drawing of a strip of graphite inside a tube of wood, the ‘pencil’ began to spread throughout Europe. Britain still had a monopoly over pencil making, and graphite, at this time. By 1794, however, France was cut off from this supply of pencils due to their war with Britain. Thus, French engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté was responsible for inventing ‘Crayons Conté’, which was low-quality graphite mixed with clay, shaped into rods, and baked. Continental pencil makers no longer needed to rely on the British for pencils.

Conté’s invention spurred more innovation in the world of pencil making. Germany, France, America — each country conducted their own experiments, and pencil making became commonplace around the globe. These pencils were great, but the wood around was not. In fact, it was often of low quality. Soon, people hit upon the idea of painting pencils to mask the quality of the wood. Only the fanciest pencils went unpainted. And then, at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, an Austro-Hungarian pencil company unveiled a new luxury pencil — which was painted yellow. It was named Koh-I-Noor after the largest and best diamond in the world. Because of this, yellow came to be associated with quality, and many other pencil makers picked up this color to adorn their pencils. Even today, the U.S. paints pencils and other writing instruments yellow to represent quality.

And what about, the mistakes people made while writing? Before there were erasers, people would rub out mistakes using balled-up lumps of old bread. Then, in 1770, a clergyman-chemist named Joseph Priestley noticed the gum harvested from trees in South America was very good at removing pencil marks. Because people had to rub to remove the marks, this gum was named ‘rubber’.

Germany gave birth to the mass-production of pencils, with companies like Faber-Castell, Staedtler, and Lyra that produced pencils in bulk. In Massachusetts, the Dixon Ticonderoga Company began manufacturing pencils in the 19th century. By the late 19th century, pencils were widely being used in the U.S. The most famously used wood for pencils was red cedar because of its aroma and quality.

On March 30, 1858, Hymen Lipman patented the ‘modern pencil.’ It was a wooden graphite pencil with a rubber eraser attached, which he later sold to Joseph Reckendorfer for $100,000. 

Since then, the manufacturing of pencils hasn’t stopped and there are billions of pencils being made and sold around the world. There are so many types of pencils including graphite pencils, charcoal pencils, grease pencils, and watercolor pencils.