The Forgotten History of the Pencil

The pencil is an object of such daily ubiquity that it is easy to assume it has always existed. It has not. The pencil as we know it is roughly four hundred and thirty years old. It was invented twice, in roughly its current form, in two different countries by people who could not have known about each other's work. It was at the center of a serious industrial-secrets controversy. It was reformulated during the Napoleonic Wars by a chemist working under blockade, in a chemical solution that is essentially still the formula on every modern HB pencil. And it was perfected as an industrial product in the United States by Henry David Thoreau, who is better known for a book that does not mention pencils at all.

The story begins in 1564, in a place called Borrowdale in the English Lake District, when (according to the local tradition) a violent storm uprooted a tree and exposed a strange black material in the ground beneath. The material was soft, marked paper, and seemed at first to be a kind of lead. It was not lead; it was a deposit of unusually pure graphite, the only large surface deposit of its kind ever found anywhere in the world. The Borrowdale graphite was so pure and so easy to work that it could be sawn directly into thin sticks for writing, with no further processing required.

The locals first used it to mark sheep, but within a generation it was being shipped to London for use as a writing implement. By the early seventeenth century, the Borrowdale mine was under royal control, with armed guards on the road, time-locked storehouses, and a tightly controlled extraction schedule (the mine was opened, on average, only once every five years, to prevent the market from being flooded and the graphite from being smuggled). The English government understood, even before there was a clear theory of why, that this graphite was a strategic resource and that the world had nothing else like it.

The wood-cased innovation

The first wooden case for graphite seems to have appeared in Italy, around 1565, in the form of a juniper sleeve carved to hold a stick of Borrowdale graphite. The reason was practical: pure graphite is dirty and fragile, and a wooden sleeve protects both the graphite and the user's hands. The Italian innovation was independent of the English supply situation, but it depended on the English supply: there was no alternative graphite of comparable purity, so every wooden-cased pencil in seventeenth-century Europe was a vehicle for Borrowdale material.

The bottleneck created by single-source supply produced predictable consequences. Smuggling was endemic; the English government raised the penalties periodically, eventually making graphite theft a hanging offence. Counterfeit graphite (mixed with various binders to extend the volume) appeared on the continental market. By the middle of the eighteenth century, demand had outstripped supply: the European pencil-using public was larger than Borrowdale could supply, and the alternatives were of poor quality.

The French breakthrough

The decisive innovation came in 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars, when the British blockade made it impossible for France to import English graphite. Napoleon's government commissioned a chemist named Nicolas-Jacques Conté to develop a substitute. Conté's solution was elegant: he took graphite powder (lower-quality graphite, available from continental sources), mixed it with clay, and fired the mixture in a kiln. The result was a synthetic graphite that could be produced from inferior source material, in any desired hardness (controlled by the clay-to-graphite ratio), in any desired length and diameter.

The Conté process is essentially still the modern process. The "lead" in a modern HB pencil is a fired ceramic of graphite and clay, with the proportions determining the hardness grade. The "B" series uses more graphite (softer, darker); the "H" series uses more clay (harder, lighter). The standard HB is the rough midpoint. The grading scheme proliferated through the nineteenth century into the modern system that runs from 9H to 9B, with most school pencils being HB or 2B and most artist's pencils ranging from 4H to 6B.

Conté patented the process and founded a company that still bears his name. The patent expiration in the 1810s meant that pencil-making became globally open: anyone with access to graphite, clay, a kiln, and wood could now produce pencils. The result was a explosion of pencil production across Europe, particularly in southern Germany (the Faber company, founded 1761, became dominant) and northern Bavaria.

The American story and Thoreau

The American pencil industry begins in 1812 with William Munroe, a Concord cabinetmaker who started making pencils as a side business. The Munroe pencils were mediocre because the available American graphite was poor and the American clay was inconsistent. The breakthrough came when John Thoreau, a fellow Concord cabinetmaker, started his own pencil business in 1823.

John Thoreau's son Henry David Thoreau (yes, the same one) joined the family business in his twenties and became its technical lead. Thoreau studied the Conté process, experimented with American graphite sources (he eventually settled on a deposit from New Hampshire), and developed a kiln-firing technique that produced pencils competitive with the German imports. By the late 1830s, Thoreau pencils were considered the best made in America. Thoreau personally engineered an improved grinding mill that produced finer graphite powder than the existing American methods, and he developed a grading system for the firm's products that anticipated the modern hardness scale.

Thoreau's pencil work funded his subsequent literary career. The cabin at Walden Pond was paid for, in part, by pencil money. Walden contains exactly zero references to pencils. The pencil business continued under his sister and brother-in-law for decades after his death.

The wood and the slat

The other half of the modern pencil is the wood. The standard wood for premium pencils, from the late nineteenth century onward, was a Western North American conifer called incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens). Incense cedar has a particular property that makes it ideal for pencils: it cuts cleanly across the grain without splintering, which is essential because a pencil sharpener cuts the wood at an angle that would shred most softwoods. It also has a faint aromatic quality that pencil users came to associate with the object itself.

The supply of incense cedar in California became, by the early twentieth century, a strategic concern for the global pencil industry. The Eberhard Faber company maintained dedicated forests in California specifically to ensure long-term supply. When the supply tightened in the 1960s, manufacturers experimented with alternatives: some moved to other cedars (Eastern red cedar, which is technically a juniper); some moved to plantation-grown plywood; and the cheapest pencils today use wood-pulp-and-resin composites that simulate the look of wood but are extruded around the lead like plastic.

The standard pencil-making technique, called slat-making, has changed remarkably little since the late nineteenth century. A block of cedar is sawn into thin slats. The slats are grooved on one side. Graphite-clay rods are laid into the grooves. A second slat, also grooved, is glued on top. The resulting sandwich is sawn lengthwise into individual pencil blanks. The blanks are shaped (round, hexagonal, or triangular), painted, branded, and tipped with a ferrule and eraser. The whole process is mechanically straightforward; the chemistry is in the lead, the supply chain is in the wood.

What the pencil teaches

The lesson the pencil offers, four hundred years on, is that even the simplest objects depend on remarkably specific conditions. The Borrowdale deposit was a freak. The Conté process was a wartime accident. The American industry was bootstrapped by a New Hampshire graphite vein and a Concord cabinetmaker's son. The incense cedar industry was an early example of vertical integration around a strategic raw material. None of this had to happen in the order it did; if any one of these threads had snapped, pencil-making would have looked very different.

And the pencil is a reminder that obsolescence is not always a one-way trip. The pencil was the dominant writing tool for three centuries; it was supposedly going to be displaced by the typewriter, then the ballpoint pen, then the personal computer, then the touchscreen. It has not been displaced. Schools still buy them by the billion, drafters still use them, woodworkers still use them, and they continue to be made by methods that would be familiar to a Bavarian craftsman of 1850. Some objects are well enough designed that the next thing has to be quite a lot better to win, and "next thing" is not always available.