User talk:Wsajid

Pencil History

Pencil

A pencil is a simple tool made of wood, lead, a rubber mechanism, a small piece of metal, and there you are. you now have what is known in so many different languages around the world, as a pencil.

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  The beginning pencil as we know it.

The History of the pencil goes far back. It was long ago that the ancient Romans held a so called pencil in their hands yet called it a stylus made basically of lead. But one of the most important things to know is that the pencil is not made of lead, since lead is poisonous. So as the story goes, this shiny black material called lead, was found in the small town of Borrowdale, England. Everyone in the town was amazed by this new found material, and started calling it “Plumbago” or “Black-lead.” This is how lead got its name. So now you might ask yourself, why do they use graphite instead of lead, well, thats simple. Lead is hard and can very easily break. Graphite is soft and easier to handle and put together. After this comes the very important characteristic of color.

A pencil as we know it is yellow. This is because during the 1800s, graphite came from China, and the manufacturers wanted a way to show this. The only way to do this was to paint the pencils yellow, which in China, stands for royalty and respect. The rest is history. Today, more than 75 percent of the pencils made in the United States are painted yellow.

A Pencil is made

We all use pencils, yet none of us know what it takes to make one pencil. Consider this, the materials used to make a pencil are found on 4 different continents. The wood comes from California and Oregon and is shipped to a mill in San Leandro. The graphite is mined in Ceyton, Sri Lanka which is mixed with the clay found in Mississippi. At this point, the lead is too soft, and thus treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats (Read 40). After this, all you have is a piece of wood, with a graphite material in the middle. But a pencil is not a pencil without its “crowning glory,” or commonly referred to as, the eraser. This rubbery material, which is made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride, is put on the top of a pencil. Now, you need something to hold the eraser in place, and this is where the small metal piecing comes in. This bit of metal, the ferrule, is brass from the metal making companies of Italy (Read 41). Put all of these components together and you have not only a genuine pencil made from materials that come from world-wide, but the hard work of millions of people who had a hand in its creation.

As you can see, the pencil has been very essential in history. It was there from the start, when the Romans first needed ways to establish one of the greatest empires in history, to serving people today as they write books and draw cartoons. How could one imagine to live without the pencil? Thats simple, you couldnt.Wsajid 00:47, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

References:

Petroski, Henry. The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumference. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1989.

Read, Leonard E. "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told To." The Freeman (1958): 40-42.

"The History of Pencils." The Pencil Pages! 2002. Incense Cedar Institute. 30 Sept. 2006 <http://www.pencils.com/>.