Imagine you are a gentleman living in the 1800s. You are an important man, and it is always necessary to have the means to take a note, or write a note to a colleague or friend. Yet carrying a pen is difficult, as the nib tends to poke holes in your pocket, and pencils leave stains. Luckily, your wife solved the problem on your last birthday, presenting you with a small, but very elegant mechanical pencil which fits neatly in your waistcoat pocket, and does not cause any staining. Best of all, there is a ring attached to the top to ensure the pencil is easily found, hanging from your watch chain. You are lucky to have such a thoughtful wife!
When I showed the children this small, silver pencil, they thought it was ‘cute, but useless’. They are used to large pencils, with long, sharp ‘leads’ to write with and this pencil seemed far too small to ever be of use as it was too small to even sit comfortably in the hands of young children. They were also confused about how to make the lead protrude, and therefore wrote the pencil off. When I showed them that not only did the pencil have a thick lead which poked out of the end when needed, but also extended to a more comfortable size, the children were very impressed by the thoughtfulness of the design, and several decreed that ‘on second thoughts, I want one!’
Pencils have a remarkably long history, with humans using some sort of ‘writing’ implement as far back as ancient times to leave marks on the walls of caves. The pencil as we know it though traces its roots back to the Roman empire and the Roman stylus. The stylus was a thin, metal rod used to leave a light mark on papyrus or other material. Some styluses were actually made of lead, and this is what we still call the core of a pencil, though it is not what is actually inside! Pencils actually have a core of graphite, which came into popular use in about 1564, when a large deposit of graphite was found in Borrowdale in England. Graphite left a darker mark than lead, but it was fragile and broke easily. It needed some sort of case to keep it safe and prevent it being broken.
At first, pencils using graphite were made by wrapping the graphite stick in string, but soon hollowed out wooden sticks were used to hold the graphite core – thus the wooden cased pencil which we still use today was born. Wood was not the only substance which could be used to keep the graphite safe in a pencil though. By the late 19th century mechanical pencils had become popular. At this time, pencils were used everyday by people, and messages were often received by a person in the same town within hours of the message being sent. Having a pencil and paper on your person was, of course, useful. Mechanical pencils were perfect for this, as they used metal bodies to keep the core of graphite safe. They couldn’t be sharpened in the usual way though, and so systems were devised where the core would be raised and lowered with a twist of the shaft or a press of a spring. Many of these pencils were very small and had a loop on the end, like the one I showed the children. These pencils were very popular, fitting on a watch chain, or for a lady on a chatelaine, and being easily found and used.