The Invention of the Pencil

 In 1795, Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist in the army, invented the pencil for Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot. At the time in France, graphite stopped getting imported, so he asked Conte to make a pencil that did not rely on imports. The word pencil comes from Latin for “little tail .”It was called this to resemble the fine brush for painting using camel hair. Before the modern pencil was invented, people used lumps of lead. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Jan van Eyck would use a silverpoint drawing technique involving various types of metalpoint.

Graphite was first discovered in North England accidentally by Edward Acheson. It looked like coal, yet would not burn, and It was very soft. It was so soft that it needed something to hold it. The first wooden holder was born and could efficiently fit the graphite. The first pencil factory opened in 1832, named Banks, Son & Co; now it is called Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company.

Making a pencil first required “roasting a mixture of water, clay, and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal, or round, depending on the pencil’s intended use. The hardness or softness of the final pencil ‘lead’ can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture”. People loved the pencil because you did not have to have any worries as you did with a quill pen. It did not spill ink and was a lot clearer and darker. One of the significant advances is that it was erasable; even though the eraser was not added to pencils until 1858, you could erase the graphite with bread crumbs!

The pencil changed the world and how we communicate in many different ways. It gave ordinary people the ability to write, helping bring about the Renaissance; they could now have the ability to write down and come up with new ideas. Some other ways are that people can directly send letters to anyone they want, which is much cheaper than other options. It solved many problems for the everyday person so they could not do what only the rich could. Quill pens were hard to make because the feathers were from different birds. The ink was hard to make and unavailable for some people. The pencil made it easy for anyone to come up with new ideas, and with the pencil came a lot of new inventions because more people could brainstorm ideas and write anything down on a piece of paper.

However, the pencil created a huge negative environmental impact on the country. Pencils have a significant role in the cutting down of trees. Eighty-two thousand trees are cut down yearly to make 14 billion traditional wooden pencils. That might not seem like a lot to you, but think about that every year, along with people cutting down trees for paper, firewood, etc. Another environmental impact pencils have all the factories pencils are being made at. They have so much pollution contributing to the world, along with the trucks and machines needed for making the modern pencil. Even though this was later in the decade, the eraser materials are very non-environment friendly and challenging to make again. 

Overall, the pencil was one of the greatest inventions bringing so many new inventions along with it. If we did not have the pencil as early as we did, the world would be a very different place.