8 ms·

The history of lead pencils and their lack of any lead (2021)

91 points by nkurz 3y ago

nkurz 3y ago
I wanted to know when pencil leads stopped by made of lead, and was surprised to learn that they never had been: Going back to an earlier point, when the graphite was discovered the English thought they had unearthed a lead deposit, a misunderstanding caused because lead and graphite look uncannily similar in their natural form. It is because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today.
- kazinator 3y ago
  My understanding had always been that there were never pencils where a rod of lead was encased in wood. However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another thought. How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in spite of the story about the graphite deposit? There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean, between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead. You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by historic knowledge of lead styluses?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. Or you simply use it because then people will immediately understand what it is for?
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    As tools for writing, normal styluses and lead rods, which were both used in Roman times, are distinct. A "stilus" (the modern spelling of the words "stylus" and "style" is a mistake, which was frequent when Latin words had been assumed to be Greek words with Modern Greek pronunciation) was a metal rod that was used to write on wax tablets. The Romans called it either "stilus" or "graphium", the latter form being directly borrowed from Greek. The Latin words "stilus" and "tabella" were used to translate the Greek words "graphion" and "deltos". The Greeks have learned to use wax tablets from the Phoenicians ("deltos" is a Semitic word) and the Romans have learned to use them from the Greeks. The wax tablets were the main method for writing texts that could be erased later. Besides such metal styluses that were used for writing by pressing soft materials, there existed a second kind of styluses, made of true lead metal. This second kind, which was much less common, is based on using a soft metal and a slightly abrasive tablet surface. Drawing with such a soft metal stylus leaves a trace of metal, exactly like drawing with a graphite pencil. For instance Pliny the Elder mentions such cases of using true lead rods for drawing, e.g. for drawing fine lines on a surface to guide the writing with ink on it, like the printed lines in some modern notebooks. Suitable soft metals are lead, silver, gold and platinum, but lead has always been many orders of magnitude cheaper than the others, so it has been frequently used for this purpose before the discovery of graphite. Graphite is softer than any of these metals, so it leaves much more visible traces, even without using a great pressure during writing. The metal styluses leave much finer traces than graphite, so they are less suitable for writing a text with good visibility, but they allow better control for fine details in drawings. While after graphite began to be used for pencils it immediately replaced most uses of soft metal styluses, the latter have remained popular until today for certain kinds of artistic drawings, the so-called metal-point drawings. The most popular metal for artistic drawings is silver, because it is much cheaper than gold or platinum, while producing higher-quality drawings than lead , graphite or charcoal. There are many such silverpoint drawings that are very beautiful.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      You have forgotten another form of carbon - charcoal. It’s not much used for writing, but it does have a niche with artists. The lead shadows of Pliny the Elder are similarly used by artists to do rough drafts before committing pen to paper. Particularly cartoonists, prior to photoshop layers.
    - somat 3y ago
      Fairly obvious in retrospect, however I never put the two together until I read your post. but the stuff is called "graph"ite, that is, the stuff you write with. boom, mind blown.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
  - oakashes 3y ago
    It didn't make any sense to me either. I found this article[1] which frames it a little more clearly: it's not that they thought graphite and lead were the exact same thing, it's that they thought graphite was just a particular type of lead that was useful for drawing when first discovered. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wondered-about-the-lead-in-pencils/2014/11/26/f8b5869c-548a-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wonde...
- hackernewds 3y ago
  that's good. because I've definitely eaten my fair share with my friends when we were kids. we used to have those cool ones that you click on the end and a sharp thin cylinder of 'lead' comes out. they were crunchy and entertaining at least
gweinberg 3y ago
graphite might look similar to lead, but it's not really plausible that anyone would mistake it for lead, except at first glance. Its physical properties are completely different.
- munificent 3y ago
  > Its physical properties are completely different. Graphite and diamonds have completely different physical properties too, yet both are carbon. They didn't think graphite was literally equivalent to lead. They thought it was another form of lead.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Did they already understand allotropy?
    - roywiggins 3y ago
      Atomic theory was just barely beginning to be invented at the beginning of the 19th century. Apparently graphite was discovered to be carbon (and not lead) in 1779: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/discovery-of-carbon.shtml http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/d...
  - gweinberg 3y ago
    That doesn't make a lot of sense. People understandably though graphite and diamonds were different, because they seemed so different. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally different because they differ in all observable properties makes sense. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally the same because they are they same color but in no other way similar really doesn't.
    - roywiggins 3y ago
      I am not sure that the ideas about substances being fundamentally the same were very well developed at the time. Atomic theory didn't exist. What counted as "fundamental" and "the same" was not very well understood or, I'd eager, even broadly agreed upon. Turning lead into gold was considered a genuine possibility for a long time.
sharkweek 3y ago
I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my leg. My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly. Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm. It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.
- cancerhacker 3y ago
  I have the same thing in the palm of my hand - was bumping a pencil along a wall, also in fourth grade, ish. I knew it was graphite and wouldn't hurt me, but I was too afraid of it hurting to winkle it out, and it just healed over.
  - nkurz 3y ago
    I spent some time puzzling over what "winkle" might be a typo for before realizing it was a British verb I was unfamiliar with: "chiefly British : to displace, remove, or evict from a position" Apparently the etymology is the periwinkles are difficult to remove from their shells: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle
    - dtgriscom 3y ago
      "She's horribly good at winkling." https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b598a17 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b5...
  - Arrath 3y ago
    As a child I was walking through my room and stepped on a fallen pencil, it rolled under my foot in just the right way: it shot out and stabbed me in the ball of my other foot! Most random thing, and I've still got the dot these 30 years later.
- inetknght 3y ago
ane 3y ago
So what's the truth of the hardness/blackness grade? Did Conte invent it? Because Hardtmuth, one of the large pencil manufacturers, claims otherwise: "According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budějovice in Czech language, and F refers to his first name Franz." https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-i-noor-graphite-pencils?lang=en https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-... Sounds a bit apocryphal to me.
- kanapala 3y ago
  Conte was French anyway, there’s no h-word for hard in french..
kitd 3y ago
There is actually a (very interesting) Pencil Museum in Keswick in the Lake District, UK, near where those first graphite deposits were found. One fact I learnt was that early on, due to its usefulness and scarcity, it became a hugely valuable commodity, transport had to be done in secret or under guard, and the mine owners became extremely wealthy.
ngcc_hk 3y ago
Actually it is misleading as pencil did have lead. Just in the coating and hence if you chew it, as it is used by kids or people like to bite their nail and pencil. Btw “ The English were not the only ones to make this mistake and in Arabic, Gaelic and German the word for pencils all mean Lead Pen.” so is chinese.
dmckeon 3y ago
Fun fact: Henry David Thoreau's family was active in the pencil-making business in the 1820..1850 timeframe, and Henry D. made several innovations in the art. https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendentalists-their-lives-writings/john-thoreau-and-co-pencils/ https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendental... https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-engineer-1 https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-enginee...
spinningD20 3y ago
As a toddler in the early 80s, I playfully stole my older sister's pencil when she was working on her homework, ran away with it, tripped and fell, the lead breaking off in my eye. Fortunately I don't remember any of that myself... Almost 40 years later it's still there, still scaring any new eye care establishment personnel with each visit. Fortunately no noticable side effects, other than when I get something in my eye and back out again, my brain keeps telling me something is there for an hour or two afterward.
xdc0 3y ago
I'm from a Spanish speaking country. In the 90s one of the ubiquitous pencil brands had on their pencils the phrase "Sin plomo" or "No contiene plomo", can't remember which one, these phrases translate to "Without lead" and "Does not contain lead" respectively. I never understood where it came from but it probably came from some English label translation perhaps? Where the distinction and labeling where the disambiguation of the word "Lead" made more sense and the label was simply translated at face value on a Spanish speaking market.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Maybe it meant the paint on the casing had no lead.
samirillian 3y ago
Lead for mechanical pencils is highly conductive, seemingly pure graphite but I think they can have different hardness ratings too, I wonder what the difference is.
- corinroyal 3y ago
  The difference is pencil clay. More clay makes a harder, lighter marking lead. https://shop.kremerpigments.com/us/shop/pigments/40960-pencil-clay-powder-0-0-5-mm.html https://shop.kremerpigments.com/us/shop/pigments/40960-penci...
  - samirillian 3y ago
    I meant as opposed to wooden pencils
Daub 3y ago
A precursor of the graphite pencil is the silverpoint. A silverpoint is no more that a metal wire. It can be made of silver, gold, copper just about any metal. The lines they produce are almost identical to pencil, but also change in color over time through oxidization. The only constraint is that the paper needs to be primed before the mark will show. Leonardo Da Vinci did most of his drawings with such a device. One advantage is that they remain sharp for years. You can test the line such a device makes by taking a coin and dragging it over a painted surface, like a wall.

91 points by nkurz 3y ago

I wanted to know when pencil leads stopped by made of lead, and was surprised to learn that they never had been: Going back to an earlier point, when the graphite was discovered the English thought they had unearthed a lead deposit, a misunderstanding caused because lead and graphite look uncannily similar in their natural form. It is because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today.

kazinator 3y ago
My understanding had always been that there were never pencils where a rod of lead was encased in wood. However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another thought. How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in spite of the story about the graphite deposit? There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean, between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead. You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by historic knowledge of lead styluses?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. Or you simply use it because then people will immediately understand what it is for?
- adrian_b 3y ago
  As tools for writing, normal styluses and lead rods, which were both used in Roman times, are distinct. A "stilus" (the modern spelling of the words "stylus" and "style" is a mistake, which was frequent when Latin words had been assumed to be Greek words with Modern Greek pronunciation) was a metal rod that was used to write on wax tablets. The Romans called it either "stilus" or "graphium", the latter form being directly borrowed from Greek. The Latin words "stilus" and "tabella" were used to translate the Greek words "graphion" and "deltos". The Greeks have learned to use wax tablets from the Phoenicians ("deltos" is a Semitic word) and the Romans have learned to use them from the Greeks. The wax tablets were the main method for writing texts that could be erased later. Besides such metal styluses that were used for writing by pressing soft materials, there existed a second kind of styluses, made of true lead metal. This second kind, which was much less common, is based on using a soft metal and a slightly abrasive tablet surface. Drawing with such a soft metal stylus leaves a trace of metal, exactly like drawing with a graphite pencil. For instance Pliny the Elder mentions such cases of using true lead rods for drawing, e.g. for drawing fine lines on a surface to guide the writing with ink on it, like the printed lines in some modern notebooks. Suitable soft metals are lead, silver, gold and platinum, but lead has always been many orders of magnitude cheaper than the others, so it has been frequently used for this purpose before the discovery of graphite. Graphite is softer than any of these metals, so it leaves much more visible traces, even without using a great pressure during writing. The metal styluses leave much finer traces than graphite, so they are less suitable for writing a text with good visibility, but they allow better control for fine details in drawings. While after graphite began to be used for pencils it immediately replaced most uses of soft metal styluses, the latter have remained popular until today for certain kinds of artistic drawings, the so-called metal-point drawings. The most popular metal for artistic drawings is silver, because it is much cheaper than gold or platinum, while producing higher-quality drawings than lead , graphite or charcoal. There are many such silverpoint drawings that are very beautiful.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    You have forgotten another form of carbon - charcoal. It’s not much used for writing, but it does have a niche with artists. The lead shadows of Pliny the Elder are similarly used by artists to do rough drafts before committing pen to paper. Particularly cartoonists, prior to photoshop layers.
  - somat 3y ago
    Fairly obvious in retrospect, however I never put the two together until I read your post. but the stuff is called "graph"ite, that is, the stuff you write with. boom, mind blown.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
- oakashes 3y ago
  It didn't make any sense to me either. I found this article[1] which frames it a little more clearly: it's not that they thought graphite and lead were the exact same thing, it's that they thought graphite was just a particular type of lead that was useful for drawing when first discovered. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wondered-about-the-lead-in-pencils/2014/11/26/f8b5869c-548a-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wonde...
hackernewds 3y ago
that's good. because I've definitely eaten my fair share with my friends when we were kids. we used to have those cool ones that you click on the end and a sharp thin cylinder of 'lead' comes out. they were crunchy and entertaining at least

gweinberg 3y ago

graphite might look similar to lead, but it's not really plausible that anyone would mistake it for lead, except at first glance. Its physical properties are completely different.

munificent 3y ago
> Its physical properties are completely different. Graphite and diamonds have completely different physical properties too, yet both are carbon. They didn't think graphite was literally equivalent to lead. They thought it was another form of lead.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Did they already understand allotropy?
  - roywiggins 3y ago
    Atomic theory was just barely beginning to be invented at the beginning of the 19th century. Apparently graphite was discovered to be carbon (and not lead) in 1779: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/discovery-of-carbon.shtml http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/d...
- gweinberg 3y ago
  That doesn't make a lot of sense. People understandably though graphite and diamonds were different, because they seemed so different. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally different because they differ in all observable properties makes sense. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally the same because they are they same color but in no other way similar really doesn't.
  - roywiggins 3y ago
    I am not sure that the ideas about substances being fundamentally the same were very well developed at the time. Atomic theory didn't exist. What counted as "fundamental" and "the same" was not very well understood or, I'd eager, even broadly agreed upon. Turning lead into gold was considered a genuine possibility for a long time.

sharkweek 3y ago

I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my leg. My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly. Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm. It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.

cancerhacker 3y ago
I have the same thing in the palm of my hand - was bumping a pencil along a wall, also in fourth grade, ish. I knew it was graphite and wouldn't hurt me, but I was too afraid of it hurting to winkle it out, and it just healed over.
- nkurz 3y ago
  I spent some time puzzling over what "winkle" might be a typo for before realizing it was a British verb I was unfamiliar with: "chiefly British : to displace, remove, or evict from a position" Apparently the etymology is the periwinkles are difficult to remove from their shells: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle
  - dtgriscom 3y ago
    "She's horribly good at winkling." https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b598a17 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b5...
- Arrath 3y ago
  As a child I was walking through my room and stepped on a fallen pencil, it rolled under my foot in just the right way: it shot out and stabbed me in the ball of my other foot! Most random thing, and I've still got the dot these 30 years later.
inetknght 3y ago

ane 3y ago

So what's the truth of the hardness/blackness grade? Did Conte invent it? Because Hardtmuth, one of the large pencil manufacturers, claims otherwise: "According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budějovice in Czech language, and F refers to his first name Franz." https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-i-noor-graphite-pencils?lang=en https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-... Sounds a bit apocryphal to me.

kanapala 3y ago
Conte was French anyway, there’s no h-word for hard in french..

kitd 3y ago

There is actually a (very interesting) Pencil Museum in Keswick in the Lake District, UK, near where those first graphite deposits were found. One fact I learnt was that early on, due to its usefulness and scarcity, it became a hugely valuable commodity, transport had to be done in secret or under guard, and the mine owners became extremely wealthy.

ngcc_hk 3y ago

Actually it is misleading as pencil did have lead. Just in the coating and hence if you chew it, as it is used by kids or people like to bite their nail and pencil. Btw “ The English were not the only ones to make this mistake and in Arabic, Gaelic and German the word for pencils all mean Lead Pen.” so is chinese.

dmckeon 3y ago

Fun fact: Henry David Thoreau's family was active in the pencil-making business in the 1820..1850 timeframe, and Henry D. made several innovations in the art. https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendentalists-their-lives-writings/john-thoreau-and-co-pencils/ https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendental... https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-engineer-1 https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-enginee...

spinningD20 3y ago

As a toddler in the early 80s, I playfully stole my older sister's pencil when she was working on her homework, ran away with it, tripped and fell, the lead breaking off in my eye. Fortunately I don't remember any of that myself... Almost 40 years later it's still there, still scaring any new eye care establishment personnel with each visit. Fortunately no noticable side effects, other than when I get something in my eye and back out again, my brain keeps telling me something is there for an hour or two afterward.

xdc0 3y ago

I'm from a Spanish speaking country. In the 90s one of the ubiquitous pencil brands had on their pencils the phrase "Sin plomo" or "No contiene plomo", can't remember which one, these phrases translate to "Without lead" and "Does not contain lead" respectively. I never understood where it came from but it probably came from some English label translation perhaps? Where the distinction and labeling where the disambiguation of the word "Lead" made more sense and the label was simply translated at face value on a Spanish speaking market.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
Maybe it meant the paint on the casing had no lead.

samirillian 3y ago

Lead for mechanical pencils is highly conductive, seemingly pure graphite but I think they can have different hardness ratings too, I wonder what the difference is.

corinroyal 3y ago
The difference is pencil clay. More clay makes a harder, lighter marking lead. https://shop.kremerpigments.com/us/shop/pigments/40960-pencil-clay-powder-0-0-5-mm.html https://shop.kremerpigments.com/us/shop/pigments/40960-penci...
- samirillian 3y ago
  I meant as opposed to wooden pencils

Daub 3y ago

A precursor of the graphite pencil is the silverpoint. A silverpoint is no more that a metal wire. It can be made of silver, gold, copper just about any metal. The lines they produce are almost identical to pencil, but also change in color over time through oxidization. The only constraint is that the paper needs to be primed before the mark will show. Leonardo Da Vinci did most of his drawings with such a device. One advantage is that they remain sharp for years. You can test the line such a device makes by taking a coin and dragging it over a painted surface, like a wall.