Not made of lead at all?

A brief history of the pencil in Europe

he pencil is a fairly old hand tool, even in Europe. Since 1558, the pencil as it is known today has been produced in Keswick, in the Lake District of northern England. A unique deposit of graphite in nearby Borrowdale made it possible to saw the crystallised carbon = graphite into elongated pieces and - later - to coat them with wood. With the wood coating, the leads no longer broke off so quickly and, what's more, the fingers stayed clean. Today, manufacturers such as Faber-Castell make graphite leads from pressed graphite, which is then baked. Before that, people used to draw, paint or write with real lead or charcoal or other pressed powders. The English name pencil goes back to a brush-like brush made of camel hair, Latin pincellus.

The German language is not the only one that still calls the graphite pencil pencil, although it no longer contains any lead at all. In Ireland the pencil is called peann luaidhe, in Arabic qalam ra??? and many other languages refer to the lead in the pencil.

I was lucky enough to be able to visit the pencil museum in Keswick, it is well worth it.

Graphite has been known since the 18th century. "In 1778, the German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele proved that the raw material used there for almost 200 years was a carbon-based mineral and not lead." (Source: Wikipedia) Later, the mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner gave the new material the name graphite. England was at an advantage with the discovery of the graphite deposits in Borrowdale. Since graphite was also used for other, mostly military, purposes, for example for the construction of fused pellets for cannonballs, there was an export ban on the valuable raw material at the end of the 18th century. This initially made life difficult for manufacturers on the mainland until it was discovered that graphite could also be ground, mixed with clay powder and pressed as powder. "In 1795, the Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté discovered a process with which impure graphite from mines in Germany and Austria could also be used. He pulverised the mined material and then slurried out the graphite." (Source: ibid.) The hardness curve as we know it today was developed by Joseph Hardtmuth. "In 1790, Joseph Hardtmuth of Vienna mixed graphite dust with clay and water for the first time and fired it in a kiln. Depending on the amount of clay, he could thus determine the degree of hardness." (Source: ibid.)

Hardtmuth later founded the Austrian company Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth (Persian f. "mountain of light", after the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond). The family of companies is also responsible for the development of 17 different grades of hardness, which have survived to the present day.

Conté and Hardtmuth are considered to be the founding fathers of the modern pencil. It was only through the pressing and firing of graphite that the economic mass production of pencils became possible. As a result, the companies Faber-Castell, Lyra, Staedtler and Schwan-Stabilo were founded in Nuremberg.

Today, the four Nuremberg companies alone produce three billion pencils a year. Even though Faber-Castell, for example, cultivates a renewable forest on its own plantation for pencil production, global wood consumption is still enormous. For a long time it was cedar wood, but today it is mainly pine wood that is used.

Mechanical pencils

But there is also a possibility to write with graphite leads without using any wood at all, and this possibility is provided by mechanical pencils, lead pens or clutch pencils. As early as 1822, the British silversmith Sampson Mordan and his partner John Isaac Hawkins received the first patent for a refillable pencil in Great Britain. A wealth of innovation grew up around the refillable pencil, and over 160 patents were granted for improvements to mechanical pencils.

In 1915, the Japanese Tokuji Hayakawa launched a fine-lead pencil in Japan under the name Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil, which was based on a screw mechanism. This novel pencil later gave the manufacturing company its name: Sharp. The principle of the clamping pliers, which is still known and most commonly used today, was developed by the American Charles Rood Keeran. Keeran's pens were developed under the name Eversharp.

Today, leads with a thickness of 0.2 mm to 1.18 mm are commonly used, which are held in a pair of clamping pliers. At the end of the pencil there is a push button, by pressing on it, the clamping pliers are released and the lead is pushed forward a little.

These thin leads cannot be sharpened, so the line width is usually dictated by the lead thickness.

Clutch pencils - the TK pencil

In 1948, Faber-Castell developed a new type of pencil with a thicker lead: the TK-Sift. The function and design have not changed significantly to this day. The lead is, as a rule unchanged to this day, 2 mm thick - and is also held by a clamp, but when the button at the end is pressed, the lead is completely released and falls out of the front of the pencil.

Clutch pencils became popular in most drawing offices in the 1970s and 1980s. The leads have to be sharpened, this can be done with sandpaper or with special clutch pencil sharpeners, for example from Dahle or Möbius + Ruppert. Unfortunately, there are no longer any pencil sharpeners manufactured that have inserts for different sharpening angles. These were still very popular in the heyday of the pencil, when people were not yet drawing with CAD systems.

The shape and colour of Faber-Castell pencils has changed considerably in recent decades. The raised injection-moulded lettering has given way to printed lettering, and the green has changed from a light deciduous green RAL 6002 to a more bottle-green or black-green shade, RAL 6007 or 6012. However, these colour assessments are only conjectural; internally, the colour is only called Faber-Castell Green.

Faber-Castell also produced a flat lead TC pencil, the TK 9600, which is hardly known today. This had a wide and flat lead and a twist mechanism to twist the lead out of the wide guide at the front. I was able to buy a few leads and 2 of these pencils in the early 90s at Bürobedarf Müller, Friedrich-Engels-Allee 117 at the Wuppertal Haspel.

If you want to delve further into the history of the pencil and its many varieties and developments, these three websites are recommended:

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

- Dave's Mechanical Pencils 
- Die alte Leadholder-Website / Unfortunately only in the archive
- Cultpens.Com Guide to mechanical pencils