Pencil
Today, the pencil. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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I just glanced across my desk to see a coffee cup bristling with pencils. It’s been there for decades. The lead’s broken on one and I no longer have a pencil sharpener. Give me just a moment. – There, I just used my pocket knife to sharpen it.
My cup full of pencils – some mechanical
Yes, I know. That was a pretty vain gesture. I really no longer have any use for that pencil. And you probably don’t either. But what about your grade-school daughter? She might well be using pencils today. More on that in a moment. But we all used pencils through most of the twentieth century. So let’s take a quick look at the pencil’s history:
They trace to the discovery of large solid graphite deposits in sixteenth-century England. People thought graphite was a form of lead. So they called it by lead’s Latin name, plumbago. And, when you rub plumbago across paper, it leaves a track. So how to harness that feature?
An Italian couple saw they could drill a hole through wood. Then they could slide a graphite rod down that hole. The result would be a pencil. But it was the Germans who, in 1662, built a pencil factory in Nuremberg. They mixed graphite with sulfur and antimony to make rods that they then encased in two wooden sides. And that was the origin of the pencil we know.
A modern HB pencil. A close look reveals the dividing line between the two wooden halves
After that, pencil-making underwent many variations until makers settled on laying a thin rod of clay and graphite between two wooden halves. Then gluing the halves together.
By the way, Henry David Thoreau greatly advanced American pencil making. He adopted the use of graphite and clay in his own very successful pencil factory. (That was when he wasn’t sitting by his famed Walden pond. But that is another story. Thoreau was a pretty complex character.)
A Thoreau-type pencil. Possibly an Original
My own intimacy with pencils developed when I worked at Boeing shortly after World War II. There, we had to be aware of lead grading. We drafted on either special paper or a kind of starched linen cloth. Too soft a lead would smear when people handled our drawings. By then, pencils were graded by lead hardness. H, 2H, on up to 6H. We had to use fairly hard 4H pencils.
A roomful of Boeing engineers and draftsmen at work on their drawing boards
Today, designers finish their designs on computer screens. Drafting tables all but vanished long ago. But the pencil might nevertheless be enjoying a revival in our schools. Many educators realiize what they lost when they gave learning over to computer screens. Many have come to see that students wielding pencils might profit from a kind of kinesthetic reinforcement of their learning. And too — students might thus be allowed to think things through more completely.
Young students with pencils
And we well may not’ve seen the last of those lowly pencils.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Why Schools Are Ditching Classroom Screens for Pencil and Paper | The Learning Standard
All images except my image of pencils are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
This episode first aired on November 10, 2026.