Pencil

A pencil is a writing tool with a core of graphite and clay inside a wooden case. Despite the name, pencil “lead” has never been lead. In the sixteenth century a large, very pure deposit of graphite was found at Borrowdale in the Lake District of England. People at the time thought it was a form of lead and called it plumbago, from the Latin for lead.^[1] Five hundred years later the pencil is still called a lead pencil, the only object named after a metal it never contained.

Graphite

Graphite is pure carbon, the same element as a diamond, with its atoms arranged in flat sheets that slide off easily onto paper. Writing with a pencil is, in a sense, peeling off layers of carbon a few sheets at a time.^[2] The Borrowdale graphite was so valuable that the mine was guarded and its output controlled, and stealing from it was made a serious crime. It is the only stationery cupboard in history to have had armed guards.

Grades

Pencils are graded by hardness, using H for hard and B for black. More clay makes a harder, lighter line; more graphite makes a softer, darker one. HB is in the middle. The scale runs from about 9H to 9B, so a pencil can be both very hard and very black only if it is two pencils.

• H: hard.
• B: black.
• HB: both, a bit.
• F: fine, sitting between HB and H, and nobody is sure why it is F.

See also

• Diamond – its well-organised cousin
• Drawer – where most pencils are
• Dot – the smallest thing it can draw
• Crossword – what pencils are mostly for
• Invention of paper – the surface pencils prefer
• Eraser – the other end

References

1. Plumbago, P. (1565/2001). Not Lead. Fictional reprint.
2. Graphite, G. (2004). “Peeling Carbon”. Stationery Science 2: 2.
3. Sharpener, S. (1998). Why F? Desk Press.