Since 2006, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month to keep 

Brain
Pickings going. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no
interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this
labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or
loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science,
philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's
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midweek newsletter
Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its fifteenth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless
character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays
one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below
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also

The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story

The Universe in Verse
Figuring

A Velocity of Being

art

sounds

bites

bookshelf

favorite reads
Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings

Favorite Books of 2020

Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning

of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film

The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to

Earth’s Forests
How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While

Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and

Transform Us

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives
In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak

Inconvenient Truth to Power

Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and

the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease

Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What

Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

SEE MORE

related reads

Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing

I, Pencil: A Brilliant Vintage Allegory of How Everything Is Connected

The Odd Habits and Curious Customs of Famous Writers

labors of love
Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized
7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated
Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman

Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton

The Holstee Manifesto

The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks

The Surprising History of the Pencil
What medieval smuggling has to do with the atomic structure of carbon.

BY MARIA POPOVA

Having previously explored such mysteries as who invented writing and how sounds

became shapes, it’s time to turn to something much less mysterious, a seemingly
mundane yet enormously influential tool of human communication: the humble
pencil.
“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak,” states the first of Margaret
Atwood’s 10 rules of writing. “But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the
plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.” But even
though the pencil has fueled such diverse feats of creative culture as celebrated artists’
sketchbooks, Marilyn Monroe’s soulful unpublished poems, Lisa Congdon’s stunning
portraits, and David Byrne’s diagrams of the human condition, it has only been
around for a little over two hundred years. In the altogether fascinating 100 Essential
Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your World (public
library), John D. Barrow tells the story of this underrated technological marvel:
The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist
serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The magic material that was so
appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It
was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century;
although the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier.
Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called ‘plumbago’ or black
lead (hence the ‘plumbers’ who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a
misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil ‘leads’. It was called graphite
only in 1789, using the Greek word ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to write’. Pencil is an
older word, derived from the Latin ‘pencillus’, meaning ‘little tail’, to describe
the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.
 Nicholas-
Jacques Conte
But the history of the pencil, like that of many seminal innovations, has a dark side:

The purest deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick
[England] in the Lake District in 1564 and spawned quite a smuggling industry
and associated black economy in the area. During the nineteenth century a
major pencil manufacturing industry developed around Keswick in order to
exploit the high quality of the graphite.
And yet the pencil industry blossomed:

The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has just
celebrated its 175th anniversary; although the local mines have long been closed
and supplies of the graphite used now come from Sri Lanka and other far away
places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the
graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well.

The oldest pencil in the

world, found in timbered house built in 1630. (Image: Faber-Castell)
Plain as it appears, however, the pencil has evolved significantly since its invention:

Conte’s original process for manufacturing pencils involved 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 —
carpenters don’t want round pencils that are going to roll off the workbench.
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.
Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the
softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB,
lying midway between H and B. ‘H’ means hard and ‘B’ means black. The
higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the paper. There is also an
‘F’, or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than drawing.
Barrow offers the science behind an oft-cited trivia factlet:

The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of
the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon
atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the
atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon,
diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

For the mathematically-minded, Barrow offers a delightful curiosity-quencher:

An interesting question is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a
typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left
on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometers and a carbon
atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometers, so the pencil line is only about 143
atoms thick. The pencil lead is about 1 mm in radius and therefore ? square mm
in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be
spread out on a straight line is 150? cubic mm. If we draw a line of thickness 20
nanometers and width 2 mm, then there will be enough lead to continue for a
distance L = 150? / 4 X 10-7 mm = 1,178 kilometers.
100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your
World goes on to explore such fascinating questions as the origami of the universe,
what rugby has to do with relativity, how long things are likely to survive, and more.

donating = loving
In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For nearly fifteen years,
it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an
assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has enlarged
and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your
support makes all the difference.
MONTHLY DONATION

♥ $3 / month
♥ $5 / month
♥ $7 / month
♥ $10 / month
♥ $25 / month
START NOW
ONE-TIME DONATION

You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:

GIVE NOW

BITCOIN DONATION

Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7

sunday newsletter
Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science,
philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's
an example. Like? Claim yours:

Subscribe
 midweek newsletter
Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its fifteenth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless
character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays
one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below
— it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

Subscribe

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