The Pencil

By David Lindsay

In 1565, Konrad Gesner was a medical scholar living in Zurich. Gesner had
already written a treatise on the virtues of milk and was moving on to his next
attempt: a bibliography of all the recorded knowledge in the world. In the midst
of this monumental task, he came across a new kind of writing device, which
appeared to be a cylinder of lead sheathed in a wooden case. Who exactly the
inventor of the pencil was, Gesner did not say. He simply made a note of it—with
his quill, the current instrument of preference—and continued on to the subject
.of fossils. The following year, he died of the plague

There is something perfect about this story, with its pairing of small and large.
A man sets out to embrace the whole of the human experience and never gets
anywhere close, yet the modest object that falls under his gaze goes on to
become… well, instrumental to the recording of knowledge from that moment
on. Explore this loop a little further and the implications turn downright screwy:
Gesner was writing about a method of writing, and for as much as he thought he
was writing the ultimate document, today a new slew of documentarians (the hor
included) are taking their turn in writing about him. The pencil, it seems, is
.continually creating more work for itself

The pencil does have a history that moves forward in time and gets
somewhere. Its origins lie in antiquity, when Egyptians used a small lead disc for
making guidelines on papyrus. ( The actual writing was done in ink.) the Greeks
later picked up on this practice, as did the Romans, who called the disc a
.plumbum—Latin for lead

Not much happened in the way of pencil technology for another millennium
after that. Then, in 1564, (the year before Gesner mentioned the pencil), a
deposit of graphite was discovered at Borrowdale in Cumbria [England]. This
graphite—called plumbago because it acted like lead—was so solid and uniform
that it could be sawed into sheets and then cut into thin square sticks. As the only
pure graphite deposit ever found, it also held fantastic financial promise. Less
pure deposits of graphite were available in many parts of the world, but they had
to be crushed and the impurities removed. And by then the graphite tended to
.crumble

The Borrowdale mines were active for ongy six weeks every year, and after the
wagons were filled with the stuff, armed guards escorted them to London.
Export of the ore itself was prohibited. Instead, it was routed to a newly formed
guild—the English Guild of Pencimakers—which carved wooden cases for the
graphite sticks and, in a separate development, enjoyed a world monopoly on the
sale of the finished product. Indeed, one could say the English Guild of
Pencilmakers was the Microsoft of its day. One could also say that there is a
direct line of descent between them: the monopolies of Elizabethan England,
most notably the textile monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers, eventually
evolved into the joint-stock companies, such as the Virginia Company, that
.originally footed the bill for the colonization of the New World
Of course, give people pencils and eventually they'll start to have ideas, no
matter how strong your monopoly is. By the seventeenth century, the Germans
were using a mixture of graphite, and antimony, and the resulting white lead
sticks were said to compare favorably with the English pencil. In 1779,K.W.
Scheele made a chemical analysis of plumbago that proved it to be a form of
carbon, not of lead. A decade later, A. G. Werner suggested the more
appropriate name graphite, from the Greek word meaning to write. But as ia
.often of case, it took the privations of war to bring about the decisive change
In 1795, when France was cut off from both the English and German pencil
sources, Napoleon commissioned Nicolas-Jacques Conte, an officer in the French
army, to develop a viable substitute. Cont mixed powdered graphite with clay
and then fired the mixture in a kiln. This method was not only serviceable, but
allowed the sticks to be graded from hard to soft by varying the proportion of
graphite to clay. When the Napoleonic Wars ended, this new method spread
.abroad and was eventually adopted by all pencil manufacturers

In an interesting postscript, the isolation of Napoleon's troops also led to one

of the first significant uses of the new pencil. After marching on Egypt, Napoleon
decided to withdraw most of his troops but left behind a draftsman named
Dominique-Vivant Denon, who proceeded to document the various wonders of
.that land

Denon finally returned to Paris and showed his sketches to Napoleon, who
liked them so much he appointed Denon as director of the louvre, which, not
coincidentally, soon housed many of the treasures that Napoleon had looted from
Egypt. In time, the louvre became a favorite location for art students, who
faithfully wore down their own pencils sketching these very same treasures.
Thus, an Egyptian invention found its way, if not home, at least into familiar
.surroundings

?In line 15, the author uses"…well," why

A pencil is often called" a writing instrument"; what is the other meaning of
?"instrumental" that creates a play on words
Where did the author use commentary instead of factual information? What
?effect did this have on you as a reader of the text

Falls under his gaze

Turn downright screwy
Slew
Crumble
Ore
Footed the bill for
Privations
Looted
Wore down

a- a large number
b- hardships
 made smaller through use -
become very strange -
paid -
covered -
stole -
deposit of a mineral -
is looked at -
Break into small pieces