The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1989 by Henry Petroski

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Portions of this book were originally published in Across the Board and in American Heritage of Invention & Technology.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “How the Pencil Is Made” from The Pencil : Its History, Manufacture, and Use by The Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company. Reprinted courtesy of Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc.

  Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Sturgis quoted by permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and of the Houghton Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Petroski, Henry.

  The pencil: a history of design and circumstance/by Henry Petroski. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77243-5

  1. Pencils—History. I. Title.

  TS1268.P47 1989

  674′.88—dc20 89-45362

  v3.1

  To Karen

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 What We Forget

  2 Of Names, Materials, and Things

  3 Before the Pencil

  4 Noting a New Technology

  5 Of Traditions and Transitions

  6 Does One Find or Make a Better Pencil?

  7 Of Old Ways and Trade Secrets

  8 In America

  9 An American Pencil-Making Family

  10 When the Best Is Not Good Enough

  11 From Cottage Industry to Bleistiftindustrie

  12 Mechanization in America

  13 World Pencil War

  14 The Importance of Infrastructure

  15 Beyond Perspective

  16 The Point of It All

  17 Getting the Point, and Keeping It

  18 The Business of Engineering

  19 Competition, Depression, and War

  20 Acknowledging Technology

  21 The Quest for Perfection

  22 Retrospect and Prospect

  Appendix A

  From “How the Pencil Is Made”

  Appendix B A Collection of Pencils

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  All made objects owe their very existence to some kind of engineering, which is essential for civilization. Even the commonest and oldest of artifacts are no less the products of primitive engineering than the artifacts of high technology are the products of modern scientific engineering. But while the practice of engineering has certainly evolved since ancient times, it has also maintained a family resemblance to its ancestors. Although engineers today tend to be more formally mathematical and scientific than their counterparts just a century ago, there are still essential elements of engineering that all ages have in common. A modern engineer and an ancient, even if called an architect or master builder or master craftsman, would find plenty to talk about, and each would be able to learn something from the other.

  This timelessness derives from a constant underlying quality inherent in all engineering, a quality that is independent of formal education. The existence of this commonsense aspect of it explains why and how so much ancient and even not so ancient engineering was done by individuals who worried about neither what they themselves nor what they were doing was called. Indeed, such seemingly unlikely persons as the political philosopher Thomas Paine and the philosophical writer Henry David Thoreau effectively acted as if they were engineers and made real contributions to the technology of their times. For this same reason, I believe that anyone today is capable of comprehending the essence of, if not of contributing to, even the latest high technology. Behind all the jargon, mathematics, science, and professionalism of engineering lies a method as accessible and as pervasive as the air we breathe. Certainly business executives with no formal engineering training daily assume this to be the case in making decisions with major technological implications. But that is not to say that professional engineers are dispensable, for it is one thing to understand their method and another to be able to apply it to the details of an increasingly complex and international technological environment and then condense the results in an executive summary.

  Because all engineering, past and present, has a common feature to its fabric, the method of engineers and of engineering is embodied in everything ever made and thus is accessible through any single artifact. I believe that a person who is attracted to bridges, for example, can learn more about the method of all engineering—including such seemingly diverse branches as chemical, electrical, mechanical, and nuclear engineering—from a focused study of bridges alone than from a diffuse and cursory survey of all the past and latest wonders of the made world. Yet a focused study need not be overly technical. It need only place the artifact in a proper social, cultural, political, and technological context in order to allow the essence of engineering to be distilled by the receptive mind. For it is attention to all aspects of the long evolutionary process by which such a thing as a rotting log across a stream becomes a corrosion-free suspension bridge across a strait that we discover the essence of engineering and its role in civilization. Just as there is no artifact that is without engineering, so there is no engineering that is free of the rest of society.

  In this book I have chosen to approach engineering through the history and symbolism of the common pencil. This ubiquitous and deceptively simple object is something we can all hold in our hands, experiment with, and wonder about. The pencil, like engineering itself, is so familiar as to be a virtually invisible part of our general culture and experience, and it is so common as to be taken up and given away with barely a thought. Although the pencil has been indispensable, or perhaps because of that, its function is beyond comment and directions for its use are unwritten. We all know from childhood what a pencil is and is for, but where did the pencil come from and how is it made? Are today’s pencils the same as they were two hundred years ago? Are our pencils as good as we can make them? Are American pencils better than Russian or Japanese pencils?

  To reflect on the pencil is to reflect on engineering; a study of the pencil is a study of engineering. And the inescapable conclusion after such reflection and study is that the history of engineering in a political, social, and cultural context, rather than being just a collection of interesting old stories about pencils or bridges or machines, is very relevant to and instructive for engineering and commerce today. The important roles that international conflict, trade, and competition play in the history of the pencil provide lessons for such modern international industries as petroleum, automobiles, steel, and nuclear power. This is so because the engineering and the marketing of the pencil are as inextricably intertwined as they are for any artifact of civilization.

  A book is also an artifact, of course, and its author incurs many debts throughout the course of its production. My acknowledgments to works, institutions, and people appear at the end of this book, but some support and encouragement have been too invaluable not to be repeated here. I was able to concentrate on this project through the support of a sabbatical from Duke University and fellowships from the Na
tional Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. Of the many librarians who have helped me, Eric Smith, of Duke’s Vesic Engineering Library, is without peer. My brother, William Petroski, was a constant source of unique information and artifacts. But it was the immeasurable patience and encouragement of my son, Stephen, my daughter, Karen, and most of all my wife, Catherine Petroski, that in the end made this book possible.

  Research Triangle Park and

  Durham, North Carolina, 1988

  Henry David Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods. He included pins, needles, and thread among the items to be carried in an India-rubber knapsack, and he even gave the dimensions of an ample tent: “six by seven feet, and four feet high in the middle, will do.” He wanted to be doubly sure to be able to start a fire and to wash up, and so he listed: “matches (some also in a small vial in the waist-coat pocket); soap, two pieces.” He specified the number of old newspapers (three or four, presumably to be used for cleaning chores), the length of strong cord (twenty feet), the size of his blanket (seven feet long), and the amount of “soft hardbread” (twenty-eight pounds!). He even noted something to leave behind: “A gun is not worth the carriage, unless you go as a huntsman.”

  Thoreau actually was a huntsman of sorts, but the insects and botanical specimens that he hunted could be taken without a gun and could be brought back in the knapsack. Thoreau also went into the woods as an observer. He observed the big and the little, and he advised like-minded observers to carry a small spyglass for birds and a pocket microscope for smaller objects. And to capture the true dimensions of those objects that might be too big to be brought back, Thoreau advised carrying a tape measure. The inveterate measurer, note taker, and list maker also reminded other travelers to take paper and stamps, to mail letters back to civilization.

  But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that he most certainly carried himself. For without this object Thoreau could not have sketched either the fleeting fauna he would not shoot or the larger flora he could not uproot. Without it he could not label his blotting paper pressing leaves or his insect boxes holding beetles; without it he could not record the measurements he made; without it he could not write home on the paper he brought; without it he could not make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods.

  According to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau seems always to have carried, “in his pocket, his diary and pencil.” So why did Thoreau—who had worked with his father to produce the very best lead pencils manufactured in America in the 1840s—neglect to list even one among the essential things to take on an excursion? Perhaps the very object with which he may have been drafting his list was too close to him, too familiar a part of his own everyday outfit, too integral a part of his livelihood, too common a thing for him to think to mention.

  Henry Thoreau seems not to be alone in forgetting about the pencil. A shop in London specializes in old carpenter’s tools. There are tools everywhere, from floor to ceiling and spilling out of baskets on the sidewalk outside. The shop seems to have an example of every kind of saw used in recent centuries; there are shelves of braces and bins of chisels and piles of levels and rows of planes—everything for the carpenter, or so it seems. What the shop does not have, however, are old carpenter’s pencils, items that once got equal billing in Thoreau & Company advertisements with drawing pencils for artists and engineers. The implement that was necessary to draw sketches of the carpentry job, to figure the quantities of materials needed, to mark the length of wood to be cut, to indicate the locations of holes to be drilled, to highlight the edges of wood to be planed, is nowhere to be seen. When asked where he keeps the pencils, the shopkeeper replies that he does not think there are any about. Pencils, he admits, are often found in the toolboxes acquired by the shop, but they are thrown out with the sawdust.

  In an American antique shop that deals in, among other things, old scientific and engineering instruments, there is a grand display of polished brass microscopes, telescopes, levels, balances, and scales; there are the precision instruments of physicians, navigators, surveyors, draftsmen, and engineers. The shop also has a collection of old jewelry and silverware and, behind the saltcellars, some old mechanical pencils, which appear to be there for their metal and mystery and not their utility. There are a clever Victorian combination pen and pencil in a single slender, if ornate, gold case; an unassuming little tube of brass less than two inches long that telescopes out to become a mechanical pencil of twice that length; a compact silver pencil case containing points in three colors—black, red, and blue—that can be slid into writing position; and a heavy silver pencil case that hides the half-inch stub of a still-sharpened yellow pencil of high quality. The shopkeeper will proudly show how all these work, but when asked if she has any plain wood-cased drawing pencils that the original owners of the drafting instruments must certainly have used, she will confess that she would not even know what distinguished a nineteenth-century pencil from any other kind.

  Not only shops that purport to trade in the past but also museums that ostensibly preserve and display the past can seem to forget or merely ignore the indispensable role of simple objects like the pencil. Recently the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History produced “After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America, 1780–1800,” and one group of exhibits in the show consisted of separate worktables on which were displayed the tools of many crafts of the period: cabinetmaker and chairmaker, carpenter and joiner, shipwright, cooper, wheelwright, and others. Besides tools, many of the displays included pieces of work in progress, and a few even had wood shavings scattered about the work space, to add a sense of authenticity. Yet there was not a pencil to be seen.

  While many early American craftsmen would have used sharp-pointed metal scribers to mark their work, pencils would also certainly have been used when they were available. And although there was no domestic pencil industry in America in the years immediately following the Revolution, that is not to say that pencils could not be gotten. A father, writing in 1774 from England to his daughter in what were still the colonies, sent her “one dozen Middleton’s best Pencils,” and in the last part of the century, even after the Revolution, English pencils like Middleton’s were regularly advertised for sale in the larger cities. Imported pencils or homemade pencils fashioned from reclaimed pieces of broken lead would have been the proud possessions of woodworkers especially, for carpenters, cabinetmakers, and joiners possessed the craft skill to work wood into a form that could hold pieces of graphite in a comfortable and useful way. Not only would early American woodworkers have known about, admired, wanted to possess, and tried to imitate European pencils, but also they would have prized and cared for them as they prized and cared for the kinds of tools displayed two centuries later in the Smithsonian.

  These stories of absence are interesting not so much because of what they say about the lowly status of the wood-cased pencil as an artifact as because of what they say about our awareness of and our attitudes toward common things, processes, events, or even ideas that appear to have little intrinsic, permanent, or special value. An object like the pencil is generally considered unremarkable, and it is taken for granted. It is taken for granted because it is abundant, inexpensive, and as familiar as speech.

  Yet the pencil need be no cliché. It can be as powerful a metaphor as the pen, as rich a symbol as the flag. Artists have long counted the pencil among the tools of their trade, and have even identified with the drawing medium. Andrew Wyeth described his pencil as a fencer’s foil; Toulouse-Lautrec said of himself, “I am a pencil”; and the Moscow-born Paris illustrator and caricaturist Emmanuel Poiré took his pseudonym from the Russian word for pencil, karandash. In turn, the Swiss pencil-making firm of Caran d’Ache was named after this artist, and a stylized version of his signature is now used as a company logo.

 
The pencil, the tool of doodlers, stands for thinking and creativity, but at the same time, as the toy of children, it symbolizes spontaneity and immaturity. Yet the pencil’s graphite is also the ephemeral medium of thinkers, planners, drafters, architects, and engineers, the medium to be erased, revised, smudged, obliterated, lost—or inked over. Ink, on the other hand, whether in a book or on plans or on a contract, signifies finality and supersedes the pencil drafts and sketches. If early pencilings interest collectors, it is often because of their association with the permanent success written or drawn in ink. Unlike graphite, to which paper is like sandpaper, ink flows smoothly and fills in the nooks and crannies of creation. Ink is the cosmetic that ideas will wear when they go out in public. Graphite is their dirty truth.

  A glance at the index to any book of familiar quotations will corroborate the fact that there are scores of quotations extolling the pen for every one, if that, mentioning the pencil. Yet, while the conventional wisdom may be that the pen is mightier than the sword, the pencil has come to be the weapon of choice of those wishing to make better pens as well as better swords. It is often said that “everything begins with a pencil,” and indeed it is the preferred medium of designers. In one recent study of the nature of the design process, engineers balked when they were asked to record their thought processes with a pen. While the directors of the study did not want the subjects to be able to erase their false starts or alter their records of creativity, the engineers did not feel comfortable or natural without a pencil in their hands when asked to comment on designing a new bridge or a better mousetrap.

  Leonardo da Vinci seems to have wished to make a better everything, as his notebooks demonstrate. And when he wanted to set down his ideas for some new device, or when he merely wanted to record the state of the art of Renaissance engineering, he employed a drawing. Leonardo also used drawings to preserve his observations of natural facts, artifacts, and assorted phenomena, and he even sketched his own hand sketching. This sketch is usually identified as Leonardo’s left hand, consistent with the widely held belief that the genius was left-handed. This trait in turn has been given as a reason for his mirror writing. However, it has also been convincingly argued that Leonardo was basically right-handed and was forced to use his left hand because his right was crippled in an accident. Thus Leonardo’s sketch may really be of his maimed right hand as seen in a mirror by the artist drawing with his fully functioning left hand. The shortened and twisted middle finger in the sketch supports this view.