Timeline of the Pencil
The graphite pencil, from the Borrowdale graphite deposit worked in 16th-century England and Conté's 1795 clay-graphite process through erasers, mechanical pencils and factory mass production to extruded and self-rotating pencils in the 21st century.
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- 26 events 16th century – 2020s
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- by claude-opus-5-5
16th century: Graphite deposit worked at Borrowdale in Cumbria
An unusually pure, solid deposit of graphite at Seathwaite in Borrowdale, in England's Lake District, became known in the 16th century; the earliest documentary evidence of working it dates from 1540. Called "wad" or black lead and long mistaken for a lead ore, it went mostly into crucibles and casting molds, but sticks of it sawn and wrapped in string or wood became the first graphite pencils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowdale_graphite1565: Gessner publishes the first known picture of a pencil
The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner's book on fossils and minerals, printed in Zurich, described and illustrated a stylus made of a piece of "lead" (graphite) fitted into a wooden holder, the earliest known image of a pencil. Gessner did not claim to have invented it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Gessner1662: Friedrich Staedtler recorded as a Nuremberg pencil maker
Nuremberg's city records refer to Friedrich Staedtler as a pencil-making craftsman, an early sign of the pencil trade that grew up around the city. The Staedtler company traces its roots to him, although the firm itself was founded by J. S. Staedtler in 1835.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staedtler1752: Parliament makes stealing Borrowdale graphite a felony
Graphite thefts from the Borrowdale mine were common enough that Parliament passed an act "for the more effectual securing mines of black lead from theft and robbery", making the stealing or receiving of wad a felony. The mine was guarded and miners were searched at the end of their shifts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowdale_graphite1761: Kaspar Faber starts making pencils near Nuremberg
The cabinetmaker Kaspar Faber began making pencils in Stein, near Nuremberg, the business from which the Faber-Castell company descends. It took the name A. W. Faber under his son Anton Wilhelm Faber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faber-Castell1770: Priestley describes rubber as a pencil eraser
In a footnote dated April 15, Joseph Priestley praised a substance "excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black-lead-pencil", sold by the London instrument maker Edward Nairne. Nairne is often credited with the first widely sold rubber eraser, and the material took its English name from this use; before it, bread crumbs were commonly used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Nairne1779: Scheele shows that "black lead" is carbon
The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed that the mineral called plumbago or black lead yields carbon dioxide when burned and is therefore a form of carbon, containing no lead. Abraham Gottlob Werner named it graphite in 1789, from the Greek for "to write", but pencil cores are still called leads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite1795: Conté patents the clay-and-graphite pencil lead
With British graphite cut off from France by war, Nicolas-Jacques Conté patented a process of mixing powdered graphite with clay, forming the paste into rods and firing them in a kiln; changing the proportion of clay set the hardness. The Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth, founder of the firm later called Koh-i-Noor, is credited with a similar process around 1790. The method lets poor graphite make good leads and remains the basis of pencil making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Jacques_Cont%C3%A91812: William Munroe makes American wood-cased pencils
With imports from Britain cut off by the War of 1812, William Munroe, a cabinetmaker in Concord, Massachusetts, began making wood-cased pencils, generally regarded as the first made commercially in the United States. Concord became the center of early American pencil making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil1822: Mordan and Hawkins patent a propelling pencil
Sampson Mordan and John Isaac Hawkins received a British patent for a metal pencil with an internal mechanism that pushed the lead forward, improving on simple holders that only gripped it. Mordan then made such pencils with the stationer Gabriel Riddle. A mechanical pencil recovered from the wreck of HMS Pandora, which sank in 1791, is usually cited as the earliest surviving example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampson_Mordan1828: Lassimone patents a pencil sharpener in France
Bernard Lassimone received French patent number 2444 for a "taille-crayon", widely cited as the first patented pencil sharpener; before it, pencils were sharpened with knives. Thierry des Estivaux's design of 1847 introduced the small hand-held sharpener with a conical opening and blade still common today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_sharpener1839: Lothar Faber takes over and standardizes the pencil
Lothar Faber took over the family firm in Stein and built it into an international maker, setting standard lengths, diameters and hardness grades for its pencils and favoring the hexagonal shape. In 1856 he secured exclusive rights to graphite from Jean-Pierre Alibert's mine in eastern Siberia, prized at the time for its purity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_von_Faber1840s: Henry David Thoreau improves his family's pencils
Working in his father's Concord pencil business, John Thoreau & Company, Henry David Thoreau devised a mill to grind graphite finely and adopted a clay binder, using Bavarian clay, in place of the glue and wax mixtures American makers had used. He did not invent the clay process, which Conté had patented in 1795. As cheap German imports arrived, the firm turned to selling ground graphite for electrotyping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau1858: Hymen Lipman patents a pencil with attached eraser
Hymen Lipman, a Philadelphia stationer, received US patent 19,783 on March 30 for a pencil with a piece of rubber fixed in one end; Charles Goodyear's vulcanization process, patented in 1844, had made rubber durable. In Reckendorfer v. Faber (1875) the US Supreme Court held a related patent invalid, ruling that joining two known devices that each kept its own function was not a patentable invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymen_Lipman1861: Eberhard Faber opens a pencil factory in New York
Eberhard Faber, a member of the German pencil-making family who had come to New York to sell its products, opened a factory on the East River at 42nd Street in Manhattan, described by Britannica as the first large-scale pencil factory in the United States. After a fire in 1872 the business moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_Faber1872: Dixon reports making 86,000 pencils a day
The Joseph Dixon Crucible Company of Jersey City, New Jersey, which had moved into pencil making alongside graphite crucibles and used machines of its own design, was producing about 86,000 pencils a day. Its pencils were sold as Dixon Ticonderoga from 1913.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Dixon_(inventor)1889: Koh-i-Noor 1500 pencil shown in Paris
L. & C. Hardtmuth of Budweis, Bohemia, presented its Koh-i-Noor 1500 drawing pencil at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, in a yellow finish and a wider range of hardness grades than was usual; accounts of the original number of grades differ. Its yellow color was widely imitated and became associated with quality pencils, especially in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor_Hardtmuth1891: Borrowdale graphite mine abandoned
Working at the Seathwaite mine in Borrowdale, intermittent for years, ended as its best graphite was exhausted and the pencil makers of nearby Keswick had switched to leads made from powdered graphite and clay, which no longer required solid lumps of pure graphite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowdale_graphite1905: Faber-Castell launches the green Castell 9000
Count Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, who had married into the Faber family and took the name Faber-Castell, introduced the Castell 9000, a hexagonal graphite pencil finished in dark green and sold in a range of hardness grades. The pencil remains in production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faber-Castell1915: Hayakawa invents the Ever-Ready Sharp pencil
Tokuji Hayakawa, a Tokyo metalworker, invented a metal mechanical pencil patented in Japan in 1920 and sold as the Ever-Ready Sharp; his company took the name Sharp Corporation. It is often confused with the Eversharp of the American Charles Keeran, first made around 1913 and mass-produced by the Wahl company from 1915, which had sold more than 12 million by the early 1920s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokuji_Hayakawa1960: Pentel introduces polymer-bound mechanical pencil leads
The Japanese stationery maker Pentel launched a 0.9-millimeter mechanical pencil using its Hi-Polymer lead, in which graphite was bound with a synthetic polymer rather than fired clay. Polymer-bound leads were strong enough to be made much thinner than clay-bound ones, and fine leads such as 0.5 millimeters became the usual standard for mechanical pencils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentel1967: Staedtler launches the Mars plastic vinyl eraser
Staedtler began making its Mars plastic eraser of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) with a chalk filler, which a conservation materials reference credits as the first white vinyl eraser (another reference dates its introduction to 1965). Vinyl erasers, which crumble as they erase and smear graphite less than natural rubber, became the common type of stand-alone eraser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraser1994: United States imposes anti-dumping duties on Chinese pencils
On December 28 the US Department of Commerce issued an anti-dumping order on cased pencils from China after finding they were sold below fair value and threatened American makers. The order was renewed after later reviews and remained in force in the 2020s, while China became the world's largest producer and exporter of pencils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil2008: Mitsubishi Pencil launches the self-rotating Kuru Toga
Mitsubishi Pencil, maker of the Uni brand, released the Kuru Toga, a mechanical pencil whose mechanism turns the lead slightly each time it is pressed against and lifted from the paper, so that it wears to an even conical point instead of a flat edge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni-ball2009: Staedtler unveils the extruded WOPEX pencil
At the Paperworld trade fair in Frankfurt, Staedtler announced WOPEX, a pencil made by co-extruding the lead together with a casing of about 70 percent wood fiber and the rest plastic and additives, instead of gluing graphite cores between grooved wooden slats. The company said the process used less energy and produced less waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staedtler2020s: Faber-Castell makes over two billion pencils a year
Faber-Castell reported an annual output of about 2.3 billion graphite and colored pencils, most of them made at its factory in São Carlos, Brazil, from pine grown in its own managed plantations near Prata. Most wood-cased pencils are still made by the slat-and-groove method that took shape in the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faber-Castell