History of the Lead Pencil

Lead pencils, of course, contain no lead. The writing medium is graphite, a form of carbon. Writing instruments made from sticks cut from high quality natural graphite mined at Cumberland in England and wrapped in string or inserted in wooden tubes came into use around 1560. [1] By 1662, pencils were produced in Nuremberg, in what is now Germany, apparently by gluing sticks of graphite into cases assembled from two pieces of wood. By the early 18^th century, wood-cased pencils that did not require the high quality graphite available only in England were produced in Nuremberg with cores made by mixing graphite, sulfur and various binding agents. These German pencils were inferior to English pencils, which continued to be made with sticks cut from natural graphite into the 1860s.  The 1855 catalog of Waterlow & Sons, London, offered "Pure Cumberland Lead Pencils."

In 1795, French chemist Nicholas Jacques Conté received a patent for the modern process for making pencil leads by mixing powdered graphite and clay, forming sticks, and hardening them in a furnace. According to Petroski (pp. 70-71), "the brittle ceramic leads…were inserted in wooden cases of a modified design, one used by some early German pencil makers to encase their sulfur-and-graphite leads. The piece of wood into which the leads were placed has a groove about twice as deep as the thickness of the rod of lead. A slat of wood was then glued in over the lead to completely fill the groove, and the pencil was ready to be finished to the desired exterior shape."

In the U.S., wood-cased lead pencils were produced in the Boston area by William Munroe beginning in 1812. Munroe’s cores were made from dried graphite paste and were not hardened in a furnace. Between the early 1820s and 1850s there were several small pencil makers near Boston, including William Munroe, John Thoreau, Joseph Dixon, and Benjamin Ball. [2] The pencils they produced were inferior to those made in England from natural graphite and in France and Austria using the Conté process. [3] The photograph to the right shows a bundle of pencils manufactured by Ball.  Holden & Cutter, Boston, MA, advertised French and English lead pencils c. 1840-60; Grigg & Elliot, Philadelphia, PA, advertised lead pencils c. 1850-60; John W. Clothier, Philadelphia, PA, advertised Faber's, Guttknecht, and Brookman & Lagdon's lead pencils c. 1858. (Hagley Museum and Library)

In 1847, Dixon set up a new factory just outside New York City that used graphite to manufacture crucibles for melting metals, polish for cast iron stoves, and, on a limited scale, pencils. However, most lead pencils sold in the U.S. were still imported from Europe, increasingly from Germany as the quality of German pencils improved with adoption of the Conté process. In 1861, Eberhard Faber set up a factory in New York that made pencils using leads from Germany, and in 1862 pencils made by another New York company, the Eagle Pencil Co., won an award in London.  The American Lead Pencil Co. and the Joseph Dixon Crucible Co. reported started making lead pencils in 1865 and 1872, respectively.  (Supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. 4, 1889)

Mass production of lead pencils began in the U.S. after the Civil War. During 1864-67, several patents were granted for machinery for making lead pencils [4], including a Dixon wood planing machine for shaping pencils that produced 132 pencils per minute. [5] U.S. production of pencils was encouraged by the import tariff of 1865 as well as increasing demand, and the four companies that were the principal manufacturers of lead pencils throughout the latter 19^th century and early 20^th century—the Eagle Pencil Co., Eberhard Faber, the American Lead Pencil Co., and the Joseph Dixon Crucible Co.—all set up or expanded pencil factories in the New York/New Jersey area. [6]

According to Petroski (p. 169), "The demand for pencils seems to have been growing at an unprecedented rate at the time, and in the early 1870s it was estimated that over 20 million pencils were being consumed in the United States each year." In 1887, a Dixon Crucible ad stated:

In 1868 we commenced building machinery for making lead pencils, and on November 18, 1872, we shipped the first invoice of one gross [of pencils] to Voorhees Bros., Morristown, N. J. Now our sales are beyond what our wildest expectations were then. We began in a building 25 x 25, with four or five hands, and now use one hundred thousand square feet of floor space and employ four hundred hands. In the beginning we had only three or four kinds [of pencils] for business and school uses; now we make hundreds of different kinds for business offices, schools, drawing classes, artists, architects, and mechanical draughtsmen, besides making a large variety of pen-holders, paint protectors, slate pencils, artist’s cases, special leads, assortment boxes, erasive rubbers, etc., etc. [7]

The explanation for use of square lead in wood pencils is that when square lead was used, it was necessary to cut a groove in only one of the two pieces of wood used to make the case. In order to use round lead, it was necessary to cut matching grooves in the two pieces of wood. Petroski reports that limitations of woodworking machinery may have prevented round lead from being widely used in wood-cased pencils until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Petroski states that by the late 1870s U.S. pencil makers had machines with the precision and speed to mass produce wood-cased pencils with round leads. (Petroski, pp. 186, 251) In other respects as well, by the late 1870s the pencils made by the four large U.S. companies, which engaged in research and development to improve their pencils, were of substantially higher quality than the pencils made before the Civil War by the small Boston area companies. (Petroski, pp. 336-37)