The Pencil

But of course you know the whole exercise of having to keep the you know, keep them sharpened, dealing with brakes, dealing with oh I always hey when they when the eraser either rubs off or falls out, and then you go to erase something and you just get that heart like I'm getting the chills even thinking about it, of the metal, of the of an eraserless pencil scraping against

your text. Or Another thing I hate is when you get like an older pencil out of your grandmother's writing desk and it has one of those petrified erasers that does nothing, and you start chewing on it, only to realize it has lead paint. Well I'm that chewing on them is another issue altogether, But but I remember, you know, eventually being done, feeling done with the old fashioned wooden pencil,

and then I embraced the mechanical pencil instead. Wait wait, wait, you mean done, like I'm never going to use a wooden pencil again. Basically, yeah, it's like what mechanical pencils exist? Goodbye wooden pencil I'm done with you and sharp to pencils just no more, basically. And you know, also I think at the time, being you know, essentially still a child, like there was the gadget try of it right, Suddenly oh I there's this plastic cylinder or I remember the

fancy ones. We had to like load the little uh purchased lead um into the back of the pencil, and you know, and then you're having to click it to get I mean, ultimately it's another headache, right because it still breaks. You still have to reload it, you have to dry. You end up dropping those little tiny leads all over the place. And I never liked mechanical pencils. I think I always have had too heavy of a hand when writing. I pressed down too hard, and so

the mechanical pencil lead would always just snap instantly. I also as a heavy doodler. One of the things I noticed is that with the mechanical pencil, you pretty much always have the same um you can you're always making the same thickness of line for the most part, tiny gauge. Yeah. But with a pencil, is it dolls? You can? And even if it's not dold, you can do more things on the paper when you're drawing, you know, goblins and

castles in the margins of your notes. Yes, the cone of graphite becomes something that you can angle to its flat side if you want to, sort of like shade more. It's it's much more versatile, I believe. Yeah. But but either way, even as I grew tired of the mechanical pencil, I fell into the arms of the word processor, which I mean that's a whole whole episode of invention onto itself. The word processor is amazing. Uh. It it changed the

way I wrote. It defines the way I write today. Uh. And so to a certain extent, I guess I kind of thought I was done with anything aside from you know, occasional sharpie's and uh in markers uh and the you know in pens for when you have to sign something, I guess, or to make a quick note. But otherwise I was like, oh, I don't need to consider pencils ever again. But then two things happened first, um Um

ended up becoming a parent. So I have a child who's going through elementary school, and suddenly pencils, old fashioned pencils were flowing back into my household or having to buy sharpeners, and I had to acknowledge, you know, given his schooling and he's learning to write and spell and doing a lot of physical homework in addition to digital homework. Uh, the pencil, the old fashioned pencil is is really wonderful technology.

I've got a question that comes from this, Actually, why is it that we associate pencils with childhood and pens with adulthood? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, well, okay. Part of it I think is is the the eraser aspect of it, right, the idea that as you're learning, you will be making mistakes and you will need to

correct things. And then adults make mistakes. Oh no, obviously, but perhaps there is this idea as adults that we don't make mistakes, We shouldn't be making mistakes, or you know, when we make a stake, mistakes will just cross it out. We don't have We're not turning our work into a supervisor, you know, to a teacher anymore we can. These are notes are mostly from my own purposes, and therefore I

can do what I want. With adults, it's more important to have a constant reminder of your mistake, is a big scratched out blot on the page steering back each rather than something that you can erase all evidence of right now. Of course, there are some of you movies saying, oh, well, there are erasable pins. I definitely remember. Irasable pins were horrible. Yeah, I was never a huge fan of them, but but

they did exist. Just to acknowledge. But another thing that is very recently happening happened to me really in the last month is after like a five year period of being a dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons, I became a player again under another dungeon master, so I had my physical character sheet. Again. One can use a digital

character set, but I prefer the paper. And if you're going to be writing down a bunch of stats and belongings, you know, recording how much gold your character has, how many experience points, their hit points, etcetera, it really behooves you to have an erasable and erasable pencil. To have

a pencil at your disposal for this. So I find myself using an old fashioned pencil once more and not only appreciating it, but marveling at the at the perfection of the device, of of this invention, of this writing implement the pencil. I got asked, do you go like full on pencil long thing with the eraser or you kind of a golf pencil game. I am not a

golf pencil person, know what I'm really digging right now. Uh, And this feels a little extravagant when I compare it to my childhood experience with pencils pre sharpened Tai Conderoga pencils that come in the box already sharpen. You just take them out, they're ready to go. Uh. If you want to be just completely reckless, and I don't recommend this, you could like basically pull one out right with it until it breaks and then just throw it away. But

don't do that, obviously. But then that's why I think it feels kind of extravagant, because I remember just using pencils until they were just gone. Oh. I loved it. Actually, I really enjoyed getting a pencil down to the like the one inch zone. I thought that was fun. Yeah, where it had no no length on the pencil, no eraser remaining where I remember the replacement erasers that you put on the end of the pencil. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that fit over the end yea, which which really I

found did not work all that well. You'd go to a race something, I'd just come off, but it would break. Yeah. Yeah, but sometimes they look cool. They're brightly colored, and yeah, you kind of end up. That was the thing too. I remember just fetishizing writing implements as a child. You know, did you ever have one of those gigantic novelty parallelogram erasers,

the standalone eraser that's parallelogram with the bent sides? Big, I don't think I had one of I tend to have tended to have the gum eraser like that dark brown, you know, just a just a try angular chunk. Do you remember this one? Now? Would I would have that? I know nothing of this. This is outside my world. Well or nice, especially if you're if you're engaging in you know, uh, pencil art. It's good to having like a nice art eracer art gum eracer on the side.

Now you might wonder, like, well, how much could actually be out there about the pencil. You know, there's somebody, a scholar of engineering, who wrote an entire book about the history and invention of the pencil as like an injury from an engineer's perspective. Uh. This is a book by Henry Petrovski called The Pencil, A History of Design and Circumstance, published by Alfred A. Knopf in And. Petrovsky is an American engineer and a professor of civil engineering

at Duke University. I haven't finished reading this whole book yet. It is a huge book about pencils, and it is it is great, Yeah, in more than one sense. In one sense, if you find any article online about the pencil, this book is inevitably cited, like he is the authority on pencils. And then, on the other hand, this is not a dry read. It is so like he has an incredible time just taking the pencil's history apart, contemplating what it means, what it says about the human experience,

what it says about innovation and invention. It's extremely contemplative and full of what almost feels like oratory. Often the book feels like it is it is a speech that would have been delivered in ancient rome about like the virtues of engineering or or like there's almost a religious flare to it, like, Hello, my name is Henry Petrovski, and I would like to tell you about the pencil. So, yeah,

this is gonna be a lot of fun. And it's one reason it made me think, I'm not sure yet whether this is going to be our one episode about the pencil, or maybe we'll need to explore more, maybe we'll have to come back. Yeah, we'll have to keep an eye on it, because as we explore the pencil, we're going to have to talk about and a number of other writing implements, and we're going to have to talk about the racer as well. So uh, let's let's go ahead and dive in. Generally, our our format on

the show is to begin with what came before. Obviously, Yeah, pencils haven't been here forever. We know writing predates the pencil, So so what does that world look like? All right, Well,

let's just think for a second about writing implements. At a very basic level, the act of writing or even drawing requires you to either add to a given surface, subtract from a given surface, or but just in some way disrupt an existing layer or a pile of particles, right, And the most basic tool to do this is of course the human finger. So with the finger in mind, you can even pull yours out and look at it. Right now, Um, let's let's consider a few examples. So,

first of all, the additive model. So if you were to dab your finger in dye, in oil, in blood, or smearit with ash and then trace a few lines on a surface, that is uh, you know, additive writing that you're adding to something to create the act. Right, then there is subtractive Okay, If you use your fingernail to scratch a few lines into a surface by removing the outer layers such as you know, layers of bark on a tree, a stone face, paint on a house, or on a metal sign, that sort of thing, then

you were subtracting from it to make your mark. And both of these methods of making marks go far back into prehistory. Like if you look at a cave paintings or petroglyphs, some of these are going to be additive, where you know that they've created some kind of pigment out of something and then painted that onto cave walls, others are going to be subtractive where you see carvings that are left behind his indentations, right, and then there's this other area which is is kind of in between,

and that's just disruption. So if you were to trace the same lines through, say the accumulated dust on a given surface, or the accumulated ash following say, you know, volcanic eruption, it's the perfect way to use your finger as a writing implement. When you realize that you can write wash me on the dusty back of somebody's car, right, But even without surfaces like that, you know you can you can write in the in the dirt or in the sand with your finger. It's it's not quite subtraction

or addition. It is much more of a disruption of the of what is before you. So that's just a basic way to to look at it. But of course humans didn't just create language, they also created tools. So the finger is just the beginning. Let's consider a few more examples of each of these forms of writing. Uh, but instead of stopping at the finger, will go beyond

the finger into instruments. Let's insert beyond the finger music. Alright, going beyond the finger so let's start with both the subtractive and disruption sort of you know, putting together into one category here. I think a fine example of this is the use of a stylus to make marks in a wax or clay tablet. And this was used from

ancient times well into the Middle Ages. Yeah, I think probably it would be the oldest examples of like character based writing we have, right, would be, uh, you know, from like ancient Mesopotamia using stylists to make indentations in like a clay or wax surface. And for a more modern example, I think you have some of these novelty toys where you use a magnetic stylists to move around

iron filings. Yeah, you know, generally you're not maybe writing something, you're more like putting a mustache of iron filings onto a cartoon face. But but that I think also is an example of what we're talking about here now. Speaking of of of the stylists or or styles, which I believe is the plural um, Petrovsky writes that iron styles were known to be often misused in Roman times because one of the things about a fine tipped metal object is you can also use them to stab people. So uh.

So sometimes they were banned in favor of ivory or other materials, which of course begs the question can't you stab somebody with ivory? Obviously you can. I mean, you can stab somebody with a number two pencil if it's sharpened enough. And um, you know so I don't entirely understand the prohibition there. Um. But lead was also a particularly favored material at the time as well, and we can come back to that. Yes, Now let's talk about

additive writing implements. The use of chalk and slate is a great example, and that goes back at least to like the eighth century. Uh. And the the use of ink on a brush or in a pin is another good example. The history of of the ink pen will have to, I think, wait for another episode of this show, but suffice to say that reed pens were used in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago and are still used today. In some places. Quills have been used for this purpose

as well as have metal nibs. The ink pin with a reservoir dates back seemingly at least as far as the tenth century CEU to northern Africa, and then of course the pencil. The modern pencil that we're talking about in this episode. Uh, this is additive as well, um, and an additive method that uses a graphite cord length of wood sharpened on one end and capped with a rubber eraser on the other. Though of course sometimes you'll still find pencils that are either uh not capped, whether

an eraser or capped with with just metal. Yeah, your golf pencils not capped. Yeah, that's the the low rent version. Well, maybe we should take a break and the when we come back, we can discuss the pencil in terms of names and materials. All right, we're back, So let's start

with the name of this invention itself. Yes, So it turns out the name of the pencil actually pre dates what we would think of as a pencil, which is this thing made of wood with or even you know, mechanical pencil either way, with a letter, graphite core inside the the eraser on the back. Things that were really not much like that. We're called a pencil long before

this existed, that's right. According to Petroski, this refers to the penicillum brush um, which this was the Latin name for a writing instrument that consisted of a tuft of animal hair that was inserted into a hollow read. So if you can imagine, yeah, you have you have this this tuft of animal hair that I think it's like kind of curled and shaped, and then you insert that through a hollowed out read, hollow read and then that way you're holding the read on the outside, but in

the interior of it is this, uh, this animal hair. Right, So what you would have is a a long, solid implement I believe it would be the same length or so of a pencil of today. But then out the end of it you would have a fine gathering of animal hairs all clumped together by the opening at the end of the read. So what it would create is this fine tipped little brush. Yeah. And and and to a certain extent, it mind is one of various animal tails.

And in this we kind of get into the curious history of the word, the name itself, and and also I think we touched on the the euphemism treadmill that we've discussed on stuff to blow your mind in the past. Because the Latin name stems from penaesulis, the for the for brush, which is a diminutive form of the word penis which is Latin for tail. So a pencil is literally a little tale. Yes, And if you're wondering, I did look it up. Was the word penis in Latin?

Did that actually ever mean penis like it does in English today? Apparently sometimes it did, but originally what it meant was tail, And then again through some like process of euphemisms or whatever associations, it also came to me and what it means in English today. So call it what you will. Let's consider the particular strength of the modern pencil based on what we've been talking about so far.

So first of all, it is portable. It is highly portable, and I smudge roof to a very large degree at least when you Yes, you can smudge pencil etchings. But compare it to ink, compare it to a chalk on a board. Uh, it's I think it's it's safe to say that it's pretty smudge free. It's less messy than most of these other forms of writing. It is erasable on untreated paper, and uh, certainly today anyway, it is inexpensive.

People regularly treat the pencil like dirt. I'll walk my son into school and they'll be like a pencil and a mud puddle and um, and of course I've kind of been broken by our disposable culture to where I would just pass it by. He'll stop, He'll pick it up out of the mud puddle and be like, look, here's a pencil. We should say this, And sometimes they have to say, oh, I think you're right. Later, the eracer looks pretty good on that one. It's it's even

still sharpened. Okay, let's dry it off. That's the sweetest

thing saving a pencil. Yeah, I mean, and I agree with them now that I'm I'm forcing myself to respect the pencil a lot more now by Roman times, I think that Petroski uh points out that you have two different uh threads of technology that would eventually unite to become the pencil we have today, because in those times we had the penicillum, the brush, the read with the hair through it, and that that would sort of supply the elements that you think of of like a long

thing that you can hold in your hand to write with. It's rigid and it makes a dark, fine mark on the page. And but the other thing he points out is that at the time, lead was literally used as a writing implement and this would have been real lead, not the graphite of today. Uh. So, you know, there are several reasons that lead would be useful as a writing implement. Number one is very soft and so it can rub off on a writing surface to easily leave

a mark. But that mark, if you were just like holding a chunk of lead in your hand to write with, the mark would probably not be very dark. It would be kind of light colored, and it would not be uh, and it would not necessarily be very permanent. Maybe it could easily get rubbed off and also kind of be hard to hold the chunk in your hand as you're writing. So it seems like these two things could ultimately kind of converged, right. Yeah, Now, a quick note on lead

for starters. There's an older episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind our other podcast titled Cupids Laden Arrow, which is about lead and about the history of lead and how lead was used, and we get into a lot of Roman uses of lead and then as well. Another thing to keep in mind is that graphite was a long thought to be a form of lead and was sometimes classified as such. Thus some of our confusion at

time regarding the lead in our pencil. Yeah, but but there is a specific material reason why something like lead would have been useful for writing, And again it's that it's soft to the lead. The paper that you write on is kind of like sand paper. It just you know, scrapes it right off and leave some on there to be your additive marking material. Absolutely, so, of course, graphite or lead or charcoal, any of these things in and

of themselves can be used as a writing implement. You could just have a chunk of of graphite in your hand, but do you actually want to write with that? Do you want your hand to potentially cramp. That's something that Petrusky touches on a number of times is that you need a writing implement that is not too big or too small, like if you had to write with a

golfing pencil all the time. Like a golfing pencil is ideal because ultimately you're not writing, You're you're only gonna be so verbose while you're keeping score during a golf game. You just need to jot down a few numbers here and there. There's no you know, introductory paragraph or a self reflection essay. Only needs to be useful enough to cheat. Right. Another question is do you want that graphite or lead all over your hand and your fingers and then potentially

all over your work surface while you're writing. Uh, Thus the need to encase it in something much like the read casing um of the the sort of you know, the earlier pencil, the penicillum that we discussed earlier. So so there's that side of the advancement. The other side of the advancement, of course, is that paper became increasingly cheaper, and graphite then was an increasingly favored means of etching on it, especially after a deposit of fine graphite was

an earth in Cumbria, England during the fifteen hundreds. By the way, in this region today you'll find the Derwent Pencil Museum in what is now Kesswick. They have the largest colored pencil in the world. That sounds like something worth stopping on your road trip for right now. I did note that they specify the largest colored pencil in the world, which makes me think there must be an even larger just graphite pencil somewhere in the world, but

I do not know where that is. So I would love to hear from our listeners if they know where we can find such a titan pencil. It's got to be in Florida. So I was reading another article on this. This one came from Howard J. Bennett in the Washington Post. There was an article uh, ever wondered about the lead and pencils. Uh. And he points out that, yes, graphite was thought to be a form of lead at the time, and this is why we still refer to the lead

and the pencil. But at the time, a graphite stylus was just a sawed off stick of graphite, sort of like a thick crayon. Um, Bennett writes, with no paper wrapped around it. And you would you would whittle down one end of it with a knife as you would like whittle a stick, and then use that to write with. That doesn't sound very fun. It's yeah, it's You're just

gonna get a graphite all over your fingers, right. Petrovsky comments at length, actually about the interesting phenomenon of tools and materials that are named after the original materials they were made out of, but no longer are made out of those materials. So you've got the lead and a pencil, the silverware you use, which is made out of stainless steel, and he talks about how I think. In England erasers are often called rubbers, even though they're probably now made

out of some petroleum product. Yeah, it's like we we the terminology sticks, even though the material changes. So in the late fifteen hundreds people began gluing graphite rods inside wooden sleeves because it's essentially what we're talking about here with the pencil. Even though you know, generally I'm looking at a pencil right now, and you certainly do not do not get that sense from looking at the modern version of it. You don't feel like this is a

thing that was assembled. It almost feels like something that was grown. Yeah, I know what you mean. And certainly manufacturing processes have changed somewhat since then. But anyway, fifteen hundreds, something like the modern pencil uh comes into the world. So you might be wondering, then if we have any actual names or places to consider here. So if you go to the Wikipedia entry for pencils, and it's a

logical place to go. We were Wikipedia fans here. I think we've discussed in the show or stuff to blow your mind before that. You know, Wikipedia is an increasingly good place to get like a general idea of what's going on with the topic, and sometimes a very in depth look at a particular topic not a good final source, so say, because you know anybody can edit it. But yeah,

it's often a great place to start out. But if if you do, go to Wikipedia's entry for pencils, you'll find Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti credited with this advancement UH circle of fifteen sixty in Italy. So the sources on this are a Rocket City Space Pioneers page which had a short article titled who invented the pencil? Despite the Rocket City Space Pioneers having been a past Google Lunar X Prize participant and not really you know, a website

associated with the history of writing implements. That's interesting. It also cites a history of Information dot com website written by Jeremy Norman, who wrote quote, uh, Simon Eo and Lidiana Bernacotti are believed to have created the first carpentry pencil. They did this by hollow hollowing out a stick of

juniper wood. Okay, don't necessarily sound like the most solid of sources I've all, but I've also seen this line of reasoning picked up on an least one um uh you know journal article Uh, simplicity as a route to impact a material research by ten at Allen and Advanced Materials. But I at least can't find much to back up or elaborate upon these individuals. Uh, though perhaps I'm missing something. Petrovsky did not mention these two individuals when he wrote

the following in his book on Pencils. Quote. Exactly when and where pencils containing graphite were first made and used appears to be unrecorded, as are so many technological milestones.

There are undocumented assertations that that place the discovery of the graphite that Gessner refers to as early as about fifteen hundred and as late as fifteen sixty five, the date of his book, But the scanty evidence generally points to the unearthing of the pencils marking substance the new unrefined mineral or English antimony as sometime in the early

fifteen sixties in Cumberland. So this would be referring to graphite. Yes, yeah, So that seemed to be about the best we can do in terms of you know, finding you, because we do always want we always want to find that Eureka moment you always want to find that that first individual and the cool story about how they you know, accidentally invented the pencil or saw it in a dream and made hit a reality. But like you said, sometimes we just don't have an answer. It just kind of emerges

from what people are doing at that time. Well, this is actually something Petrovsky talks about in his book A Good Bit, which is that much of the history of engineering is unrecorded um because for much of human history, engineering was not thought of as something that deserved to

be written about, um. Like he talks about in Ancient Rome. Vitruvius, you know, writes this great treatise on architecture where it's clear that Vitruvius is is he really knows his stuff in terms of engineering and architecture of the day, but he's a terrible writer. Like he didn't you know, bother to go out and say, like, I'm going to get a better writer to do this. So, you know, people have commented through the years that his Latin sucks, um.

But but yeah, I think it's just because historically it's a fairly unusual attitude that that, uh, that engineering innovation is worth being written about, and a lot of times, you know, especially worth being written about in like sources that are meant to be you know, read by the public and sustained over time. A lot of times, if we want insights from literary sources on the history of engineering, you have to like look at people's diaries and letters

and stuff. Yeah, and then it's something we've just seen in the past. Who as you have like a situation where is the person who who happens upon an innovation or even an invention just in order to do to get the work done, to get through the day, you know, be it like create essentially creating the forerunner of the jigsaw puzzle in order to be a better teacher, that sort of thing. And then there's the person who comes along and says, m hmmm, I bet I could make

some money off of that. I could mass produce that, etcetera. So no offense to the bernacottis I don't know where whether I buy that or not. But I mean they very very well maybe true, we just do not have perhaps robust evidence enough, uh you know, to to uh you know, to state that that is what happened. Okay, so question mark on that, yes, but at any rate,

it there it certainly catches on. And then later in sevente it was discovered that one could vary the hardness of a pencil's lead by mixing powdered graphite with clay and firing it in a kiln. The more clay, the harder the lead. And this is ideal if you want a finely sharpened pencil that won't break easily. Well, that that's the friend of the heavy handed like me. Yeah, and um and and also yeah, it allows you again

to make different types of lines and strokes. Right, you have the finely sharpened pencil where you can do a lot of very fine work. But then as it gets duller, you can, uh, you can color in those shapes. You can. You know, it changes how you're writing. But uh, it

also gives you a lot more versatility. Okay, So whoever actually invented it, we know by the fifteen hundreds, these graphite cores were being inserted into these wooden outlines, and then by the late seventeen hundreds they had found a better way to incorporate graphite by mixing it with the this clay, and you're getting something more like the pencil product we're familiar with, right, yeah, and it's it's inside

inside the wood. So we almost have the pencil that we uh, the basic form of the pencil that we have today. But of course it's missing something on one end, and that would be the racer, which we'll get to in a bit. For now, we're going to take a break, but we will be right back to continue our exploration. Alright, we're back. You know one thing that I meant to

mention earlier that I think is really net. Petrovsky has a lot of little tangents and had bits of history throughout this book, and in discussing, like the the advantages of a pencil over other writing implements, he shares a little bit about the Scottish poet Robert Burns who lived seventeen fifty nine through seventeen nine and his reported fondness for writing on glass panes with a with either it seems to depend on who you're reading on this, either

a diamond pointed pen or stylists, or perhaps a diamond ring. Um. And uh so he's using it to, you know, to etch into the glass pane permanently, um, composing poetry upon it or within it, depending on how you look at it.

And a number of these diamond point engravings can still be found throughout Scotland, though some maybe fakes apparently not actually Robie right, but but when out there has you know, certainly if you if you are Scottish, or if you've lived in Scotland or traveled in Scotland for any length of time and you've you've seen one of the uh, we'd love to hear from you about it. But anyway,

they're they're often celebrated, um and uh in. Petrovsky argues that the pencil delivers on a number of the strengths exhibited by this technique without having to rely on fine stones and vandalism, though interestingly enough, he stresses the graphite in a pencil is chemically the same as a diamond. Oh yeah, the same constituents, different structure. Yeah, we're my love, Jon carbon fair alright. So coming back to the pencil itself.

The pencil was then used in congress with ink for a long time as a way of say, lightly marking the margins or even tracing characters, before bringing in permanent ink to h to make it permanent and of course to you know, to stand out more. Bright black ink on parchment, But the pencil becomes steadily more important, evolving from a mere instrument among many to being the writing

implement par excellence of the pre computer world. Just think, for example, of how we use pencil in the English language, you know, to pencil someone or something in uh the uh the adage about this is why pencils have erasers. You know, that's something that made at times feel a little um hokey today. But but Petrosky actually talks about it a little bit like you know that when it

is first rolled out. I believe a pastor use this analogy and does I think that is one of the things about the pencil that is appealing is that it does, on some level, even if it is a hokey level, it sums up something about the human experience. And of course, even if we're not gonna wax poetic about all of this, it is hard to imagine and hard to use a pencil without an eraser, like the two just go hand in hand, right, So you're probably wondering when does the

eraser affix itself to the pencil. When does this invention come along or this innovation anyway, So the concept of an eraser itself certainly predates the pencil really because scribes have always made mistakes, They've always needed to remove unwanted etchings from a manuscript. I think pretty recently we got a piece of Listener mail with somebody talking about the

use of knives to scrape away ink from parchment. Yeah, because when you're when you have ink on parchment, especially pricey parchment, parchment that is valuable and must be used and reused, Uh, you're gonna have to scrape it off. So you might use a small knife to do that. Um. Another thing you might use is a stone or a bit of dried wax or crustless bread. Was a huge was it was not just a random thing. It was

like a standard that you would have the bread. There were, you know, all these little um uh tangents and writings about saying like the hungry scribes succumbing to their to their hunger and consuming the bread that they were supposed to be using to you know, for erasure. Gross. But of course, the spread of rubber technology ends up changing

all of this. So natural rubber had been used in Mesoamerica by the Mayans and the text uh you know, but for uses such as the production of rubber, sports balls, um, as well as I think like waterproofing and various other material uses, uh, you know, for which rubber is very very handy. But then the French bring this material back

to Europe and we go from there. But then in the late eighteenth century you have a British inventor and scientific instrument maker come along by the name of Edward Nairn who lived through eighteen o six, and he starts selling cubes of rubber for erasure in seventeen seventy, claiming that he accidentally discovered the use of this use for rubber when he reached for bread to erase something and grabbed a chunk of rubber instead from grabbed my trick

rubber sandwich by accident, which, uh, it's a nice story, but it also sounds like a little it's too much of a good story, like maybe he was just looking at it. My my take is it seemed more likely that you were to kind of looking and I bet I could erase some something with that, Or maybe he already ate the bread and just didn't want to admit it.

Narn is an interesting figure even without taking into account all of this, um, you know, rubber and eraser business because he made a number of improvements to various scientific instruments of the day, including the microscope and the telescope, and he created the first successful marine barometer. Given his place in the in history, it should come as no surprise that he corresponded with an individual that we've talked about in the show before, none other than Benjamin Franklin.

What do you know, Franklin effect, He even made a set of magnets and a telescope before Benjamin Franklin. So after this uh discovery slash innovation, uh, the eraser soon becomes a common companion of the pencil, and Petrovsky points to various pencil cases uh that included an eraser, you know, pretty much like a big rectangular lump of an eraser that is in the case with the pencils. But they would have still remained separate at the not one unified instrument,

just two instruments that come together. Yes, as far as we know, they did not actually come together into a single instrument until the late nineteenth century. So who can we thank for this invention? Well, looking at Petrovsky's extensive work as well as a Pagan Kennedy two thirteen New York Times magazine article who made that built in eraser? There are three individuals slash entities to highlight here. First

of all, let's look at eighteen fifty eight. Himan Lippmann of Philadelphia was awarded a patent for his invention of a pencil with a groove at the tip that could be that could contain a glued in hunk of rubber and fun fact here, apparently one of Lippmann's ideas, too, was that the eraser could be embedded inside the wood shaft, just like the graph ideas. So you would have to sharpen both ends of your pencil, one to allow the graphite to emerge and the other to allow the eraser

to emerge. Maybe, so we go half and half, like half graphite half eraser, right, Yeah, So that that Pagan Kennedy article includes a drawing of what this might have looked like. So that's an interesting alternate reality to consider, all right. Then, in the early eighteen sixties, the Faber Firm, the key individual here being uh ebiter Hard Faber. UH may have been the first company to put out eraser tipped pencils, as well as uh as pencils that had

like a metal cap on the end as well. Uh. They had an early eighteen sixties patent for quote a lead pencil with an angulated rubber seal head which serves as a seal, a preventer against rolling and as an eraser. Rolling is an interesting um concept with the pencil, you know, because you look at a pencil today and certainly the modern eracer you probably doesn't help prevent rolling. But the shape of the wood does. You can rest a pencil

on one of its sides. Well, you're you're talking about what like the hexagonal cross section pencils, Yeah, which I guess they're the most common type. Though. I remember when I was a kid, I had perfectly round pencils, and well, and I'm sure we have we do have some perfectly round pencils in our house. I think some colored pencils particularly, and of course they roll all over the place. But this this uh, this fine Taikonderoga pencil in front of me here yet it can I can put it on

the desk and it stays put. It's very well behaved. Yes, all right, and then uh. In eighteen sixty two, entrepreneur Joseph Reckendorff sought to improve on Littman's patent. So he bought the patent for a hundred thousand dollars, which is about two million dollars in todays dollars, and then he sued a favor for infringement. As Kennedy writes, uh if all you know, if this would have held up, he would have become a titan industry. He would have been

the master of the modern eraser tipped pencil. But the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in eighteen seventy five that the eraser tipped pencil didn't count as a legitimate invention because he was simply combining to existing and widespread inventions into a new product. So my alarm clock toaster has no hope. What's kind of like there was an episode of Uh Fly of the Concords where there was a character who had a camera phone and it was like a camera

glued to a phone. It's kind of like that. Yeah, with the with with the pencil eraser, you've just taken an eraser and and fixed it on the end. I guess there's an argument that you're not really inventing something, but it does feel big. It does feel huge. I I to a certain extent. I it's a fantas sorry for this guy. Yeah, it's a fantastic leap forward in convenience.

I think that counts as an invention, though, I guess you you just have to have some kind of subjective judgment about how innovative the linking of the two things actually is. Yeah. One thing we forgot to cover, which I also remember from my childhood, or pencils or pins they're capped in something other than a metal tip or a race like a couchh ball or um. I've seen them too, where you have like a dusting implement for like a computer screen thing or some sort of like

toy or gadget. Oh I had one. This This is a big memory for me because I remember buying it and being super proud of the purchase, and I'm really being proud of it for a number of years. Is that I had a Gremlin's two pencil that was capped in a grimlin uh that as if it were like it was perched on the pencil top like it was. It was like holding onto the pencil and I love that thing. I don't think I ever sharpened it. I was so proud of it. That's so good. I wish

I had had that. I think I had like a tazz that could go over the back of the pencil, which I don't know. I don't want out myself as a taz guy. But but no, it comes back to how I think as children, we would fetishize the pencil, and we would we would. I mean a lot of times, especially I mengtioned in cases where you have like school uniforms. You know, you want to stand out, you want to say something with your choice of writing implement. That is very true. Yeah, well, I mean it goes beyond just

like decorations for the pencils. You'd have different kinds of pencils, like the wacky pencils of course, have been around in different things that I remember people at my school being very into like the gel pens that seemed almost like it like an identity forming kind of signal. Er Yeah. Now, speaking of the eraser, uh, Petrovsky rites that as erasers became more and more popular, there was actually kind of

a backlash to them. It's kind of almost like a future shock technological anxiety concerning uh, the erase ability of text, and people were saying, well, how do I how do I write with a pencil so nobody erases it. How can I protect my writings from a racier? And so there were you know, people were giving advice on how to do this or also how to treat the paper after you've written, say with I think they were talking about using a milk wash on the paper. Um so um,

I think that's interesting as well. Like it just a reminder, Yeah, that anytime there's some sort of new technology, certainly of it affects the way that we're using language or using the written word. Uh, it can cause a bit of h you know, it can stir up anxiety, It can stir up a little fear, even because it's it's changing

how we express ourselves, how we define ourselves. Yeah, I mean people, well, people reacting to the concept and of an invention without considering the practicality of what it is they're worried about, Like it would be easier to just burn somebody's writings than to erase everything they had written down, and that that burning technology has existed for quite a while. Yeah. Or it also gets down to the fact of how do you how do you? How how does forgery work?

Forgery comes back to the very principles of writing. We began with you can there's additive forgery, but there's also subtractive forgery. You know, you can if you want to change the grade on your test that's being sent home that your teacher wrote in red ink, Well you can get yourself a red pen and that that f becomes a be rather easily. Right. But then the truth comes to collect at the end of the semester, when your

final grades come in. The harder to alter you can only Uh, forgery is only gonna get you so far. All right, Well, there you have it. Uh, that's the pencil in a nutshell. But obviously there are a number of different roads that we did not take here that we could easily come back to. We could discuss the pen for at least an episode, because there are a number of different innovations with the ink pen over the

years that are worth discussing. UM. For for that matter, UM, written language is a big one, UM, and then the various forms of writing. Also rubber rubber technology, UH technology that comes in the wake of rubber. There's a lot of fun we could have with that as well. Absolutely. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention what you can go to invention pod dot com and that will shoot you over to a place where you can listen to and download the show,

where you can subscribe. Basically, you can get the show wherever you get your podcasts these days, wherever that happens to be. Just make sure that you rate, review, and subscribe. Those are the things that really help us out and check out our other show as well. Stuff to blow your mind if you haven't already. Again, we have an excellent episode on lead uh that you can check out, and we we cover language a lot on that show, so it's a good place to to look for more

on related topics. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my art radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H