IELTS Academic Reading passage: The Long Life of the Pencil

The Long Life of the Pencil

Few objects are as familiar, as cheap and as little considered as the pencil. It is picked up by children learning to form letters and by engineers sketching a bridge, it works upside down and in the rain, and it can be bought almost anywhere in the world for the price of a bus fare. Yet the name most people give it is wrong. The core of a pencil has never contained lead, the soft grey metal used for pipes and roofing. What it contains is graphite, a form of carbon, and the confusion dates from the sixteenth century, when the first users of the material assumed that the greasy black mineral they were writing with was a variety of the metal they already knew.

That mineral came from a single valley. Some time in the middle of the sixteenth century, shepherds in Borrowdale, in the English Lake District, found a deposit of an unusually pure black substance exposed on a hillside, and began using it to mark their sheep. It was called plumbago, or black lead, and within a few decades it was being cut into thin sticks, wrapped in string or sheepskin to keep the fingers clean, and sold in London. The Borrowdale deposit was, and remains, the only large body of solid graphite of that quality ever discovered, and its value was soon recognised by the Crown, which took control of the mine. Graphite was needed for lining the moulds in which cannonballs were cast, and for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the mine was opened for only a few weeks each year, flooded when not in use and guarded against thieves, while smuggled graphite fetched prices that made the men who dug it rich.

The stick in its sheepskin was clumsy, and the wooden pencil was an early improvement. Craftsmen in the nearby town of Keswick began gluing a sliver of graphite into a groove cut in a strip of wood and capping it with a second strip, an arrangement that has not changed in its essentials since. On the continent, where no such deposit existed, makers had to work with powdered graphite mixed with sulphur or glue, which gave a scratchy, uneven line. It was in one of these workshops, at Stein near Nuremberg, that Kaspar Faber began making pencils in 1761, founding a firm whose descendants are still in the trade.

The pencil as it exists today was the product of a war. In the 1790s the French Republic was cut off by a British naval blockade from the graphite it imported, and the government asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, an officer and inventor, to find a substitute. In 1795 Conté ground low-grade graphite to a powder, mixed it with clay, pressed the paste into thin rods and fired them in a kiln. The result was as good as anything from Borrowdale, and it had an advantage the English stick could never offer: by varying the proportion of clay, the maker could control exactly how hard or soft the core would be. Conté's process is the one used by every manufacturer today, and the grading scale on the side of a pencil, from a soft 6B to a hard 6H, records the balance of clay and graphite in its core.

Across the Atlantic the pencil became a family business in unexpected hands. The writer Henry David Thoreau spent years in his father's pencil works in Concord, Massachusetts, and is credited with improving the American mixture of clay and graphite until it matched the best European imports. The other American contribution was less technical. In 1858 Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia patented a pencil with a rubber eraser fixed to one end, an idea so obvious in retrospect that it is hard to believe anyone owned it. Nobody did for long: in 1875 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the patent was invalid, on the grounds that fastening together two things that already existed, and that went on doing exactly what they had always done, was not an invention.

The look of the modern pencil was settled in the same period. Most pencils of the nineteenth century were left in natural wood or painted in dark colours. In 1890 a firm in Bohemia launched an expensive pencil made with graphite from Siberia, then regarded as the finest in the world, and painted it yellow, a colour associated at the time with China and with luxury. The yellow pencil sold so well that rivals copied the colour, and it became the default in the United States, where a large majority of pencils are still yellow today. The wood changed as well. Red cedar was so favoured for its straight grain and pleasant smell that supplies ran low by the early twentieth century, and manufacturers moved to incense cedar from California, which is still the standard casing.

It is worth asking why the pencil has survived at all, in an age of cheap ballpoints, keyboards and touchscreens. Part of the answer is practical. A pencil needs no ink and no power, it writes on wet paper and in freezing temperatures, and a mistake can be removed without trace. Part of it is chemical. Graphite does not fade, run or react with paper, so a pencilled note is more durable than most inks, which is why surveyors, archivists and artists still reach for one. And part of it is habit. The pencil was the first writing tool most people ever held, and the small pleasure of sharpening one, of seeing a soft grey line appear on a clean page, has outlasted every prediction of its disappearance.