40 Fun Facts About Pencils

Graphite was first mistaken for an ore of which metal, a mix-up that still names the pencil's core?

Lead was the best guess of sixteenth-century miners, who called the mineral plumbago, Latin for the metal's ore. No pencil core has ever contained any of it.

Which Japanese electronics firm is named after a mechanical pencil Tokuji Hayakawa invented in 1915?

Sharp takes its name from the Ever-Ready Sharp pencil; after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake destroyed the pencil business, the company turned to making radios.

Which everyday food lifted pencil marks off paper before purpose-made erasers appeared in 1770?

Bread without its crust was a common pencil eraser, and Tokyo students in the Meiji era were still being handed it for the job.

Charles Fraser-Smith, a wartime gadget maker linked to James Bond's Q, hid what inside pencils?

Maps tucked into pencils were among the secret devices Fraser-Smith built for British agents in occupied Europe, along with steel shoelaces that doubled as saws.

Which colour did the luxury Koh-i-Noor pencil make famous, prompting American rivals to copy it?

Yellow made the Koh-i-Noor stand out when most pencils were dark or unpainted, so competitors borrowed the colour to suggest the same quality.

Which children's author was buried with his snooker cues, burgundy, chocolates and pencils?

Roald Dahl's family gave him what his granddaughter called a sort of Viking funeral, and children have left toys and flowers at his grave ever since.

Which Concord writer improved his family's pencils by binding poor local graphite with clay?

Henry David Thoreau kept working in the family pencil factory beside his writing for most of his adult life, later switching it to supplying graphite for printers.

Which material, sold in 1770 London as costly half-inch cubes, is named for wiping out pencil marks?

Rubber was simply a word for anything used for rubbing until the 1770s, when it stuck to the new material that cleaned pencil marks off paper.

What did locals in England's Borrowdale valley first use graphite for, long before pencils existed?

Marking sheep was the first job found for the pure black mineral, which was so solid that it could simply be sawn into sticks.

Which industrial giant shares its name and emblem with an unrelated pencil maker founded in 1887?

Mitsubishi Pencil, the company behind Uni-ball pens, began as Masaki Pencil in Tokyo and has never been part of the famous industrial group.

Which grade on the European pencil scale matches the American No. 2 used for school tests?

HB is the standard writing grade, sitting between the hard H pencils engineers prefer and the soft B pencils artists use for dark shading.

European pencil grades pair the letter H for hardness with a B that is commonly taken to mean what?

Blackness is the usual reading, since softer B cores carry less clay and mark darker, though Koh-i-Noor claims the letter honours its home city of Budějovice.

Pencil graphite is a crystalline form of which chemical element, also the basis of coal?

Carbon atoms in graphite sit in stacked sheets held by weak bonds, so whole layers glide off onto the paper as a pencil moves.

Graphite's name, coined by Abraham Werner in 1789, comes from the word for write in which language?

Greek graphein, to write or draw, gave Werner his name for the mineral, replacing older labels that wrongly tied it to a metal.

The flat body of a carpenter's pencil stops it from doing what on a job site?

Rolling away is prevented by the flat sides, which also work as a quick ruler because the body is cut to common quarter- and half-inch widths.

Powdered graphite, the mineral in pencil cores, is sold to locksmiths and machinists as a dry what?

Lubricant is graphite's other career: it keeps working at very high or very low temperatures, so it is used on forging dies and mining gears as well as locks.

Graphite, the mineral in pencil cores, forms the anode in which widely used battery type?

Lithium-ion cells rely on graphite because its layers can take in and release the ions without swelling apart, charge after charge.

Which German firm, founded in Stein in 1761, paints its pencils green after a count's army regiment?

Faber-Castell got its double name in 1898, when the founding family's heiress Ottilie married Count Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen.

The Koh-i-Noor pencil Hardtmuth showed at the 1889 Paris World Fair is named after a famous what?

Diamond glamour was the point: the Koh-i-Noor stone, whose Persian name means Mountain of Light, sits among the British Crown Jewels.

Non-photo pencils draw sketch lines that graphic arts camera film cannot detect in which colour?

Blue of one pale shade was invisible to the film used in printing, so artists could rough out a page and ink over it with no need to erase.

The first nuclear reactor stacked 45,000 graphite blocks in 1942 to slow down which particles?

Neutrons slowed by graphite are far more likely to split uranium, and Germany's rival project stalled partly because its scientists wrongly ruled the material out.

Which household item did Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov use to isolate graphene from graphite?

Adhesive tape pressed onto graphite and pulled off again thinned the flakes to a single layer of atoms, work that won the pair the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

IBM's 1937 test-scoring machine read pencil marks on answer sheets because graphite can do what?

To conduct electricity was the trick: wire brushes swept the sheet and a filled-in answer completed the circuit. Later scanners sensed light instead.

What is the metal band called that holds the eraser on a pencil and the bristles on a paintbrush?

Ferrule comes from the Latin for a small bracelet, its spelling bent over time by ferrum, the word for iron.

Which French inventor created the modern pencil core after a blockade cut off English graphite?

Nicolas-Jacques Conté needed only days to hit on firing powdered graphite with clay, and the artists' crayons he also devised still carry his name.

England's Crown guarded the Borrowdale graphite mines because the mineral lined moulds for what?

Cannonballs cast in graphite-lined moulds came out rounder and smoother and flew farther, so the mines were flooded between digs to stop thieves.

Which conifer, dyed to pass for the scarce old favourite, became the standard pencil wood?

Incense cedar from California and Oregon took over once the eastern red variety grew so scarce that pencil makers were recycling old fences and barns.

Swiss firm Caran d'Ache borrowed a cartoonist's pen name that means pencil in which language?

Russian karandash was the pen name of Paris cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré, and the Geneva firm adopted it in 1924 when a new owner took over.

Which tool did astronauts and cosmonauts both use on plastic slates before buying space pens?

Grease pencils have no moving parts and a paper wrap that simply peels back, while snapped graphite tips and dust were a hazard to electronics in zero gravity.

Ticonderoga pencils are named after a town in which US state, where graphite ore was found in 1815?

New York's Ticonderoga, better known for its Revolutionary War fort, sat near graphite deposits that Joseph Dixon's company later mined for its pencils.

Which pencil, favoured by John Steinbeck and animator Chuck Jones, was discontinued in 1998?

Blackwing 602 pencils became so prized once production stopped that single originals fetched $40 or more at online auctions.

Which Lake District town, home to the Derwent Pencil Museum, grew famous for its graphite pencils?

Keswick had a pencil factory by 1832, and when production later moved to Workington the museum stayed on the old site.

Which economist retold Leonard Read's essay I, Pencil on his 1980 television series Free to Choose?

Milton Friedman used the story of a pencil's many makers, from loggers to a lighthouse keeper, to argue that no one person directs how it comes together.

Japanese pencil maker Tombow, founded in 1913, takes its name and its logo from which insect?

Dragonfly is tonbo in Japanese, and the insect has been the company's registered trademark on its pencils since 1927.

The word pencil comes from the Latin penicillus, an artist's fine brush, which literally means what?

Little tail was a Roman name for a painter's fine brush. The word has no link to pen, which comes from the Latin for feather.

Which Jamaican-born Philadelphia stationer patented the first pencil with a built-in eraser in 1858?

Hymen Lipman sold the patent for $100,000, only for the US Supreme Court to void it in 1875 as a mere pairing of two existing things.

Shelbyville, nicknamed The Pencil City for its cluster of pencil factories, is in which US state?

Tennessee farms supplied the raw material: the Musgrave company swapped farmers' weathered wooden fence rails for new wire fences and cut the old rails into pencil slats.

What did miners call the graphite they dug in Borrowdale before the mineral had a scientific name?

Wad was the everyday local name, used alongside black cauke, for the mineral that would make the valley's pencil makers famous.

The oldest known mechanical pencil came from which ship, wrecked in 1791 hunting Bounty mutineers?

HMS Pandora had captured 14 of the mutineers when it struck the Great Barrier Reef on the voyage home, taking the pencil down with it.

Which sport gives its name to the short pencils that many libraries hand out with scrap paper?

Golf pencils, about nine centimetres long, were made for recording scores hole by hole and are cheap enough to give to anyone.