[HN Gopher] The history of lead pencils and their lack of any le...
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The history of lead pencils and their lack of any lead (2021)
Author : nkurz
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-03-29 18:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pensunlimited.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pensunlimited.co.uk)
| nkurz wrote:
| I wanted to know when pencil leads stopped by made of lead, and
| was surprised to learn that they never had been:
|
| _Going back to an earlier point, when the graphite was
| discovered the English thought they had unearthed a lead deposit,
| a misunderstanding caused because lead and graphite look
| uncannily similar in their natural form. It is because of this
| prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil,
| a name that has endured until today._
| kazinator wrote:
| My understanding had always been that there were never pencils
| where a rod of lead was encased in wood.
|
| However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing
| which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I
| pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another
| thought.
|
| How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era
| instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in
| spite of the story about the graphite deposit?
|
| There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean,
| between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it
| might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite
| pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead.
| You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside
| joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by
| historic knowledge of lead styluses?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate
| inside joke.
|
| Or you simply use it because then people will immediately
| understand what it is for?
| adrian_b wrote:
| As tools for writing, normal styluses and lead rods, which
| were both used in Roman times, are distinct.
|
| A "stilus" (the modern spelling of the words "stylus" and
| "style" is a mistake, which was frequent when Latin words had
| been assumed to be Greek words with Modern Greek
| pronunciation) was a metal rod that was used to write on wax
| tablets. The Romans called it either "stilus" or "graphium",
| the latter form being directly borrowed from Greek. The Latin
| words "stilus" and "tabella" were used to translate the Greek
| words "graphion" and "deltos". The Greeks have learned to use
| wax tablets from the Phoenicians ("deltos" is a Semitic word)
| and the Romans have learned to use them from the Greeks.
|
| The wax tablets were the main method for writing texts that
| could be erased later.
|
| Besides such metal styluses that were used for writing by
| pressing soft materials, there existed a second kind of
| styluses, made of true lead metal.
|
| This second kind, which was much less common, is based on
| using a soft metal and a slightly abrasive tablet surface.
| Drawing with such a soft metal stylus leaves a trace of
| metal, exactly like drawing with a graphite pencil. For
| instance Pliny the Elder mentions such cases of using true
| lead rods for drawing, e.g. for drawing fine lines on a
| surface to guide the writing with ink on it, like the printed
| lines in some modern notebooks.
|
| Suitable soft metals are lead, silver, gold and platinum, but
| lead has always been many orders of magnitude cheaper than
| the others, so it has been frequently used for this purpose
| before the discovery of graphite.
|
| Graphite is softer than any of these metals, so it leaves
| much more visible traces, even without using a great pressure
| during writing. The metal styluses leave much finer traces
| than graphite, so they are less suitable for writing a text
| with good visibility, but they allow better control for fine
| details in drawings.
|
| While after graphite began to be used for pencils it
| immediately replaced most uses of soft metal styluses, the
| latter have remained popular until today for certain kinds of
| artistic drawings, the so-called metal-point drawings.
|
| The most popular metal for artistic drawings is silver,
| because it is much cheaper than gold or platinum, while
| producing higher-quality drawings than lead , graphite or
| charcoal.
|
| There are many such silverpoint drawings that are very
| beautiful.
| hinkley wrote:
| You have forgotten another form of carbon - charcoal. It's
| not much used for writing, but it does have a niche with
| artists.
|
| The lead shadows of Pliny the Elder are similarly used by
| artists to do rough drafts before committing pen to paper.
| Particularly cartoonists, prior to photoshop layers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known
| as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today_
|
| Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different
| substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took
| that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
| oakashes wrote:
| It didn't make any sense to me either. I found this
| article[1] which frames it a little more clearly: it's not
| that they thought graphite and lead were the exact same
| thing, it's that they thought graphite was just a particular
| type of lead that was useful for drawing when first
| discovered.
|
| 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-
| wonde...
| gweinberg wrote:
| graphite might look similar to lead, but it's not really
| plausible that anyone would mistake it for lead, except at first
| glance. Its physical properties are completely different.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Its physical properties are completely different._
|
| Graphite and diamonds have completely different physical
| properties too, yet both are carbon.
|
| They didn't think graphite was literally equivalent to lead.
| They thought it was another form of lead.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Did they already understand allotropy?
| roywiggins wrote:
| Atomic theory was just _barely_ beginning to be invented at
| the beginning of the 19th century. Apparently graphite was
| discovered to be carbon (and not lead) in 1779:
|
| http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/
| d...
| gweinberg wrote:
| That doesn't make a lot of sense. People understandably
| though graphite and diamonds were different, because they
| seemed so different. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally
| different because they differ in all observable properties
| makes sense. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally the same
| because they are they same color but in no other way similar
| really doesn't.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I am not sure that the ideas about substances being
| _fundamentally the same_ were very well developed at the
| time. Atomic theory didn 't exist. What counted as
| "fundamental" and "the same" was not very well understood
| or, I'd eager, even broadly agreed upon. Turning lead into
| gold was considered a genuine possibility for a long time.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Turning lead into gold was considered a genuine
| possibility for a long time.
|
| And much later, it was found to be a genuine possibility
| with terrible economics. Just need a particle
| accelerator, and a lot of patience.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Noone can mistake chilli peppers for peppercorn, but they named
| it that anyway.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a
| pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my
| leg.
|
| My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned
| myself and would be dying shortly.
|
| Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the
| doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite
| in my leg would cause essentially no harm.
|
| It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.
| cancerhacker wrote:
| I have the same thing in the palm of my hand - was bumping a
| pencil along a wall, also in fourth grade, ish. I knew it was
| graphite and wouldn't hurt me, but I was too afraid of it
| hurting to winkle it out, and it just healed over.
| nkurz wrote:
| I spent some time puzzling over what "winkle" might be a typo
| for before realizing it was a British verb I was unfamiliar
| with:
|
| "chiefly British : to displace, remove, or evict from a
| position"
|
| Apparently the etymology is the periwinkles are difficult to
| remove from their shells: https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/winkle
| inetknght wrote:
| Once upon a time I was stabbed in the knee with a pencil. It's
| still there 30+ years later. Both the knee and the pencil mark.
| It doesn't hurt at all.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I have a pencil stab wound from grade school as well.
| Apparently there are many of us pencil stab victims.
|
| The same girl came at me with scissors later on but she
| wasn't as successful that time.
| timmg wrote:
| I have almost the exact same story. Except my older sister
| freaked out about me potentially having "lead poison." She
| called my *nurse* mom at work. Mom said it would be fine and
| she'd take a look when she got home. Mom was pretty old-school,
| fwiw :)
|
| I still have the blue dot next to my knee.
| david422 wrote:
| I've got a blue mark in the palm of my hand from where it was
| stabbed in maybe 1st or 2nd grade. I don't think I actually
| left a piece of pencil in there ... I think perhaps the skin
| was colored grey and just stayed that way?
| layer8 wrote:
| Same but on the back of my hand.
| ane wrote:
| So what's the truth of the hardness/blackness grade? Did Conte
| invent it? Because Hardtmuth, one of the large pencil
| manufacturers, claims otherwise:
|
| "According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking
| of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname
| Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budejovice in Czech language, and
| F refers to his first name Franz."
|
| https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-...
|
| Sounds a bit apocryphal to me.
| kitd wrote:
| There is actually a (very interesting) Pencil Museum in Keswick
| in the Lake District, UK, near where those first graphite
| deposits were found. One fact I learnt was that early on, due to
| its usefulness and scarcity, it became a hugely valuable
| commodity, transport had to be done in secret or under guard, and
| the mine owners became extremely wealthy.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Actually it is misleading as pencil did have lead. Just in the
| coating and hence if you chew it, as it is used by kids or people
| like to bite their nail and pencil.
|
| Btw " The English were not the only ones to make this mistake and
| in Arabic, Gaelic and German the word for pencils all mean Lead
| Pen." so is chinese.
| dmckeon wrote:
| Fun fact: Henry David Thoreau's family was active in the pencil-
| making business in the 1820..1850 timeframe, and Henry D. made
| several innovations in the art.
|
| https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendental...
|
| https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-enginee...
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(page generated 2024-04-01 23:01 UTC)