# 2026-10-20 - I Pencil by Leonard E. Read
As I sat contemplating the miraculous make-up of an ordinary lead
pencil, the thought flashed in mind: I'll bet there isn't a person on
earth who knows how to make even so simple a thing as a pencil.
If this could be demonstrated, it would dramatically portray the
miracle of the market and would help to make clear that all
manufactured things are but manifestations of creative-energy
exchanges, that these are, in fact, spiritual phenomena. The lessons
in political economy this could teach!
There followed that not-to-be-forgotten day at the pencil factory,
beginning at the receiving dock, covering every phase of countless
transformations, and concluding in an interview with the chemist.
Had you seen what I saw, you, also, might have struck up a warm
friendship with that amazing character, I, PENCIL.
Being a writer in [its] own right, let I, PENCIL speak for [itself]:
I am a lead pencil--the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys
and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with,
my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery--more so than a
tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken
for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and
without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the
level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in
which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise
G.K. Chesterton observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not
for want of wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a
claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand
me--no, that's too much to ask of anyone--if you can become aware of
the miraculousness that I symbolize, you can help save the freedom
mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach.
And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an
airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because--well, because I am
seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how
to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is
realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind
produced in the United States each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the
eye--there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead,
a bit of metal, and an eraser.
## Innumerable Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it
impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would
like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and
complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of
straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now
contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other
gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad
siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went
into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and
its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and
bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the
logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the
raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand
in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you
imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad
engines and who construct and install the communication systems
incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into
small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in
thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason
[people] put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty,
not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How
many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into
supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all
the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my
ancestors? Yes, and included are the [people] who poured the concrete
for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant, which
supplies the mill's power!
Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in
transporting 60 carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all
capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine--each slat
is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another
machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places
another slat atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I
are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
My "lead" itself--it contains no lead at all--is complex. The
graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make
their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the
graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks
and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships.
Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and
the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium
hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are
added such as sulfonated tallow--animal fats chemically reacted with
sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture
finally appears as endless extrusions--as from a sausage grinder--cut
to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees
Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are
then treated with a hot mixture that includes candelilla wax from
Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the
ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor
beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why,
even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow
involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon
black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is
carbon black?
My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. Think of all the persons who
mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny
sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my
ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied?
The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black
nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade
as "the plug," the part [one] uses to erase the errors [one] makes
with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a
rubberlike product made by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East
Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion,
is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous
vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and
the pigment that gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
## No One Knows
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single
person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no
one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you
may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in
far-off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this
is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a
single person in all these millions, including the president of the
pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit
of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference
between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is
in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be
dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the
worker in the oil field--paraffin being a byproduct of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: neither the worker in the oil field nor
the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who [runs] or
makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine
that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the
company performs [their] singular task because [they want] me. Each
one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade.
Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a
pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other
than me. Perhaps it is something like this: each of these millions
sees that [they] can thus exchange [their] tiny know-how for the
goods and services [one] needs or wants. I may or may not be among
these items.
## No Mastermind
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a mastermind,
of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions
which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found.
Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to
which I earlier referred.
It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why do we agree
with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not
make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in
superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular
configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there
among [mankind] that could even record, let alone direct, the
constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a
tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc,
copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles that manifest
themselves in nature an even-more-extraordinary miracle has been
added: the configuration of creative human energies--millions of tiny
know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to
human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human
masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God
could make me. [One person] can no more direct these millions of
know-hows to bring me into being than [they] can put molecules
together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of
the miraculousness that I symbolize, you can help save the freedom
mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these
know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into
creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and
demand--that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive
masterminding--then one will possess an absolutely essential
ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible
without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for
instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe
that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by [people] acting
freely. And here is the reason: each one acknowledges that
[they don't] know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery.
[Each one] also recognizes that no other individual could do it.
These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough
know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any
individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the
absence of faith in free people--in the unawareness that millions of
tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to
satisfy this necessity--the individual cannot help but reach the
erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by
governmental "masterminding."
## Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what
men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little
faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore;
it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly
simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or
a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to
tens of thousands of other things.
Delivery? Why, in this area where [people] have been left free to
try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one
second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any
person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from
Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from
Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates
and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the
Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard--halfway around the world--for
less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce
letter across the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies
uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this
lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best
it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith
that free [people] will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith
will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the
miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith,
as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
This article appears in
Anything That's Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market, 1964.
tags: article,freedom,philosophy,political
# Footnotes
(HTM) Original source
(TXT) The Humble Pencil
(HTM) How To Make A Pencil
(TXT) Dixon Ticonderoga (wikipedia)
(TXT) Sanford (wikipedia)
# Tags
(DIR) article
(DIR) freedom
(DIR) philosophy
(DIR) political