Continental pencil makers no longer needed to rely on the British for pencils.Ĭonté’s invention spurred more innovation in the world of pencil making. Thus, French engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté was responsible for inventing ‘Crayons Conté’, which was low-quality graphite mixed with clay, shaped into rods, and baked. By 1794, however, France was cut off from this supply of pencils due to their war with Britain. Britain still had a monopoly over pencil making, and graphite, at this time. This connotation stuck to graphite, and consequently, pencils too.Īfter Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his drawing of a strip of graphite inside a tube of wood, the ‘pencil’ began to spread throughout Europe. Because it looked so much like lead, people would call it plumbago - the Latin word for lead, i.e., ‘plumbus’ - or even ‘black lead’. In the early days after the discovery, local shepherds were the only ones using graphite to mark their sheep. Werner was responsible for naming it ‘graphite’, from the Greek word ‘graphein,’ which means ‘to write’. This is around the time people began using a piece of graphite wrapped in a string to write.ġ8th-century German chemist A. Legend says a storm uprooted a tree here, and clinging to the tree roots was a shiny black substance - graphite! There is no evidence that this is how graphite was discovered what we do know is that this site was transformed into a commercial graphite mine a few decades later. This crystallized form of carbon was found somewhere around 1565 or even earlier, near Keswick, England. Pencils are one of the first writing tools and they are known to have originated in the 16th century when the world discovered graphite. Back in the 1st century B.C., the Greek poet Philip of Thessaloníki wrote about ‘leaden writing instruments’. Who would have thought that a graphite core closed inside a wooden casing could perform such numerous and extremely important tasks?īefore the invention of the pencil as we know it, people still wrote, only, they used things like a fine brush of camel hair or the stylus (ancient Romans).
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