- There are two theories as to where the word pencil comes from. One is that is comes from the Latin pencillus, meaning "little tail". The other is that is comes from the French word pincel, meaning “little paintbrush.”
- There is no Lead in a pencil. The Black stuff in the middle which makes the marks is actually a mixture of graphite and clay, which has been fired in a kiln at more than 800 degrees Celsius. The word graphite was coined by an 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, from the Greek graphein, “to write.” So why do we call it lead, then? The story goes that some Shepherds in Borrowdale, Cumbria, were out looking for some lost sheep in 1564 when they stumbled across a massive deposit of pure graphite. The stuff was assumed to be lead, since science wasn't so advanced back then. One of its early uses was to mark sheep. It was also used for rust-proofing and as a home remedy, mixed with ale and Wine. Typically, people only got really wealthy from it when they found a way to use it for war - for coating cannonballs. Suddenly it was worth £5,000 a ton, armed guards were brought in for the mine and miners had to strip after their shifts to ensure they weren't stealing any. Seven years in a penal colony was the punishment for stealing graphite.
- Okay, so a murder plot where someone gets stabbed with a pencil and dies of lead poisoning isn't going to work. However, it used to be possible to get lead poisoning from a pencil up until the middle of the 20th century - by chewing it, because they'd be painted with lead paint. Now, however, a writer would have to be content with the victim dying from an infection caused by a pencil stab wound.
- Why are so many pencils painted Yellow? I came across two possible explanations. One is that the Rolls Royce of pencils in the 19th century was a brand called Koh-I-Noor, named after the famous yellow diamond and based in Austria-Hungary, which had yellow in its Flag. The other is that the best graphite was from China, and pencil producers wanted people to associate their products with the Orient and with quality - so they chose yellow because it was a colour associated with Chinese royalty. China still produces more than half of the world's pencils today.
- The average pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, or write 45,000 words. Or so they say. Nobody has actually tested this out.
- We've all heard that old joke about how NASA spent millions of dollars designing and making a pen that would write in zero gravity, while the Russians merely got on with it and used pencils. The Americans did use pencils in space, but after the Apollo 1 fire, they were deemed to be a fire hazard. Bits of graphite floating around in zero gravity were a hazard too. It was for these reasons that NASA started using the Fisher Space Pen in 1965.
- The standard size of a pencil is 19 cm (7.5 in) long, and 6mm (a quarter of an inch) high. The largest pencil ever made is a Castell 9000, which is on display at a pencil factory in Kuala Lumpur. It is 65 feet high. The smallest was made by engineers at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Theirs is essentially an atomic force microscope rather than a traditional pencil. It can draw lines 50 nanometers (two millionths of an inch) wide. On average, a pencil can be sharpened 17 times.
- Pencils are classified according to their hardness or blackness. That is why you'll see the letters H, B and numbers on pencils. Pencils with more clay in the mix are harder and lighter. H9 is the hardest and lightest. Pencils with more graphite are softer and darker. The softest and darkest is a B9.
- What about coloured pencils? Their cores are wax or oil based and contain pigments and binding agents.
- Some famous writers would use nothing but pencils to write their novels - Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck among them. Hemingway held that writing the first draft in pencil and then typing it meant you got an extra chance to edit your work and improve it. Another writer, Henry David Thoreau, had a job as a pencil designer at his father's pencil factory before becoming a writer full time.
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