Lead pencils, of course, contain no lead. The writing medium is graphite, a form of carbon. Writing instruments made from sticks cut from high quality natural graphite mined at Cumberland in England and wrapped in string or inserted in wooden tubes came into use around By , pencils were produced in Nuremberg, in what is now Germany, apparently by gluing sticks of graphite into cases assembled from two pieces of wood.
By the early 18 th century, wood-cased pencils that did not require the high quality graphite available only in England were produced in Nuremberg with cores made by mixing graphite, sulfur and various binding agents. These German pencils were inferior to English pencils, which continued to be made with sticks cut from natural graphite into the s. According to Petroski pp. The piece of wood into which the leads were placed has a groove about twice as deep as the thickness of the rod of lead. A slat of wood was then glued in over the lead to completely fill the groove, and the pencil was ready to be finished to the desired exterior shape.
In the U. Hagley Museum and Library. In , Dixon set up a new factory just outside New York City that used graphite to manufacture crucibles for melting metals, polish for cast iron stoves, and, on a limited scale, pencils. However, most lead pencils sold in the U. The American Lead Pencil Co. Supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica , 9th ed. Mass production of lead pencils began in the U.
During , several patents were granted for machinery for making lead pencils [ 4 ], including a Dixon wood planing machine for shaping pencils that produced pencils per minute. American Lead Pencil Company, According to Petroski p. In we commenced building machinery for making lead pencils, and on November 18, , we shipped the first invoice of one gross [of pencils] to Voorhees Bros.
Now our sales are beyond what our wildest expectations were then. We began in a building 25 x 25, with four or five hands, and now use one hundred thousand square feet of floor space and employ four hundred hands. In , Charles J. By , Dixon Crucible was issuing stock certificates. In , Dixon Crucible alone manufactured more than 30 million pencils. Petroski p. Before a market for mechanical pencil sharpeners could be developed, it was necessary not only that a substantial number of pencils were is use but also that these pencils could be sharpened by a machine.
