Pencils



Pencil Collage Puzzle Item #730



Hi Puzzlers,

Recently my family and I watched an episode of “How It’s Made” on the Discovery Channel; it was a feature piece on how pencils are made. I immediately thought of our Pencils puzzle by artist Maureen Rupprecht. I remember her bringing the original artwork into the office and asking everyone what we thought of it. It was love at first sight! Brightly colored and intriguing to look at, we just had to make it into a puzzle.

Upon closer examination of the pencils, I noticed some were very old and unique. Intrigued by this, I asked her where she found the collection. Maureen said that it was her own collection and she has been collecting pencils for as long as she could remember. Her love of pencils and her desire to preserve them is what inspired her to make the piece. I loved that answer and it made perfect sense that an artist would collect pencils.

Pencils can be traced back to ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. Small lead discs were used to make guide lines on papyrus (ancient paper) to keep writings straight. Before long someone realized that a thin rod of lead could be used to draw fine lines and detailed images. The word “pencil” derived from the Latin word penicillus, meaning tiny brush.

In 1564 a large deposit of graphite was found in Borrowdale, England and local farmers began using it to mark their sheep. They called this new substance plumbago, Latin for “lead ore”, because the substance was believed to be a type of lead. It would be known as lead until the eighteenth-century when geologist, Abraham Werner, identified and named it graphite after the Greek word meaning “write.” Early graphite rods were wrapped in various encasements including wax, string and sheepskin, to prevent breakage and dirty hands. By the early 1600’s many began inserting the graphite rods into hollowed-out wooden sticks, resulting in the classic wood-cased pencil!

The pencil as we know it today was invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1794 at the request of Napoleon. France at the time was under economic embargo due to the French Revolution and a substitute for graphite was needed. Conté developed this new lead in just eight days. He discovered that if he mixed clay with a low quality graphite powder and then baked it he could produce “leads” in varying degrees of hardness. A similar recipe is still in use today making Conté the father of the modern pencil.

So how did the pencil get the bad lead rap you may wonder? Well, it had to do with the paint being used to coat the wood. Those beautifully colored paints were loaded with lead! And if you are like many people who chew or suck on the tip of your pencil you would ingest the lead!

Personally I prefer a brightly colored pencil to a pen any day.  They never explode, and if they do happen to mark something it can easily be washed away.

Happy Puzzling!