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A Spectacular Antique Mechanical Hand Engraved Sterling Silver Graphite Pencil Pen Holder. Probably made in the 1920s. The style looks to be Art Deco. Vintage mechanical pencil with lead. Light wear and tarnish. Don't miss out on the chance to add this to your collection. How it works. The pencil case will push a piece of lead out and will pull it back in. It protects the user From getting graphite all over them. Lead is advanced and retracted by twisting the tip. The pencil is in excellent operating condition. Sometime in the 16th century, a tree fell over in Borrowdale, England. Under that tree was an igneous rock layer with protruding veins of a dark gray metallic-looking substance. The locals noticed that it looked just like lead. But this was no metal. It was pure carbon. It was graphite. They called it black lead. English people cut graphite into chunks and put it into sticks that could be used to write. They wrapped the sticks in paper or string and sold them on the street. This new tool was called the pencil—a name derived from pencillum, the Latin for a fine brush. Making your mark would never be the same. Nothing was like the pencil. It was completely dry. You didn't have to worry about spilling ink like you did with a quill pen. It made that dark, discernible mark on paper. And it was erasable! The pencil is the go-to drawing tool of the carpenter and the architect, the cartoonist and the painter. We used pencils when we learned math in elementary school, and a graphite-filled piece of wood remains the implement of choice for anyone who needs to make a mark that is not permanent. You might think of the mechanical pencil as a modern idea, pioneered by someone who got tired of sharpening and sharpening their wooden scribblers. In fact, pencil-makers have been making "lead holders," early versions of mechanical pencils, for centuries. These lead holders were made of metal, sometimes silver and gold. As such, they were viewed as adornments through the 19th century. The weight made them difficult to use, too, so the precious-metal mechanical pencils never became very popular. Then, in 1915, Japanese metal worker Tokuji Hayakawa invented the Ever-Ready Sharp mechanical pencil, or simply, the Eversharp pencil. It was as thin as a normal wooden pencil and the lead fit snugly inside. Rotate the metal pencil as if you were screwing it together and the lead would pop out. The design would take off around the world. Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci frequently sketched in pencil. One of Thomas Edison’s brightest ideas was to keep a three-inch-long pencil in his vest pocket just to jot down notes! John Steinbeck, who wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Cannery Row”, used as many as 60 cedar pencils every day! Ernest Hemingway, author of “The Old Man and the Sea” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, also favored cedar pencils for writing down thoughts and for taking notes while reporting on the Spanish Civil War. The first mass-produced pencils were natural and unpainted to show off high-quality wood casings. But, by the 1890s, many pencil manufacturers started painting pencils and imprinting them with brand names. There’s an interesting story behind how the familiar yellow pencil came to be. Early American pencils were made from Eastern Red Cedar, a strong, splinter-resistant wood that grew in Tennessee and other parts of the Southeastern United States. To be nearer to the source, Northern manufacturers migrated south and set up wood mills until, eventually, the greatest concentration of U.S. pencil manufacturers had established factories in Tennessee. To this day, U.S. producers are primarily concentrated in the South. By the early 1900s, however, additional sources of wood were needed. Pencil manufacturers turned to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, where they found Incense-cedar, a species that grew in abundance and made superior pencils. California Incense-cedar soon became the wood of choice for domestic and international pencil makers around the world.

The Earliest Forms of Self Expression / Did you know that modern pencils owe it all to an ancient Roman writing instrument called a stylus? Scribes used this thin metal rod to leave a light, but readable mark on papyrus (an early form of paper). Other early styluses were made of lead, which is what we still call pencil cores, even though they actually are made of non-toxic graphite. Graphite came into widespread use following the discovery of a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England in 1564. Appreciated for leaving a darker mark than lead, the mineral proved so soft and brittle that it required a holder. Originally, graphite sticks were wrapped in string. Later, the graphite was inserted into hollowed-out wooden sticks and, thus, the wood-cased pencil was born! Nuremberg, Germany was the birthplace of the first mass-produced pencils in 1662. Spurred by Faber-Castell (established in 1761), Lyra, Steadtler and other companies, an active pencil industry developed throughout the 19th century industrial revolution. Early settlers depended on pencils from overseas until the war with England cut off imports. William Monroe, a Concord, Massachusetts cabinet-maker, is credited with making America’s first wood pencils in 1812. Another Concord native, famous author Henry David Thoreau, was also renowned for his pencil-making prowess. The American pencil industry took off when The Joseph Dixon Crucible Company (now Dixon Ticonderoga) and more pencil manufacturers started getting into the act and, towards the end of the 19th century, New York and New Jersey hosted several factories established by prominent German pencil manufacturers, including Faber-Castell, Eberhard Faber, Eagle Pencil Company (later Berol) and General Pencil Company. The history of the pencil industry includes a great number of important companies and brands from around the world. Many now have factories globally. Factors contributing to the challenging impact of globalization, resulting in a great shift of pencil production increasingly being concentrated in Asia over the past 20 years.

Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21567/history–of–the–pencil/

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 1560. The term "black lead pencil" was in use by 1565. By 1662, 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 18th 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 1860s. The 1855 catalog of Waterlow & Sons, London, offered "Pure Cumberland Lead Pencils."