So Much More About Pencils - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli

So Much More About Pencils - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli

It is not often that I follow a piece with a sequel. Sequels rarely work in Hollywood, but this isn’t Hollywood, though I don’t expect a full-length movie about pencils. However, there are a few pencil songs and cartoons, none of which I will visit.

I was surprised to see how much is written about the wooden, “lead” pencil. I knew the brand Ticonderoga, but that was it. It’s actually the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, named after Joseph Dixon, who experimented with various uses for graphite found on his father’s sailing vessels. He mixed the mineral with clay and water, rolled it into strips and baked it in his mother’s oven. He then pressed the mixture into grooved cedar wood, and the first Dixon pencil was created.

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The biggest virtue of a wooden pencil is that, well, it's not made out of plastic. That means it takes less energy to produce the raw pencil material and, over time, it will eventually become a pile of shavings that will, hopefully, be composted.

The wood is one of the most important components of a high-quality pencil. The best pencils are made from Genuine Incense-Cedar, while quality budget pencils are made of Basswood or Poplar. Cedar is the most used.

2,000,000,000 is the estimated number of pencils used in the U.S. each year. This represents about 82,000 trees.

Graphite is expensive, but pencils are inexpensive because the graphite core (called "lead", though it contains no lead at all) is not high-grade pure graphite but a mixture of graphite powder with a clay binder. The wood encloses the graphite, and the yellow paint serves as the casing.

Pencils create marks by physical abrasion, leaving a trail of solid core material that adheres to a sheet of paper or another surface. Its grey or black marks, though  easily erased, are resistant to moisture, most chemicals, ultraviolet radiation, and natural aging. Other types of pencil cores, such as charcoal, are primarily used for drawing and sketching. Color pencils are for another day.

The highest-priced pencil is the Limited Edition of the Graf von Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil, offered at $12,800. Only ten of these classic pencils were crafted with 240-year-old olive wood and 18-carat white gold and include a built-in eraser and sharpener. There are approximately five remaining in the world.

The Perfect Pencil Limited Edition White Gold Pencil, crafted of cedar and featuring diamonds and white gold, is the world’s most expensive today.

That’s quite enough, albeit only a modest amount of the considerable information about the pencil. How about using the word pencil in some phrases?

For example: not the sharpest pencil in the box, pencil me in, pencil pusher, pencil whipped, pencil-necked (geek). I’ll leave you to figure the meanings of these phrases. I’ll also leave you to figure out the most commonly used pencil phrase, not mentioned here.

Pencils are near perfect as they combine three essential functions in a single object: writing, and correcting, in a timeless design.

Ya gotta love ‘em.

Dr. Ed Iannuccilli is the author of three popular memoirs, “Growing up Italian; Grandfather’s Fig Tree and Other Stories”, “What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner” and “My Story Continues: From Neighborhood to Junior High.”  Learn more here.