Pencil 2.0

The NYTimes had a photo essay last week about the last pencil factory in the USA.

A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use. 

archeoblog links to that article and notes:

I believe I may have written before on this topic in the context of this book by Henry Petroski:

 Petroski ranges widely in time, discussing the writing technologies of antiquity. But his story really begins in the early modern period, when, in 1565, a Swiss naturalist first described the properties of the mineral that became known as graphite. Petroski traces the evolution of the pencil through the Industrial Revolution, when machine manufacture replaced earlier handwork. Along the way, he looks at some of pencil making’s great innovators–including Henry David Thoreau, the famed writer, who worked in his father’s pencil factory, inventing techniques for grinding graphite and experimenting with blends of lead, clay, and other ingredients to yield pencils of varying hardness and darkness. Petroski closes with a look at how pencils are made today–a still-imperfect technology that may yet evolve with new advances in materials and design.

so who invented the pencil?

Although the exact inventor of the pencil is unknown, Conrad Gesner is often credited with the invention. In 1565, Gesner was the first to document the use of graphite placed in a wooden shaft, which was the predecessor to modern pencils

or maybe not: the pencil as we know it came later:

Pencils were invented in 1795 by a French scientist named Nicolas-Jacques Conte. He used a mixture of graphite, clay and water baked in a kiln to create the "lead" of the pencil. He then housed this mixture in a wooden frame for writing

another reference to the evolution of pencils LINK includes this information on the eraser:

In 1770, the noted scientist Sir Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen) recorded the following, "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil." ...

English engineer, Edward Naime is also credited with the creation of the first eraser in 1770. Before rubber, breadcrumbs had been used to erase pencil marks. Naime claims he accidentally picked up a piece of rubber instead of his lump of bread and discovered the possibilities. He went on to sell the new rubbing out devices or rubbers.

and then there was the pencil sharpener: Wikipedia notes:

Before the development of dedicated pencil sharpeners, a pencil was sharpened by whittling it with a knife...French mathematician Bernard Lassimonne applied for the first patent (French patent #2444) on pencil sharpeners in 1828, but it was not until 1847 that the pencil sharpener in its recognizable modern form was invented by fellow Frenchman Thierry Des Estivaux

There is an old urban legend that NASA spent thousands of dollars designing a space pen that worked in zero gravity, while the Russians just used a cheap pencil.

That joke was meant to show how inefficient the government was.

However, as Scientific American pointed out:

Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips could flake or break off, drifting in microgravity where they might harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable—a characteristic NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire.