The history of lead pencils and their lack of any lead (2021)
pensunlimited.co.uk
pensunlimited.co.uk
My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly.
Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm.
It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.
"chiefly British : to displace, remove, or evict from a position"
Apparently the etymology is the periwinkles are difficult to remove from their shells: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b5...
Most random thing, and I've still got the dot these 30 years later.
The same girl came at me with scissors later on but she wasn't as successful that time.
Sorry Ben!
Sorry, Logan.
I still have the blue dot next to my knee.
Even after nearly 25 years they're still there.
Both left visible gray marks under the healed skin...one on a finger and the other in the soft tissue between my thumb and index finger. Years later, in my 30s, I was handling some super strong magnets and felt tugging on the tissue next to my thumb, indeed that magnet was pulling strongly on that piece of embedded graphite. I thought that was strange because either the graphite had impurities of iron in it or my body had accumulated iron around it.
Some years later I would develop random knuckle pain in a couple of the nearby fingers. I was skeptical that this foreign object was to blame...but I convinced a doctor to do some minor in-office surgery to remove it. The doctor made an incision and using forceps tried to find and pull it out. He couldn't find it (which he initially warned me about and suggested ultrasound guidance) and asked me to get out my magnet and pull the object up...his forceps immediately snapped to the magnet, I didn't flinch but was laughing internally. He grabbed the object, which was probably half the size of a sesame seed...much smaller than what he was expecting based on the amount of tissue that was being pulled up by the magnet.
Months would pass and I no longer had pain in those knuckles, that was probably 5 years ago. The other stab mark, which is on a different finger, never caused any issues.
The nurse afterwards said, "I cannot believe you did that." I chuckled.
I can now say that I've assisted in my own surgery ;-)
Semi-permanent, actually; it faded after a couple decades. Probably wormed it's way into my brain. Sometimes I'm shocked I'm still alive.
Going back to an earlier point, when the graphite was discovered the English thought they had unearthed a lead deposit, a misunderstanding caused because lead and graphite look uncannily similar in their natural form. It is because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today.
However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another thought.
How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in spite of the story about the graphite deposit?
There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean, between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead. You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by historic knowledge of lead styluses?
Or you simply use it because then people will immediately understand what it is for?
A "stilus" (the modern spelling of the words "stylus" and "style" is a mistake, which was frequent when Latin words had been assumed to be Greek words with Modern Greek pronunciation) was a metal rod that was used to write on wax tablets. The Romans called it either "stilus" or "graphium", the latter form being directly borrowed from Greek. The Latin words "stilus" and "tabella" were used to translate the Greek words "graphion" and "deltos". The Greeks have learned to use wax tablets from the Phoenicians ("deltos" is a Semitic word) and the Romans have learned to use them from the Greeks.
The wax tablets were the main method for writing texts that could be erased later.
Besides such metal styluses that were used for writing by pressing soft materials, there existed a second kind of styluses, made of true lead metal.
This second kind, which was much less common, is based on using a soft metal and a slightly abrasive tablet surface. Drawing with such a soft metal stylus leaves a trace of metal, exactly like drawing with a graphite pencil. For instance Pliny the Elder mentions such cases of using true lead rods for drawing, e.g. for drawing fine lines on a surface to guide the writing with ink on it, like the printed lines in some modern notebooks.
Suitable soft metals are lead, silver, gold and platinum, but lead has always been many orders of magnitude cheaper than the others, so it has been frequently used for this purpose before the discovery of graphite.
Graphite is softer than any of these metals, so it leaves much more visible traces, even without using a great pressure during writing. The metal styluses leave much finer traces than graphite, so they are less suitable for writing a text with good visibility, but they allow better control for fine details in drawings.
While after graphite began to be used for pencils it immediately replaced most uses of soft metal styluses, the latter have remained popular until today for certain kinds of artistic drawings, the so-called metal-point drawings.
The most popular metal for artistic drawings is silver, because it is much cheaper than gold or platinum, while producing higher-quality drawings than lead , graphite or charcoal.
There are many such silverpoint drawings that are very beautiful.
The lead shadows of Pliny the Elder are similarly used by artists to do rough drafts before committing pen to paper. Particularly cartoonists, prior to photoshop layers.
Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wonde...
"According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budějovice in Czech language, and F refers to his first name Franz."
https://www.blog.koh-i-noor.cz/post/the-story-of-iconic-koh-...
Sounds a bit apocryphal to me.
You can test the line such a device makes by taking a coin and dragging it over a painted surface, like a wall.
Almost 40 years later it's still there, still scaring any new eye care establishment personnel with each visit.
Fortunately no noticable side effects, other than when I get something in my eye and back out again, my brain keeps telling me something is there for an hour or two afterward.
I never understood where it came from but it probably came from some English label translation perhaps? Where the distinction and labeling where the disambiguation of the word "Lead" made more sense and the label was simply translated at face value on a Spanish speaking market.
https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/the-transcendental...
https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/h-d-thoreau-enginee...
Btw “ The English were not the only ones to make this mistake and in Arabic, Gaelic and German the word for pencils all mean Lead Pen.” so is chinese.
Graphite and diamonds have completely different physical properties too, yet both are carbon.
They didn't think graphite was literally equivalent to lead. They thought it was another form of lead.
http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/inorganic/faq/d...
And much later, it was found to be a genuine possibility with terrible economics. Just need a particle accelerator, and a lot of patience.