Inside One of America's Last Pencil Factories (2018)

From the relevant gallery on Payne's site: "Between 2016 and 2018, I made several dozen trips to the factory, photographing every aspect of production. A selection of these photographs was published in The New York Times Magazine in January 2018, with an accompanying essay by Sam Anderson."

Several dozen!

I just saw that he is the one who photographed "New York's Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind The Subway" a great book on the old substations that powered the NYC subway system. Certainly an excellent photographer.

Thank you for sharing this! Pretty much every single gallery on his website is awe-inspiring, he's an incredible artist.

He had a coffee table book of photos come out not too long ago called "Made in America" that is really nice.

Amazing! Thank you for pointing out that he has such a beautiful website with his work on it

I rolled my eyes reading your comment and went to the site to validate that your gushing praise was over the top. Boy was I wrong! His work is incredible!

Too many photographers these days misuse/overuse the Bokeh effect and lose important visual information in their photos. They also use poor lightning and coloring, under the guise it is artistic when in fact it is a frustrating loss of the visual elements.

Kudos to Chris Payne and his amazing work.

Correction: Payne isn't NYTimes staff.

>Which really tells the story of US manufacturing decline. When all supporting functions of an industry no longer exist, or have migrated to other countries, or have been surpassed by new technology, why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?

That is true, and most people do not romanticize working in a factory as their day job. However it is a good idea I think to keep some small amount of it onshore so the knowledge is not totally lost, in case whatever country who is doing the manufacturing decides to use that as leverage over your country.

[0]: ...they're having a "beat the tariff sale". 5% off everything.

> why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?

Because if something bad happens, be it a war, trade war with tarrifs or a pandemic, or just a stuck ship somewhere blocking transport, you're left without everything that you were once able to make, but can't make anymore.

Advanced economies are not so much living ahead in time as living at the top of a deeper production chain. The lower rungs on the production ladder do not cease to exist, though sometimes one of them is replaced by another, they just move around. And the biggest reason they are moved is to exploit different laws. One does not need to romanticize the past to want the work done under stricter laws at higher cost and with better pay and working conditions.

Thank you for your service.

Interesting, I (being pencil ignorant) wonder how they compare to the Japanese ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243716

There were predecessors to pencils going back hundreds of years before that, with very similar capabilities. They used soft metals that streak when dragged across a surface, particularly silver and lead (Pb) (also the etymology of "pencil lead"); and sharpened these into narrow points. The modern pencil sort of iterated on those ideas. Soft graphite powder, in a wax binder, leaves a streak superior to metals; and encasing it in wood was the solution to the graphite composite's brittleness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverpoint

Here's a zoomable example by da Vinci (don't you agree they look awfully similar to pencil lines?)

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1860-0616-...

Henry Petroski wrote a great book about the history of the pencil. There used to be a mine in Southern England which contained pure graphite, that was found in the 16th century. That graphite could just be cut into sticks and made into writing implements. The modern pencil consisting of powdered graphite with a binder is a response to that mine being exhausted. So it's a substitute for a product that wasn't possible before that pure deposit was found.

A pencil is essentially a core of something that easily rubs off onto other things surrounded in a protective cladding of something that keeps it from rubbing off onto your hands; stuff like this has existed for centuries.

There is essentially only one place in the world where graphite suitable for pencils naturally exists, and this wasn't discovered until the 1500s. Making it artificially from powdered graphite was first done in 1662, and the first process that approximates modern pencil construction was done in 1795, which is probably what you're calling the invention of the pencil.

The ancients had reed/bamboo pens, which looked similar to modern pencils, though they were largely supplanted by quill pens by medieval times.

Automation has been buoying it. We are producing as much as we have in the past but at 10% of the workforce.

It’s a completely financial thought process. Nobody is going to invest capital to make pencils 7% cheaper when I can dump money in monkey NFTs and yield a big short term gain. China has incentives to make pursuing those opportunities attractive.

The glory days of manufacturing that people think of are their grandparents union jobs in the 1960s. The problem is the leadership people like Musk and Bezos are thinking more 1860 than 1960 :)

Seems like that already happened for industries susceptible for that. You don’t need ai to automate a factory. You could do that by 1950. Labor costs have been cheap elsewhere for a while too. Plenty of manufacturing already left for these reasons. What remains stateside probably has some sticking factor that is highly context specific and impossible to generalize.

Last time I visited a Chinese factory (which was before covid) it was heavily automated without much staff. They also did have a few foreign laborers who didn't speak the local language, ironically.

I visited a US factory more recently,o and it was all about A.I., automation, and engineers (who maintained and operated the robots). Availability of cheap unskilled labor was not a relevant factor in the business.

Aside from what happened in 2008, American manufacturing has effectively only ever grown by leaps and bounds, even while manufacturing jobs have cratered. It is quite apparent that American manufacturing has fully embraced automation where it is sensible to do so.