A Brief History of the Pencil
A giant pencil that I received as a Christmas present in Nuremberg. Thanks, Christopher!
One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662.
Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I knew was that Thoreau invented a better pencil, and then got bored with the whole thing and went off to do something else. But I would have been hard pressed to tell you what made Thoreau’s pencil better. (We’ll get there in a moment.)
As those of you who have hung around here on the Margins for a while know, I can’t resist tracking down the story behind a bit of history trivia. Here’s some of what I found:
- The roman stylus is the immediate ancestor of the modern pencil: a thin metal rod that was used to make a light mark on papyrus. Some styluses were made of lead, which why we still call pencil cores leads even though they have been made of graphite ever since the stylus became a pencil.
- In fact, graphite is the reason styluses became pencils. In 1564, someone discovered a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England. Graphite makes a darker mark than lead, but it is too soft and brittle to use without something to hold it. At first, people wrapped graphite sticks in string, but eventually someone inserted a graphic stick into a hollow piece of wood. Poof! A pencil.
- The new industry/craft of pencil making was transformed in Nuremberg. As I’ve mentioned before, the Nuremberg council kept tight control over craft processes in the city. Pencil-making was seen as a two-step process, requiring craftsmen from two different trades to create a single pencil: a lead cutter to shape the graphite and a carpenter or knife handle maker to put the graphite in a wooden case. A storekeeper named Friedrich Staedtler, who was not a member of either skilled trade, figured out how to make a better pencil from start to finish. Pencil makers became a recognized craft category by the 1730s.
- I was astonished to learn that Thoreau didn’t just invent a better pencil; he revolutionized the American pencil industry. American graphite was less pure than British graphite and pencils made from it smudged. Thoreau worked for a time in his father’s pencil factory and was determined to create a better product. After hitting the books at the Harvard Library, he came up with a method of blending graphite and clay that solved the problem. The Thoreau pencil factory took off. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau also took off for Walden Pond. (FYI: He went back into the pencil business occasionally when he needed cash.)
That’s all I’ve got. If you’re interested in learning more about pencil history, everyone seems to agree that the book to read is The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski. I must admit, I’m tempted. **
*On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the history of paper, which was invented in China and then spread to Europe via the Islamic world—making it exactly the kind of thing I’m fascinated by.
**In fact, I’m tempted by several of Petroski’s books.
Dangerous Melodies
Several years ago, I reported on an excellent book about how pianist Van Cliburn’s victory at Russia’s first Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 helped change the course of the Cold War.
It was a revelation, but I didn’t realize that the culture battles of the Cold War were only one example of the role that classical music played in American cultural and political life for much of the 20th century. In Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Julliard-trained musician and historian Jonathan Rosenberg explores the surprising ways in which classical music in the United States became repeatedly tangled in international politics.
It is a complicated and often ugly story. Music lovers divided into two camps. Musical nationalists found it difficult to separate the United States’ troubled relationships with Germany, Italy and later Russia from those countries’ musical heritage. Musical universalists believed that music not only rose above nationalism but could be used to heal schisms between nations. For more than 50 years the two groups clashed repeatedly over questions of who should be allowed to perform in American concert halls and opera houses and what music they should be allowed to play, forcing the directors of musical institutions to make hard decisions. The music of Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, and Verdi, among others, became the focus of heated debate, and occasional violence. With the advent of the Cold War, the role of music and politics became even more complex as the United States government deployed American musicians as ambassadors for “the image of freedom in oppressed countries abroad.”
In fact, Rosenberg argues, neither the fears of the musical nationalists nor the hopes of the musical universalists proved true. At most, classical music gave Americans a forum for discussing the nature of loyalty, patriotism, democracy, freedom and oppression. Who knew?
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Road Trip Through History, Nuremberg, Pt. 3: Merchant Houses
My Own True Love and I spent three afternoons touring museums in three merchant houses from slightly different periods: the Albrecht Dürer house from the early sixteenth century,(1) the Tucher house from the mid-16h century and the Stadtmuseum in the Fembo house, which dates from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Together they tell the story of a wealthy merchant and industrial city that both benefited from its relationship with various Holy Roman emperors and was at odds with them.
Here’s the big picture:
- Nuremberg was a free imperial city, which meant that it owed allegiance only to the Holy Roman Emperor, not to a feudal overlord. Because it had no feudal overlord, the town ruled itself, and made its own laws. Which is not the same thing as being a democracy. A small number of patrician families—limited by law to 43—held the power—so tightly that they did not allow the formation of craft guilds.
- Nuremberg was one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities states in Europe from the late medieval period until well into the seventeenth century. Its wealth was based trade, both in the goods produced by Nuremberg’s renowned craftsmen and in spices. (2) Nuremberg was specially known for its metalwork, armor, and weapons production.—If the Stadtmuseum is to be believed, Nuremberg craftsmen invented both the wheel lock and the rifled gun barrel. (I was able to verify the invention of the wheel lock. My sources places the invention of the rifled gun barrel in Augsburg but allow that an armorer in Nuremberg improved it. Then I stopped myself from going further down the rabbit hole. )
- Nuremberg’s acceptance of the Protestant Reformation in 1525 put the city at odds with its Catholic Hapsburg rulers, even though it remained a free imperial city and held the imperial insignia until Napoleon moved it to Vienna.
- And speaking of Napoleon, Nuremberg finally lost its glory as a free city in 1806, when Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Emperor following a serious defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerliz. (He did not give up the Austrian empire, which held on until the end of World War I.) Nuremberg was incorporated into the newly-created kingdom of Bavaria and became no more than a provincial industrial city.
These museums focused on Nuremberg’s glory days, but there was an underlying theme of destruction and reconstruction. One of the ironies of Nuremberg’s history is that the city remained untouched by fire or war until World War II, when it was largely destroyed. Tough stuff.
(1) As those of you who get my newsletter know, I don’t have any notes from our afternoon in the Dürer house because I dropped my pen behind the radiator in the ladies room and couldn’t get it out. (If you’re interested in getting the newsletter, you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b You’ll not only get different content than I post here on the Margins, but a very cool downloadable timeline of the Roman emperors and the women who fought against them.)
(2)The idea of Nuremberg as a center of the spice trade surprised me. When I think spice trade I think Venice, Portugal, the Netherlands, and finally Britain. Once home, I turned to one of my favorite resources on trade in early modern Europe, Fernand Braudel’s three-volume Civilization and Capitalism.(3) Braudel did not fail me. Nuremberg stood at the meeting point of a dozen major trade routes, but its direct trading activities were limited to Europe. But, and this is a huge but, the city stood almost exactly in the geometric center of European economic life in the early sixteenth century—note the date in reference to the merchant house museums that we visited. It was halfway between Venice, most recent ruler of the ancient trading zone of the Mediterranean, and Antwerp, one of the capitals of the new trade routes of the Atlantic. Pepper arrived in Nuremberg from both directions, and Nuremberg goods travelled back to both trading centers and from them to the larger world. >Gingerbread!
(3) I do not recommend reading Civilization and Capitalism from front to back. I did that when I first bought it as a foolish graduate student in 1981 and came out the other end of the experience dazed, overwhelmed, and with no memory of anything I read.. Dipping into the volumes in search of something specific, however, is a joy. In addition to allowing you (or at least me) to focus on a single subject, it also gives me (and hopefully you) the room to savor the precision and elegance of sentences like this one: “With beer we will still stay in Europe—if we leave out the American maize beer which we have mentioned in passing, and the millet beer which for the black peoples of Africa filled the ritual role of “bread and wine with Westerners,” and also if we do not inquire too much into the distant origins of this very old beverage.” (Vol. I, p. 238)