How about the pencil. I'm sure every home has at least one pencil. I have many, like the Mirado Classic shown here. Pencils are truly amazing - design simplicity incarnate. I challenge you to find a more simple and perfect design for an artifact that is so useful: A mere stick of pure carbon sheathed in a wooden holder. Unpretentious, economical, robust, works almost anywhere.Worldwide, 14 billion pencils are sold every year, which is more than 2 per person, and if fully used for writing would put down about 630 trillion words (at 45,000 words per pencil), or 3,150 Terabytes of information, which is about 5 times the estimated amount of the information on the Web (in 2003). We sure are traditional when it comes to writing.
Its invention seems obvious, but the first pencil emerged only in 1565, one hundred years after Gutenberg's printing press had revolutionized the written word, in 1440. A staggering 15 million books were published by 1499 (I wonder how that compares to the growth of the Web, per capita). But readers still had to wait 66 years before they could mark up the book pages with doodles and cartoons.
The design of the pencil may appear simple, but its evolution was not. Serendipity led to its discovery (perhaps like a random genetic mutation). In 1564 "black lead" was discovered in Borrowdale, Cumbria, England, and very soon England grew to be the pencil leader. Modern pencils were more likely discovered than invented, since graffiti goes back to 25,000 year old cave paintings, and 5,000 year old accounting on clay tablets.
No one knew what this black lead really was, but it sure did write well. The first problem then emerged: black lead was brittle and greasy, so it had to be wrapped in string, which could be unravelled as the lead was used up - that's clever. Later, it was sheathed in wooden tubes hollowed out by hand, or the apparently easier sandwich between pieces of wood, none of them great solutions, really.It wasn't until 1779 that C. W. Scheele took the time to work out that black lead was really a form of carbon. A. G. Werner renamed it graphite (from the Greek graphein, to write) shortly thereafter.
After a while, the world's only source of pure graphite was scribbled onto millions of sheets of paper, most of it lost forever. (How many sheets no one can tell: the average pencil can fill about 56 sheets using the 45,000 words/pencil calculation.) Less-pure graphite had to be ground down and mixed with other substances, the best being clay (through a process invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795). It used to be that we wrote in clay; now we write with clay. The best graphite now comes from a deposit discovered on the Chinese/Russian border in 1890. The best clay comes from West Germany. The best wood is incense cedar, which comes from purpose grown forests in the Western United States. A seemingly simple deisgn, perfected over time, with a global reach.
Other innovations include painting them yellow to indicate the quality Asian graphite (in fact, the Mirado shown above was originally a Mikado - Asian quality assured survival of the pencil, until war broke out!), the eraser to even further disperse the graphite (patented in 1858, and sold for $100,000), and the mechanical pencil in 1822, an almost entirely different beast than a pencil.
Does size matter? The word pencil is derived from the Latin penis (actually meaning tail), by way of peniculus (brush), penicillus (paintbrush, also the root of penicillin), to the Old French pincel (artist's paintbrush). But it was coined some 200 years before the pencil was invented, and I can't find out why or how a graphite stick came to known as a pencil, especially since the new pencil technology did not displace the old.
Despite all these innovations, not to mention great and highly useful spin-offs such as penciling someone in, the pencil has lost its place as the most popular writing instrument. It is no longer essential. The ballpoint pen has mostly displaced it. The typewriter also took a swing at it, but the computer might be the pencil's Cro Magnon, totally displacing it within a few years now. Yet, I have stacks of pencils in my house, and pencils apparently write more information on paper than is typed on the Web. Why? I think it is design simplicity that is assuring its survival ... so far.
To end, a thought about pencils and education. Pencils are linked to education and that is maybe why they have stuck around for so long. They are cheap and robust, and are indispensable in the Third World classroom. One student : one pencil. It's also difficult to train teachers in new technologies such as the typewriter, which might have been more effective for learning, according to some studies back when the typewriter was the future. It's also telling that some teachers didn’t like eraser technology since they thought erasers would encourage students to make mistakes. Fear of new technology! Nevertheless, the computer, the Internet, and other technologies (for example, One Laptop Per Child project) might eventually displace the pencil because they will be more effective for education, for collaboration, sharing, and recording. We will see.
Such a simple and perfect design - it will be a sad loss, but it seems inevitable.
Links:
History of pencils
The last word on the written word
Don't write off the pencil just yet
Faber-Castell History of the pencil
How much information 2003
Next post: the fork.
