Pencils

They’re on every school supplies list ever created and their bright yellow color and pink eraser make them easy to find fun to look at and useful in erasing math errors! But how did these simple practical writing tools come about?

Pencils were first developed in the 1500s as sticks of graphite (which we call lead even though it’s not really lead) encased in wood. In the 1820s Ebenezer Wood a pencil mill owner in New Hampshire made the wood pencil casings in hexagon and octagon shapes a style that soon became commonplace. In the 1850s pencils and erasers were first put together but the US Supreme Court ruled that the new pencil-plus-eraser couldn’t be patented because it wasn’t a new invention just two existing inventions joined together. 

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