Where Does the Word Pencil Come From
Where Does the Word Pencil Come From
Having previously explored such mysteries equally who invented writing and how sounds became shapes, information technology's fourth dimension to turn to something much less mysterious, a seemingly mundane yet enormously influential tool of human advice: the humble pencil.
"Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak," states the first of Margaret Atwood's 10 rules of writing. "But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the airplane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take 2 pencils." But even though the pencil has fueled such diverse feats of artistic civilization as historic artists' sketchbooks, Marilyn Monroe's soulful unpublished poems, Lisa Congdon's stunning portraits, and David Byrne'southward diagrams of the man condition, it has only been around for a little over 2 hundred years. In the altogether fascinating 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know Yous Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World ( public library ), John D. Barrow tells the story of this underrated technological marvel:
The mod pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the class of pure carbon that nosotros call graphite. Information technology was get-go discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the kickoff of the fifteenth century; although the Aztecs had used information technology as a marking several hundred years before. Initially information technology was believed to be a class of lead and was called 'plumbago' or black pb (hence the 'plumbers' who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil 'leads'. It was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word 'graphein' significant 'to write'. Pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin 'pencillus', meaning 'little tail', to depict the modest ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.
Simply the history of the pencil, like that of many seminal innovations, has a dark side:
The purest deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick [England] in the Lake District in 1564 and spawned quite a smuggling industry and associated blackness economic system in the surface area. During the nineteenth century a major pencil manufacturing manufacture developed effectually Keswick in order to exploit the high quality of the graphite.
And nevertheless the pencil industry blossomed:
The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has simply celebrated its 175th anniversary; although the local mines take long been closed and supplies of the graphite used at present come from Sri Lanka and other far away places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well.
Plain as it appears, all the same, the pencil has evolved significantly since its invention:
Conte's original process for manufacturing pencils involved roasting a mixture of water, dirt and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround tin can exist foursquare, polygonal or round, depending on the pencil'south intended use — carpenters don't want circular pencils that are going to roll off the workbench. The hardness or softness of the final pencil 'lead' tin be adamant by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture. Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB, lying midway betwixt H and B. 'H' ways hard and 'B' means black. The higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the newspaper. There is also an 'F', or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than cartoon.
Barrow offers the scientific discipline behind an oft-cited trivia factlet:
The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the half-dozen carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide hands over adjacent rings. Nevertheless, if the atomic structure is changed, in that location is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is ane of the hardest solids known.
For the mathematically-minded, Barrow offers a delightful curiosity-quencher:
An interesting question is to ask how long a direct line could be fatigued with a typical HB pencil earlier the lead was wearied. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is most twenty nanometers and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometers, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick. The pencil lead is near 1 mm in radius and therefore ? square mm in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be spread out on a straight line is 150? cubic mm. If we depict a line of thickness 20 nanometers and width ii mm, then there volition exist enough pb to continue for a distance 50 = 150? / four 10 10-vii mm = 1,178 kilometers.
100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World goes on to explore such fascinating questions as the origami of the universe, what rugby has to do with relativity, how long things are likely to survive, and more than.
Where Does the Word Pencil Come From
Posted by: gilbertoempsy1998.blogspot.com
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