Full Reading Test

AFew objects are as ordinary as the wooden pencil, yet its history involves mining, chemistry, war and a surprising amount of national rivalry. The story begins in the sixteenth century in Borrowdale, a valley in the north-west of England, where an unusually large and pure deposit of graphite was discovered. Local farmers are said to have used lumps of the soft black mineral to mark their sheep. At the time nobody understood what graphite was; it was widely believed to be a type of lead, and the name has stuck ever since, even though a pencil 'lead' contains no lead at all.

BBorrowdale graphite proved valuable well beyond the farm. It made clean, dark marks that could be rubbed out, which made it ideal for writing and drawing, and it was also used in making moulds for cannonballs. As demand grew, the mine was guarded, and in the eighteenth century stealing graphite was made a serious criminal offence. The earliest pencils were simply sticks of graphite wrapped in string or sheepskin to keep the user's fingers clean. Later, craftsmen began to enclose the graphite in wood, cutting a groove in a strip of wood, inserting the graphite and gluing a second strip on top, a basic method that is still used today.

CBecause graphite of Borrowdale quality was found almost nowhere else, England held something close to a monopoly. Pencil makers elsewhere tried to use powdered graphite of poorer quality, mixed with substances such as sulphur or glue, but the results were brittle and unreliable. The breakthrough came in France in 1795. With war cutting the country off from English supplies, the engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté developed a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay, shaping the mixture into rods and firing them in a kiln. His process had a further advantage: by changing the proportions of graphite and clay, manufacturers could control how hard or soft the pencil was. More clay produced a harder pencil and a lighter line; more graphite produced a softer pencil and a darker line.

DConté's method remains the basis of pencil manufacture today, and the grading systems used by manufacturers reflect it. In the widely used European system, H stands for hardness and B for blackness, so a 4H pencil is hard and makes a pale, fine line suitable for technical drawing, while a 6B is soft and is preferred by artists for shading. HB, in the middle of the range, is the standard choice for everyday writing. Some ranges run from 9H at the hard end to 9B at the soft end, and many also include F, for 'fine', a grade just harder than HB. There is, however, no universal standard: one manufacturer's HB may be noticeably darker than another's.

EOther features of the modern pencil developed gradually. Most wooden pencils today are made from cedar, which is soft enough to sharpen easily and does not split. Many pencils are made in a hexagonal shape, which stops them from rolling off sloping desks and is comfortable to grip; it also allows more pencils to be cut from the same block of wood than a round design would. In 1858 an American inventor patented a pencil with an eraser attached to one end, an idea that was enthusiastically adopted in the United States but much less so in Europe, where pencils without erasers are still common. And while the graphite core has never contained lead, the paint on the outside of pencils sometimes did, until the practice was abandoned in the twentieth century.

FOne popular story claims that during the space race the American space agency spent millions developing a pen that would work in zero gravity, while Soviet cosmonauts simply used pencils. The story is entertaining but misleading, although it is true that pencils have one advantage over many ordinary pens: they do not depend on gravity to work. Pencils were in fact used on early American missions, but they had drawbacks: tips could break off and float around the cabin, and graphite dust conducts electricity, which posed a risk to equipment. The well-known space pen was developed by a private company at its own expense and was later bought by both the American and Soviet space programmes. Even in an age of tablets and keyboards, the pencil's combination of cheapness, reliability and erasability means that billions are still produced every year.