A History of the Mechanical Pencil

The mechanical pencil is a tool most of us use on a daily basis, but have you ever wondered how it came to be? I don’t know, maybe you haven't, but I know I sure have. After deciding to research this seemingly mundane topic, I found that the mechanical pencil has a very fascinating history.

This revolutionary writing utensil has been traced back to the 16th century when a tree fell over in Borrowdale, England. The people of the town found that under the tree was an igneous rock layer with a dark gray, metallic-looking substance. That substance turned out to be graphite, which is probably the most important part of the mechanical pencil. Later on, in the rubble of HMS Pandora, a ship that sank in 1791, the first early model of a mechanical pencil was found.

Decades later, in 1822, the English engineer/inventor John Isaac Hawkins and silversmith Sampson Mordan were the first to patent a pencil with an internal mechanism for propelling the graphite to write. Mordan ended up buying Hawkin’s patent rights and went into business with a man named Gabriel Riddle from 1823 to 1837. Starting in 1837, Mordan produced pencils under the company name ‘S.Mordan and Co.’ This company ran until WWII, when the factory was bombed.

Today, mechanical pencils are used by everyone. As many as 2 billion mechanical pencils are sold in the US alone. Although that’s a lot of plastic, if you can keep your mechanical pencil for as long as possible, it is actually a greener writing utensil than the wooden pencil. Pencils companies are also starting to make plastic-free mechanical pencils, which is very exciting. Currently, companies are mainly using metal and recycled paper and cardboard as alternatives to plastic. Here’s to the pencils of the future!

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Ursula Denholm