History of Inventions

Greetings everyone! I am Sarah Javed and I study in 4H. I am the UAE Culture and Values Coordinator for my year group. I like to participate in innovative programs and competitions. I am the organizer of a free library. My hobbies include reading, gardening, building Lego, and learning programming. In this column, I will be talking about different ground-breaking inventions which changed history. Stay tuned!

Many of the world’s best inventions started with a piece of paper and a pencil in hand. Are you using them too when you are playing with your ideas? Here is an interesting story about the invention of pencils. The word pencil is actually derived from the Latin word “pencillus” meaning “little tail” and describing small ink brushes of camel hair, that were used for writing before pencils as we know them today were invented.

Before pencils, the preferred writing instrument was the stylus. But we can’t talk about modern-day pencils until 1564, when a large deposit of graphite was found in Borrowdale, England. The word “graphite” was derived from the Greek word “to write”. The discovery surprised the locals because they didn’t know what the material was. It looked like coal but it didn’t burn. The problem graphite presented was that it was soft and hard to write with. Many came up with ideas but they didn’t succeed.

While the British discovered graphite, it was the French painter Nicholas-Jacques Conte who was asked to make a pencil without using too much graphite since the France Republic couldn’t get graphite from Great Britain due to the economic blockade. Conte created a modern-day pencil by mixing powdered graphite with clay and putting it between two half-cylinders of wood. He received a patent for the invention in 1795. The oldest pencil in the world was found in timbered house built in 1630.

Nuremberg, Germany was the birthplace of the first mass-produced pencils in 1662. Spurred by Faber-Castell (established in 1761), Lyra, Steadtler and other companies, an active pencil industry developed throughout the 19th century industrial revolution.

The first factory opened in 1832, by the Cumberland Pencil Company. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well. In 1822, Sampson Mordan and John Issac Hawkins patented a metal pencil with an internal mechanism for propelling graphite. This was the very first mechanical pencil ever made. Hymen Lipman in 1858 received a patent for the first wood pencil with an attached rubber eraser. He went on to sell it for $100,000 and the eraser became a must-have piece in pencil anatomy. In 1894, an inventor named John Love released the world’s first pencil sharpener. It was called the “Love Sharpner”. Faber Castell changed art forever by creating the first coloured pencils in 1908.