The 19th century was an era that valued self-reliance and self-study – a spirit that prevailed not only in the fledgling field of engineering and the booming pencil manufacturing industry, but also among ordinary citizens. Back then, there were no such things as the "careers" we know today. If a census taker asked someone about their occupation, they could only tell you what work they were doing at that moment, and the future was far from certain.

When a Harvard University student from the Class of 1837 was asked about his career plans, he wrote in a reply: "I do not know if mining can be called a career, or business a career, or what work cannot be named as such. All of these remain to be studied and explored; after all, these activities have long been practiced extensively before we began to examine them as scholarly subjects... For the past two or three years, I have lived alone in a forest in Concord, far from the madding crowd. Any 'neighbor' lives more than a mile away from my abode, which I built with my own hands, brick by brick."

Henry David Thoreau

This somewhat unorthodox Harvard alumnus was none other than Henry David Thoreau. Deeply influenced by Emerson's ideas, he advocated returning to one's true self. Later, to experience a simple life close to nature, he lived in seclusion for two years on the shore of Walden Pond, two miles from Concord, living by farming his own land and growing his own food. He drew on this experience to write his famous long essay Walden.

Beyond his identities as a writer, philosopher and environmentalist, however, Thoreau was also an innovator – he created the finest American pencils of his time.

In 1842, the untimely death of his elder brother from an accident drew Henry David Thoreau into a much closer relationship with his father. Old Mr. Thoreau had been in the pencil manufacturing business for nearly 20 years, and the profits from pencils had funded both his sons' education – yet the pencils produced back then were still quite crude.

According to Thoreau's close friend, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau's mind was fully occupied with ways to improve the pencil-making process and the pencils themselves. He consulted numerous books and treatises, conducted countless experiments, and adjusted the ratio of clay to graphite to create pencils of varying hardness. In the end, he successfully improved the pencils produced by the Thoreau Company. Thoreau pencils gained immense popularity in the market starting in 1844 and won numerous awards from craft guilds and expositions.

Yet a question arises: Why did Europe, which had a long evolutionary history of stationery, fail to become the manufacturing hub of modern pencils, while the United States took the lead instead?

The Anglo-French-American Battle for Pencil Supremacy

Around 1564, a shepherd in Borrowdale, England, caught people's attention when he used lumps of graphite to mark his sheep. Thus, the British discovered a graphite deposit in Borrowdale. Soon after, the Borrowdale mine was nationalized as royal property by King George II at that time. The graphite produced from the mine was ideal for precise drawing, which held great significance for military development – the molds for many artillery shells were drawn with pencils made from this graphite.

Although the British processed graphite rather crudely back then, merely cutting large lumps of graphite into sticks, then wrapping the cores with fine thread or sheepskin for protection, the pencils were not only used by the military but also beloved by artists around the world for their excellent writing and drawing performance. This even led some people to engage in illegal graphite smuggling, and in this way, pencils spread quietly across the whole of Europe.

King George II

As time passed and pencils became more popular, technological innovation emerged amid the interplay of historical inevitability and chance – and France stepped onto the stage.

During the Anglo-French rivalry in the 17th and 18th centuries, France struggled to import pencils from Britain and Germany, and thus had to begin researching a new method for manufacturing graphite pencil cores. A scientist named Nicolas-Jacques Conté finally succeeded after numerous attempts.

To improve the utilization efficiency of graphite, Conté mixed clay into graphite powder and fired the mixture at high temperature. Unexpectedly, this method not only produced pencil cores that required less graphite but also inadvertently solved the problem of graphite being overly soft. The more clay was added, the harder the core; the more graphite powder was used, the blacker the core. People thus gained two controllable variables – blackness and hardness – allowing them to better meet their diverse needs. Britain's monopoly on pencil-making technology was thus broken by France. Regrettably, however, after France's defeat in the war, this pencil-making method was not put into large-scale production in the country itself.

There is another account of this manufacturing technology: an Australian named Hardtmuth invented the same core-making method earlier than Conté. The pencil manufacturing company founded by Hardtmuth strictly classified the ratios of graphite to clay, creating 20 grades of pencils with different levels of blackness and hardness. This classification later evolved into the H (Hard) and B (Black) pencil core grading system still in use today.

Let us now turn our attention to the United States. After the American Revolutionary War, the US began importing pencils from Europe; by the 19th century, it had started independent pencil production. Then, after more than half a century of development, the US not only mastered the manufacturing method for the highest-quality pencils but also scaled up and industrialized pencil production. In 1870, the pencil manufacturing company founded by American Joseph Dixon had become the world's largest producer and processor of graphite pencils.

Entering the 20th century, pencils were innovated and upgraded in dazzling ways. This progress was accompanied by the development of the pencil sharpener and precision machinery industries, as well as the advent of electronic graphic design – which replaced primitive manual experiments to meet consumers' stringent demand for an ultra-sharp pencil point.

The Pencil-Making Process

Furthermore, the role of America's innovation mechanism cannot be overlooked. The US patent system protected inventors' intellectual property rights at a reasonable cost. The Patent Office also actively encouraged the dissemination of technical information through a series of measures, such as providing research funding to researchers and publishing patent-related information in journals. Compared with the rigid European guild system, America's mechanism was more flexible and relaxed, and far more effective at spurring patent protection and technological innovation.

The United States itself had also stepped onto the world political stage. In the century following the founding of the Dixon Company, America replaced the once-mighty Empire on which the sun never sets to become the new global hegemon...