The pencil : a history of design and circumstance

522 Pages·1989·5.011 MB·English

by  Henry Petroski

ALSO BY HENRY PETROSKI
Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer
The Book on the Bookshelf
Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering
Invention by Design:
How Engineers Get From Thought to Thing
Engineers of Dreams:
Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America
Design Paradigms:
Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering
The Evolution of Useful Things
To Engineer Is Human:
The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Beyond Engineering:
Essays and Other Attempts to Figure Without Equations
Pushing the Limits:
Pushing the Limits:
New Adventures in Engineering

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1989 by Henry Petroski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random
House, Inc., New York.
Portions of this book were originally published in Across the Board and in American
Heritage of Invention & Technology.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc., for permission to
reprint excerpts from “How the Pencil Is Made” from The Pencil : Its History,
Manufacture, and Use by The Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company. Reprinted courtesy of Koh-I-
Noor Rapidograph, Inc.
Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Sturgis quoted by
permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and of the Houghton
Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petroski, Henry.
The pencil: a history of design and circumstance/by Henry Petroski. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77243-5
1. Pencils—History. I. Title.
TS1268.P47 1989
674′.88—dc20 89-45362
v3.1
To Karen
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1 What We Forget
2 Of Names, Materials, and Things
3 Before the Pencil
4 Noting a New Technology
5 Of Traditions and Transitions
6 Does One Find or Make a Better Pencil?
7 Of Old Ways and Trade Secrets
8 In America
9 An American Pencil-Making Family
10 When the Best Is Not Good Enough
11 From Cottage Industry to Bleistiftindustrie
12 Mechanization in America
13 World Pencil War
14 The Importance of Infrastructure
15 Beyond Perspective
16 The Point of It All
17 Getting the Point, and Keeping It
18 The Business of Engineering
19 Competition, Depression, and War
20 Acknowledging Technology
21 The Quest for Perfection
21 The Quest for Perfection
22 Retrospect and Prospect
Appendix A
From “How the Pencil Is Made”
Appendix B A Collection of Pencils
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Preface
ll made objects owe their very existence to some kind of
A
engineering, which is essential for civilization. Even the
commonest and oldest of artifacts are no less the products
of primitive engineering than the artifacts of high
technology are the products of modern scienti(cid:32)c engineering. But
while the practice of engineering has certainly evolved since ancient
times, it has also maintained a family resemblance to its ancestors.
Although engineers today tend to be more formally mathematical
and scienti(cid:32)c than their counterparts just a century ago, there are
still essential elements of engineering that all ages have in common.
A modern engineer and an ancient, even if called an architect or
master builder or master craftsman, would find plenty to talk about,
and each would be able to learn something from the other.
This timelessness derives from a constant underlying quality
inherent in all engineering, a quality that is independent of formal
education. The existence of this commonsense aspect of it explains
why and how so much ancient and even not so ancient engineering
was done by individuals who worried about neither what they
themselves nor what they were doing was called. Indeed, such
seemingly unlikely persons as the political philosopher Thomas
Paine and the philosophical writer Henry David Thoreau e(cid:39)ectively
acted as if they were engineers and made real contributions to the
technology of their times. For this same reason, I believe that
anyone today is capable of comprehending the essence of, if not of
contributing to, even the latest high technology. Behind all the
jargon, mathematics, science, and professionalism of engineering
lies a method as accessible and as pervasive as the air we breathe.
Certainly business executives with no formal engineering training
daily assume this to be the case in making decisions with major
technological implications. But that is not to say that professional
engineers are dispensable, for it is one thing to understand their