Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early
electronics. See articles from Popular
Science, published 1872-2021. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
The massive scale of
production of commonly used items is difficult to comprehend. Rates continually
increase as the world's population increases and access becomes easier. As much
as some people love to bash Capitalism as an evil system, it is that which
facilitates life improvement through shelter, clothing, transportation, food and
water, education, medicine, tools and labor-saving machinery. The list is
endless. We take for granted something as simple as writing implements for
communications and expressing and recording ideas, not thinking about how a
little more than a century ago many people even in first-world countries were
still scratching on a slate tablet with chalk or graphite rods. Privileged
classes at least had quill pens and ink. By 1949, when this article appeared in
Popular Science magazine, the U.S. alone was cranking out more than a
billion (109) wooden pencils each year (that's 2.7 million per day) -
hard to believe for that long ago. At the bottom, I imbedded a video of
modern-day pencil making, which is not much different from how it was done in
1949! One commenter noted how no matter how many billions or trillions of
pencils are made, there is always some kid in a classroom that doesn't have one
with him :-)
Pencils Made by the Billion
Raw materials for pencil lead: clay (top) and graphite. Wood
is soft, straight-grained cedar.
PS photos by Hubert Luckett
That pencil in your pocket is one of more than a billion made in the U. S. each
year by a highly mechanized process that is surprisingly complicated for so simple
a product. The materials come from the mines and forests of four continents.
The business part of any pencil, its lead, is graphite fused with clay. The percentage
of clay determines its hardness. For soft grease pencils, wax is added. The softer
the lead, usually, the bigger its diameter - to keep it from breaking. Colored leads
contain dyes and a filler that is a secret with each manufacturer.
In the Brooklyn factory where these pictures were taken, the 100-year-old Eberhard
Faber Pencil Co. can turn out 860,000 pencils in an eight-hour day. They come in
more than 1,000 types and 70 tints - including women's eyebrow pencils.
Mixture of graphite and clay is put through
series of mechanical and chemical processes to refine and pulverize it. Here pellets
are being milled to give lead finer consistency
Uncut leads, fresh from extruding machine, are
fragile yet - as you can see in this picture - limber. Before being cut to pencil
length and hardened, they are straightened by rolling.
Leads are laid in grooves of slat by hand or
machine. Glue is then spread on face of the slat, and a similarly grooved top slat
is pressed on to enclose the leads in a sandwich.
Rough pencils are coated 5 to 15 times by shoving
them through reservoirs of lacquer onto drying belts. Circular plates beside
belts stop pencils as they shoot from baths.
Firing takes four to eight hours, depending
on the type of lead being made. Heat is maintained at 1,750° to 2,200° F.
in gas furnace. This strengthens lead by fusing graphite and clay.
Modern pencil production video created by Popular Mechanics
magazine (c2020).
Extruding machine presses compound through
a die to make long, slim lead. Receiving roller cuts off sections. These ride conveyer
into heat-treating unit for drying.
Bunches of leads are wrapped in a special paper
and put into crucibles for firing. Charcoal is sifted around them on agitator table
as packing to prevent their warping under heat.
Cutting machine, operating at 15,000 r.p.m.,
slices up slats at rate of 130,000 pencils a day. It also shapes pencils round or
hexagonal. Operator here holds a slat and cut pencils.
In factory laboratory leads taken from production
line are ground down on this turntable (below) to determine their wearing qualities.
Another machine tests leads for strength.
Wood sheaths for lead are made of slats half
the finished thickness of pencils. These are grooved five to eight times, to a depth
of half the diameter of the lead to be inserted.
To finish pencils, after they have been printed
with trademark and type identification, this single machine performs five operations.
It cuts a shoulder on one end of each pencil, presses on a metal cap or ferrule,
clinches it, then inserts eraser and clinches that.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed
formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
while tying up your telephone line, and a nice lady's voice announced "You've Got
Mail" when a new message arrived...
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All trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other rights of ownership to images
and text used on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowledged.
All trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other rights of ownership to images
and text used on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowledged.
