From The New York Times:
A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.
Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.
. . . .
Other parts of the factory are eruptions of color. Red pencils wait, in orderly grids, to be dipped into bright blue paint. A worker named Maria matches the color of her shirt and nail polish to the shade of the pastel cores being manufactured each week. One of the company’s signature products, white pastels, have to be made in a dedicated machine, separated from every other color. At the tipping machine, a whirlpool of pink erasers twists, supervised patiently by a woman wearing a bindi.
. . . .
In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.
Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for the tip.
PG recommends you go to the OP to see wonderful photos of industrial age machinery with contrasting bright colors of colored pencils.
If you are having problems accessing the story, here’s PG’s tip for the day for those of you using a Chrome browser: Right Click on the NYT link above, then choose the third item from the top in the drop-down menu – “Open link in incognito window” and you may find success.
Old machinery, such as shown in the photo essay, always has fascinated me. I can understand the process of modern industrial design, done now on computer screens and, before that, with methods that still strike one as modern.
But machines such as the ones shown here: how many iterations did they go through over the decades to make them efficient in what they do? How were they designed when all the industrial engineer himself had was a pencil, a compass, and a straight edge? What machines made these machines?
What sort of mind did it take, a century and more ago, to imagine just how one of these pencil-making machines ought to function and ought to be shaped? What unremembered genius designed what Henry Adams call the Dynamo?
But machines such as the ones shown here: how many iterations did they go through over the decades to make them efficient in what they do?
And they are still running. That is real creativity.
I’d have thought it nice and mostly effortless to name the veteran employee. After all, he was the only one selected to include in the photo essay.
Otherwise, very nice. Thanks, PG and Nate.
Great article, with beautiful images and eloquent insight regarding one of the most basic foundations of modern communication.
This article spoke to me in a way that was different from most writers – the very first story I can recall crafting was a third-grade assignment in creative writing. The assignment was to imagine life as an inanimate object. I chose a pencil, and wrote a story about being a pencil from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl.
I don’t remember if I wrote about being manufactured or not, but this article made me chuckle at the thought of a child trying to imagine the process, and how far off – or how close – that child would have been.
In his book, Free to Choose, Milton Friedman uses the manufacture of a pencil to demonstrate how efficient the free market is and why capitalism is superior to centralized planning. I’ve always loved how simple his explanations are.
Friedman references this famous story of family tree.
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.*
RP.2
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
RP.3
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
I, Pencil
My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
Reminds of the show “How It’s Made.” Love it.