Why is it called pencil lead?
Before the discovery of graphite, lead, a soft and silvery metal, was used for writing. The archetypal pencil may have been the stylus, a thin metal stick often made from lead and used for scratching on papyrus, a form of early paper. They were used extensively by the ancient Egyptians and Romans. The Greek poet Philip of Thessaloniki wrote of leaden writing instruments in the first century B.C., but the modern pencil, as described by Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, dates only to 1565. Nowadays, the “lead” in pencils is actually graphite. Legend has it that in the early 1500s, a violent storm in the Borrowdale parish of Cumberland, England, uprooted trees and led to the discovery of an enormous deposit of a strange black material underneath. The locals found that it was useful for marking sheep. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawed into sticks for writing. The substance was thought to be a form of lead. Later, the sticks were wr
