Happy Birthday Pencil!

Heard this on the radio this morning and thought it was interesting. On 30 March 1858, Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil.

• Pencils were given a hex shape so they would not roll off desks.
• Pencils don’t really contain lead. That gray matter is graphite and clay.
• Two billion pencils are made in the United States each year.
• The pencil was invented more than 400 years ago, in 1565.
• Famous novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck used pencils to write their books.
• Pencils didn’t have erasers on them at first because teachers felt they would encourage children to make mistakes.
• It would cost $50 in labor and materials for a person to make a 10-cent pencil.
• One million pencils are used annually on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
• The average pencil can be sharpened 17 times, write 45,000 words or draw a line 35 miles long.
• A good-size tree will make about 300,000 pencils.
• Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star Spangled Banner” in pencil.
• More than 14 billion pencils are produced in the world every year - enough to circle the globe 62 times.