Original photo by Max Fischer/ Pexels
Despite widespread belief to the contrary, pencils have never been made of lead. Like all roads, this misconception leads to Rome, where ancient people drew on papyrus scrolls with small pieces of lead, a soft (and toxic) metal that rubs off easily.
Pencils actually contain graphite, a solid form of carbon, and have since the 1600s. Because the graphite people simply dug out of hills in the 17th century behaved similarly to lead but had a darker color, it was called “black lead.” It wasn’t until 1779 that German Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele determined graphite was pure carbon; a decade later, German chemist and mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner gave the substance the name we know it by today.
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It's a factIt’s sometimes called “the first metal” due to how long people have known about it, though gold and silver have been known to humans for roughly the same amount of time.
Somewhat surprisingly, pencil sales have held steady in recent years even as more and more aspects of daily life have been digitized. More than 3.7 billion of the writing tools were imported in 2022, largely thanks to grade-schoolers, as the implements remain the easiest, most intuitive way for students just learning to write to sharpen their skills — pun intended.
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“Graphite” comes from the Greek word for “______.”
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“Graphite” comes from the Greek word for “write.”
Algeria was the last country to stop using leaded gasoline.
Leaded gasoline was fully banned in the United States in 1996, by which time the substance had already done considerable damage. Most other countries followed suit within a decade, but a number of holdouts remained until fairly recently: Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
Algeria, the last country to continue using leaded gasoline, ceased doing so in July 2021, marking the end of a century-long practice that began thanks to tetraethyl lead’s engine-improving properties. The United Nations estimates that phasing it out has saved $2.44 trillion per year by reducing crime rates and health issues associated with lead.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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