Today I learned!

[kaberett]

So! As we know, I fell down the bullet journal rabbit hole getting on for a year ago! And a few months ago, in one of my special-interest Make The Internet Tell Me Things phases, I found Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals (Ayobi et al. 2018). On the face of it, this sort of thing should be right up my street, and yet somehow I kept glazing over every time I tried to read it.

Well, today I made a bit more of an effort, and promptly bounced hard off the statement that "Self-tracking is not a new phenomenon: it probably began with one of the oldest toolsets: pencil and paper."

Pencils are actually a pretty recent invention, friends! But in the course of grousing about this and also reminding myself just how recent, looked up "pencil" on Wikipedia and was delighted to learn why we refer to them as "pencil leads" when they're made of graphite! Specifically (with reference indicators omitted):

As a technique for drawing, the closest predecessor to the pencil was silverpoint or leadpoint until in 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), a large deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. It remains the only large-scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for "lead ore"). Because the pencil core is still referred to as "lead", or "a lead", many people have the misconception that the graphite in the pencil is lead, and the black core of pencils is still referred to as lead, even though it never contained the element lead. The words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (peann luaidhe), Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raṣāṣ), and some other languages literally mean lead pen.

The discussion then moves on to trade embargoes during the Napoleonic wars and their relevance to the Modern Pencil. I am charmed and also now actually more or less understand why there exists the Derwent Pencil Museum feat. a giant pencil. So there you go! That's my nerdery for the day.

Comments

[redbird]

Thank you! That's just the sort of geekery I enjoy hearing about.

[booksarelife]

This is very cool!

[frith_in_thorns]

I've been to the pencil museum! (It was raining that day.) It was great. You get a complimentary pencil with your entrance tickety.

[rugessnome]

oh wow I enjoyed learning this info about that particular allotrope of carbon

fun fact about me: in first grade I got into an argument about pencil lead with a classmate. I think I was somehow convinced both that they were in fact lead but also that they were harmless?

irrelevant misconceptions (but neat)

[rugessnome]

in the other interesting +language file, one of my favorite translation anecdotes* is that Böotes' club was, at least supposedly, first somewhat questionably translated from Greek into Arabic as a hooked spearshaft but then, then, (some years later) someone mistook the Arabic for a similar word meaning dogs. Ecce, Canes Venetici!

(Boötes and Canes Venetici being northern hemisphere constellations)

I guess that's one way to beat a sword into a ploughshare, er, change from a club(weapon) to dogs.

...I feel like there's another mistranslation out of Arabic in math that I enjoyed, but all that comes to mind is the (German and either Latin or possibly Italian) low-hanging non-orientable surface of Felix Klein and Agnesi's indeterminately buoyant, immaterial and thus unoxidizable curve. ;)

*though the particulars had come unmoored in memory from the gist of the story and I had to look it up

[legionseagle]

The Derwent Pencil Museum also feat. the special secret pencil for RAF officers which has a mini map of Europe printed on silk and rolled up into the place where the lead should be.

[highlyeccentric]

I was so disappointed in the pencil museum. I learned stuff! But I felt it could have taught me MORE about pencils, overall.

[emperor]

+10 excellent nerdery, would read again :)

[lunabee34]

Very cool!

[hilarita]

:-)

Of course, wax tablets would have been great for to-do lists, and of course less costly in terms of paper.

[silveradept]

That's excellent nerdery, and we are glad the research chase turned out entertaining things.

[ironed_orchid]

This is very exciting nerdery. I had the belief that they used to use lead, but then they switched to graphite, but the idea that they discovered graphite and thought it was lead is even better.