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Pencils have existed for millennia. It is known that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used small pieces of metal as writing instruments, and that 14th century European artists made pale grey drawings with thin rods of lead, silver or zinc. It is, however, generally accepted that the history of the modern pencil began in the 16th century, in the hilly, rural county of Cumberland in north-west England.
Some time before 1565, an enormous deposit of the soft, dark grey mineral now known as graphite was discovered in the Borrowdale district of the country. Then, as now, Cumberland was a farming area, and the locals found the mineral useful for marking their sheep so they could identify the ones that belonged to them. It was thought to be a form of lead, and so was referred to as plumbago, a term deriving from the Latin name for that element. However, the mineral was later identified as a form of carbon, and in 1789 the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner renamed it ‘graphite’, a word based on the ancient Greek grapho, meaning ‘draw’ or ‘write’.
The graphite found at Borrowdale was extremely dense and it could easily be sawn into sticks to be used for marking, writing or drawing. But because graphite is also soft, it requires some form of encasement around it, and so the sticks were initially wrapped in string for stability and ease of use. The news of the usefulness of these early pencils spread far and wide, attracting the attention of artists throughout Europe.
