Pencil

A pencil is a writing or drawing implement with a solid core of pigment, usually graphite, in a protective casing. Around 1560 the Italian couple Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti made what are likely the first plans for a wood-encased pencil, from a hollowed stick of juniper. In 1565 a large deposit of pure, solid graphite, then thought to be a form of lead and called plumbago, was found at Seathwaite in Borrowdale, Cumbria, England, and its sticks were at first wrapped in string or sheepskin. The first attempt to make graphite sticks from powder was in Nuremberg in 1662, and in 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté fired powdered graphite with clay, the method still in use.