On March 30, 1858, inventor Hymen L. Lipman patented the first pencil with a built-in eraser—then sold it for $100,000. Believe it or not, this is not the first time in history that a little stick of ...

A class of fifth-graders from Green Acres Elementary in Lebanon, Ore., asked us to find out how pencil lead is made. That quest took us all the way back to the dawn of the universe and then all the ...

Even if you're a pencil aficionado, you might find out something new from this video on the history of pencil lead from NPR. Like, for example, that Henry David Thoreau helped invent the numbering ...

According to historians, pencils descended from an ancient Roman writing instrument called a stylus, a thin metal rod. The stylus was used on a wax tablet for marking or scribing text. The wax tablet ...

The Pencil Museum by Jackie Mock, installed in Faber Park on Staten Island (photo by Rob Ventura, courtesy Jackie Mock and the New York City Parks Department) Suspended in a vitrine in Staten Island’s ...

From Pencils You Should Know: A History of the Ultimate Writing Utensil in 75 Anecdotes by Caroline Weaver (published by Chronicle Books 2020, all images courtesy Chronicle Books) I hadn’t thought of ...

From woodworkers to Broadway legends, artists to Pulitzer Prize winners, one indispensable tool unites them all: a pencil known as the Blackwing 602. Created in the 1930s by Eberhard Faber, this ...