The Pencil Story

Hello dear friends,  you know me well ! I am your little Pencil, you use me to write on paper and to make beautiful drawings or sketches.I am a useful little instrument for students as well as professionals.
                                               
Today I am sharing some information about me with all of you. I hope that you will find it interesting.
Most of the people think that a pencil is made of lead but the fact is that is that pencil contains no lead. A pencil is made of Graphite which is the form of carbon. Earlier people used to call Graphite black lead.                       
                                                   
                                                           
A very large amount of Graphite(Black Carbon) was found in Cumbria (England) at a place called Borrowdale. It was the time before 1565. The people of that place found it very useful to mark their sheep. It was pure and solid to be divided into sheets. The sheets were cut into sticks.These graphite sticks or rods were placed between two wooden halves,these halves then glued together to form a pencil. That is how pencil came into existence.
  

Later in the year
1795 , a French officer Nicolas Jaques Conte developed the method of mixing clay with powdered Graphite
and forming the mixture into rods.The making of modern pencil is based on that method.



Today different grades of pencil are in use .The most popular and common pencil which people normally use for writing is HB grade pencil. 9H is the hardest and 9B is the softest pencil.
 Now let me tell you one more thing that how I got my name.The word Pencil comes from the Latin word Penicillus which means the little tail.
So this is my little story, 'The Pencil Story'.