I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my leg.
My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly.
Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm.
It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.
I too was stabbed in grade school; twice actually, in the same hand. I think both times for pestering girls as they were writing, lol. I guess I deserved it.
Both left visible gray marks under the healed skin...one on a finger and the other in the soft tissue between my thumb and index finger. Years later, in my 30s, I was handling some super strong magnets and felt tugging on the tissue next to my thumb, indeed that magnet was pulling strongly on that piece of embedded graphite.
I thought that was strange because either the graphite had impurities of iron in it or my body had accumulated iron around it.
Some years later I would develop random knuckle pain in a couple of the nearby fingers. I was skeptical that this foreign object was to blame...but I convinced a doctor to do some minor in-office surgery to remove it.
The doctor made an incision and using forceps tried to find and pull it out. He couldn't find it (which he initially warned me about and suggested ultrasound guidance) and asked me to get out my magnet and pull the object up...his forceps immediately snapped to the magnet, I didn't flinch but was laughing internally. He grabbed the object, which was probably half the size of a sesame seed...much smaller than what he was expecting based on the amount of tissue that was being pulled up by the magnet.
Months would pass and I no longer had pain in those knuckles, that was probably 5 years ago. The other stab mark, which is on a different finger, never caused any issues.
The nurse afterwards said, "I cannot believe you did that." I chuckled.
I can now say that I've assisted in my own surgery ;-)
I have the same thing in the palm of my hand - was bumping a pencil along a wall, also in fourth grade, ish. I knew it was graphite and wouldn't hurt me, but I was too afraid of it hurting to winkle it out, and it just healed over.
As a child I was walking through my room and stepped on a fallen pencil, it rolled under my foot in just the right way: it shot out and stabbed me in the ball of my other foot!
Most random thing, and I've still got the dot these 30 years later.
I have almost the exact same story. Except my older sister freaked out about me potentially having "lead poison." She called my *nurse* mom at work. Mom said it would be fine and she'd take a look when she got home. Mom was pretty old-school, fwiw :)
I was stabbed with a pencil in the arm in 4th grade, tip broke off. Had the little gray-blue dot in my arm for years. I could feel it if I poked at it, which I eventually stopped doing. I'd check it, or show it to someone every once in awhile. Sometime in 40s, I went to check it and it had disappeared.
I've got a blue mark in the palm of my hand from where it was stabbed in maybe 1st or 2nd grade. I don't think I actually left a piece of pencil in there ... I think perhaps the skin was colored grey and just stayed that way?
My older brother jammed a pencil into an old-school dart gun and fired it at me, tagging me about half an inch to the right of my eye. Left the same permanent blue dot.
Semi-permanent, actually; it faded after a couple decades. Probably wormed it's way into my brain. Sometimes I'm shocked I'm still alive.
I wanted to know when pencil leads stopped by made of lead, and was surprised to learn that they never had been:
Going back to an earlier point, when the graphite was discovered the English thought they had unearthed a lead deposit, a misunderstanding caused because lead and graphite look uncannily similar in their natural form. It is because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today.
My understanding had always been that there were never pencils where a rod of lead was encased in wood.
However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another thought.
How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in spite of the story about the graphite deposit?
There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean, between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead. You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by historic knowledge of lead styluses?
As tools for writing, normal styluses and lead rods, which were both used in Roman times, are distinct.
A "stilus" (the modern spelling of the words "stylus" and "style" is a mistake, which was frequent when Latin words had been assumed to be Greek words with Modern Greek pronunciation) was a metal rod that was used to write on wax tablets. The Romans called it either "stilus" or "graphium", the latter form being directly borrowed from Greek. The Latin words "stilus" and "tabella" were used to translate the Greek words "graphion" and "deltos". The Greeks have learned to use wax tablets from the Phoenicians ("deltos" is a Semitic word) and the Romans have learned to use them from the Greeks.
The wax tablets were the main method for writing texts that could be erased later.
Besides such metal styluses that were used for writing by pressing soft materials, there existed a second kind of styluses, made of true lead metal.
This second kind, which was much less common, is based on using a soft metal and a slightly abrasive tablet surface. Drawing with such a soft metal stylus leaves a trace of metal, exactly like drawing with a graphite pencil. For instance Pliny the Elder mentions such cases of using true lead rods for drawing, e.g. for drawing fine lines on a surface to guide the writing with ink on it, like the printed lines in some modern notebooks.
Suitable soft metals are lead, silver, gold and platinum, but lead has always been many orders of magnitude cheaper than the others, so it has been frequently used for this purpose before the discovery of graphite.
Graphite is softer than any of these metals, so it leaves much more visible traces, even without using a great pressure during writing. The metal styluses leave much finer traces than graphite, so they are less suitable for writing a text with good visibility, but they allow better control for fine details in drawings.
While after graphite began to be used for pencils it immediately replaced most uses of soft metal styluses, the latter have remained popular until today for certain kinds of artistic drawings, the so-called metal-point drawings.
The most popular metal for artistic drawings is silver, because it is much cheaper than gold or platinum, while producing higher-quality drawings than lead , graphite or charcoal.
There are many such silverpoint drawings that are very beautiful.
You have forgotten another form of carbon - charcoal. It’s not much used for writing, but it does have a niche with artists.
The lead shadows of Pliny the Elder are similarly used by artists to do rough drafts before committing pen to paper. Particularly cartoonists, prior to photoshop layers.
Fairly obvious in retrospect, however I never put the two together until I read your post. but the stuff is called "graph"ite, that is, the stuff you write with. boom, mind blown.
> because of this prevailing thought that the pencil was known as the lead pencil, a name that has endured until today
Wait, so we didn't realise graphite and lead were different substances until after pencils were invented? Yet we never took that mix-up to the point of putting lead in pencils?
It didn't make any sense to me either. I found this article[1] which frames it a little more clearly: it's not that they thought graphite and lead were the exact same thing, it's that they thought graphite was just a particular type of lead that was useful for drawing when first discovered.
that's good. because I've definitely eaten my fair share with my friends when we were kids. we used to have those cool ones that you click on the end and a sharp thin cylinder of 'lead' comes out. they were crunchy and entertaining at least
There is actually a (very interesting) Pencil Museum in Keswick in the Lake District, UK, near where those first graphite deposits were found. One fact I learnt was that early on, due to its usefulness and scarcity, it became a hugely valuable commodity, transport had to be done in secret or under guard, and the mine owners became extremely wealthy.
So what's the truth of the hardness/blackness grade? Did Conte invent it? Because Hardtmuth, one of the large pencil manufacturers, claims otherwise:
"According to the personal notes of Franz Hardtmuth, the marking of pencils using the letter H originates from the family surname Hardtmuth, B means Budweis, or Budějovice in Czech language, and F refers to his first name Franz."
A precursor of the graphite pencil is the silverpoint. A silverpoint is no more that a metal wire. It can be made of silver, gold, copper just about any metal. The lines they produce are almost identical to pencil, but also change in color over time through oxidization. The only constraint is that the paper needs to be primed before the mark will show. Leonardo Da Vinci did most of his drawings with such a device. One advantage is that they remain sharp for years.
You can test the line such a device makes by taking a coin and dragging it over a painted surface, like a wall.
As a toddler in the early 80s, I playfully stole my older sister's pencil when she was working on her homework, ran away with it, tripped and fell, the lead breaking off in my eye. Fortunately I don't remember any of that myself...
Almost 40 years later it's still there, still scaring any new eye care establishment personnel with each visit.
Fortunately no noticable side effects, other than when I get something in my eye and back out again, my brain keeps telling me something is there for an hour or two afterward.
I'm from a Spanish speaking country. In the 90s one of the ubiquitous pencil brands had on their pencils the phrase "Sin plomo" or "No contiene plomo", can't remember which one, these phrases translate to "Without lead" and "Does not contain lead" respectively.
I never understood where it came from but it probably came from some English label translation perhaps? Where the distinction and labeling where the disambiguation of the word "Lead" made more sense and the label was simply translated at face value on a Spanish speaking market.
Fun fact: Henry David Thoreau's family was active in the pencil-making business in the 1820..1850 timeframe, and Henry D. made several innovations in the art.
Actually it is misleading as pencil did have lead. Just in the coating and hence if you chew it, as it is used by kids or people like to bite their nail and pencil.
Btw “ The English were not the only ones to make this mistake and in Arabic, Gaelic and German the word for pencils all mean Lead Pen.” so is chinese.
graphite might look similar to lead, but it's not really plausible that anyone would mistake it for lead, except at first glance. Its physical properties are completely different.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. People understandably though graphite and diamonds were different, because they seemed so different. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally different because they differ in all observable properties makes sense. Assuming 2 things are fundamentally the same because they are they same color but in no other way similar really doesn't.
I am not sure that the ideas about substances being fundamentally the same were very well developed at the time. Atomic theory didn't exist. What counted as "fundamental" and "the same" was not very well understood or, I'd eager, even broadly agreed upon. Turning lead into gold was considered a genuine possibility for a long time.
Atomic theory was just barely beginning to be invented at the beginning of the 19th century. Apparently graphite was discovered to be carbon (and not lead) in 1779:
Lead for mechanical pencils is highly conductive, seemingly pure graphite but I think they can have different hardness ratings too, I wonder what the difference is.
My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly.
Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm.
It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.