Pencils and Other Drawing Tools Contributed
ENHANCE YOUR CREATIVITY WITH PENCILS FROM S&S WHOLESALE
Pencils as artists’ tools have a truly fascinating history.
Graphite is one of the physical forms in which the element carbon is found. The decay of great forests yielded, under sedimentary pressure, the coal deposits common throughout the world. Not so common are the graphite seams formed by more extremes of pressures.
The first graphite ever discovered was found in the Seathwaite Valley on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near Keswick (England) in about 1500.
The popular story is that, following a very violent storm, shepherds went out in the morning to see their sheep on the mountainside and found a number of trees had been blown down, tearing away the subsoil as they fell and leaving exposed to view large masses of black material. Pieces of the black material were dug out; and the shepherds first thought it was coal – but as it would not burn, they were at a loss to understand it.
It was then found to be an excellent medium for marking sheep. The value of the material was quickly discovered and the mines were taken over by the government.
This unknown material was found most useful for medicinal purposes, but its chief use was as moulds for the manufacture of cannon balls. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for ‘lead ore’). The black core of pencils is still referred
