ForLook Interior Design

The pencil is an essential tool for a designer - but have you ever wondered who thought of it first, who invented it, and who used it first???..

The hexagonal pencil, as we know it today, was developed by Johann Lothar Faber in 1840. In fact, pencil manufacturing had been in his family for almost a hundred years. It was his great grandfather, Kaspar Faber, who opened the first pencil shop in Germany in 1761. In those days the pencils consisted of sticks of graphite mixed with sulphur and glued between two pieces of wood.  A couple of years later, a French chemist developed a more efficient compound of graphite and clay that was fired into ceramic before putting it into a wooden case. This allowed for different levels of hardness in the graphite.

By the way - graphite comes from the Greek word grapheine which means “to write”. It was named by the Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele who identified the material in the eighteenth century.
The first merchandised pencil factories, in both Europe and the US, were built by the Faber family. Although the technology of pencils has evolved, the basic design of the pencil remains much he same as it was a century ago.