Do you know what is the number on the pencil means?
The earliest pencils were made simply from filing a wood shaft with raw graphite. The hardness of the graphite would differ depending on the quality of the graphite, thus it was different depending on where the pencil was made.
The current style of making pencils was developed in 1974 by Nicolas-Jacques Conte (1755-1895). Conte, a painter, chemist, physicist, balloonist, and inventor, put into practice a new method of making pencils so that they would be much more functional.
Conte's first pencils were numbered for varies degrees of hardness. As the Conte process made its way into the world, other pencil makers decided to use the same technique.
To further complicate things, English pencils decided to use letters instead of numbers. Soft leads were labelled "B" for black and harder leads with "H" for hard. For varing grades they would just add more letters, thus very soft was "BB", very hard was "HH", and extra hard was "HHH".
Later they switched again to a combination of numbers and letters! Where you would see 2B, 9H, etc. Although more complicated, this system allowed for a much wider variety of grades to be made with no more than a two character description.
This was the last major change in the English grading system, the same we use today.
The earliest pencils were made simply from filing a wood shaft with raw graphite. The hardness of the graphite would differ depending on the quality of the graphite, thus it was different depending on where the pencil was made.
The current style of making pencils was developed in 1974 by Nicolas-Jacques Conte (1755-1895). Conte, a painter, chemist, physicist, balloonist, and inventor, put into practice a new method of making pencils so that they would be much more functional.
Conte's first pencils were numbered for varies degrees of hardness. As the Conte process made its way into the world, other pencil makers decided to use the same technique.
To further complicate things, English pencils decided to use letters instead of numbers. Soft leads were labelled "B" for black and harder leads with "H" for hard. For varing grades they would just add more letters, thus very soft was "BB", very hard was "HH", and extra hard was "HHH".
Later they switched again to a combination of numbers and letters! Where you would see 2B, 9H, etc. Although more complicated, this system allowed for a much wider variety of grades to be made with no more than a two character description.
This was the last major change in the English grading system, the same we use today.
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| Pencil Grades |
