SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_02: When Henry David Thoreau, the great 19th century American essayist made a comprehensive list of supplies for an excursion, he specified obvious items such as a tent and matches and also included paper and stamps to make notes and write letters. Strange then that he omitted the very pencil with which he was making the list. Stranger still when you realise that Thoreau and his father made their money by manufacturing high quality pencils. The pencil seems fated to be overlooked. We don't even give it the courtesy of a sensible name. Pencil is derived from the Latin word penis which means tail. That's because Roman writing brushes were made from tufts of fur from an animal's tail. Lead pencils achieve the same effect without needing ink or indeed lead. It's actually graphite. But the pencil does have some champions. Henry Petroski, a historian of the pencil, points out that it's very erasability makes it indispensable to designers and engineers. Ink is the cosmetic that ideas will wear when they go out in public, he writes. Graphite is their dirty truth. If Petroski has piqued your interest in pencil history, you can go to England's Lake District and visit the Derwent Pencil Museum. There you can learn the answer to a perennial question. How do they get the graphite inside the wood? The trick is to take a slim slab of kiln dried cedar wood and saw a row of grooves into the top surface. Originally the grooves were square, easier to cut by hand. Now they're precision machined with a semi-circular cross-section. Once the cylindrical rods are laid into the grooves, glue another grooved slab on top, this time the grooves in the bottom, and then cut the whole graphite sandwich into sticks, parallel to the graphite rods. These sticks are unformed pencils. So, plain, varnish, and the job is done. And then there's the American economist Leonard Reed, who was a crusader for the principles of small government free market economics. In 1958, Reed published an essay titled, Eye, Pencil, written in the voice of the pencil itself. Reed's pencil is a proselytising libertarian with a melodramatic disposition. If you can become aware
SPEAKER_08: of the miraculousness which I symbolise, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. Reed's pencil is well aware that it doesn't immediately appear impressive. And yet,
SPEAKER_02: the pencil goes on to explain, collecting its cedar wood required saws, axes, motors, rope, and a railway car. Its graphite was from Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphuric acid, animal fats, and numerous other ingredients. And don't get the pencil started on its six coats of lacquer, its brass ferrule, or its eraser. Made not from rubber, it wants you to know, but from sulphur chloride, reacted with rapeseed oil, made abrasive with Italian pumice, and tinted pink with cadmium sulphide. Reed's pencil draws a stirring conclusion from all this. Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the
SPEAKER_08: invisible hand. This faith will be confirmed. Reed's essay became famous when the economist
SPEAKER_02: Milton Friedman, a Nobel Memorial Prize winner, free market champion, and gifted communicator of economic ideas, adapted it for his 1980 TV series, Free to Choose. Friedman drew the same lesson from the humble pencil's formidably complex origins. It was an astonishing testimony to the power of market forces to coordinate large numbers of people with nobody in overall charge.
SPEAKER_08: There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system. Jump back 500 years or so and you'd have seen the magic of
SPEAKER_02: the price system swing into action. Graphite was first discovered in the English Lake District, just down the valley from where the pencil museum now stands. Legend has it that a ferocious storm uprooted trees in the idyllic valley of Borrowdale. Underneath their roots was a strange shiny black substance that was initially dubbed black lead. Did it have any uses that would justify investing in a mine? Well, yes. Graphite was promptly used as a marking stone, as celebrated in this London street hawker's cry from three centuries ago. Buy marking stones, marking stones
SPEAKER_01: buy much profit in their use, doth lie. I've marking stones of colour red passing good or else black leg. Because graphite was soft yet heat resistant, it was also used for casting cannonballs.
SPEAKER_02: It soon became a precious resource, valuable enough for miners to be supervised by armed guards as they changed out of their clothes at the end of the shift, lest they try to smuggle a nugget away. By the late 1700s, French pencil manufacturers were happily paying to import high quality Borrowdale graphite. But then war broke out and England's government sensibly decided not to make it easy for the French to cast cannonballs. What were the pencil makers to do? In stepped Nicolas Jacques Comte, French army officer, balloonist, adventurer and pencil engineer. Comte painstakingly developed a way to make pencil leads from a mix of clay with low-grade powdered continental graphite. For these efforts, the French government awarded him a patent. And this is where we might start to question whether Reed's pencil is right to be so fiercely proud of its free market ancestry. Would Monsieur Comte have put such effort into his experiments without the prospect of a state backed patent? Perhaps, perhaps not. The economist John Quiggin raises a different objection. While Reed's pencil underlines its history of forests and railway carts, both forests and railways are often owned and managed by governments. And while Friedman was right that there's no pencil czar, even in a free market economy, there are hierarchies. That's an insight explored by another Nobel laureate, Friedman's colleague Ronald Coase. Leonard Reed's loquacious instrument was made by the Eberhard Farber company, now part of Newell Rubbermaid. And as in any conglomerate, its employees respond to instructions from the boss, not to prices in the market. In practice then, the pencil is the product of a messy economic system in which the government plays a role and corporate hierarchies insulate many workers from Friedman's magic of the price system. Reed might be right that a pure free market would be better, but his pencil doesn't prove the case. It does though remind us how profoundly complex are the processes that produce the everyday objects whose value we often overlook.
SPEAKER_00: Henry Petrosky's book, The Pencil, a History of Design and Circumstance,
SPEAKER_09: was a wonderful resource for this episode.
SPEAKER_06: An unidentified body in a remote Norwegian valley.
SPEAKER_07: Who was she? Fake passports, the wicks, the unprescripted glasses.
SPEAKER_08: And what was she doing there?
SPEAKER_06: She has an agenda and she doesn't want to talk about it. I'm Marit Higraff. And I'm Neil McCarthy. And in Death in Ice Valley,
SPEAKER_07: we tried to find answers to a mystery that has remained unsolved for 48 years. There are somebody living who knows more about this case.
SPEAKER_08: Tracking down eyewitnesses and using new forensic technology.
SPEAKER_06: Now I'm cutting the tooth.
SPEAKER_07: Telling a story set deep in the cold war with strong hints of espionage. If you take the missile, I will shoot.
SPEAKER_06: But it left us with a lingering feeling that someone didn't want the truth to be known.
SPEAKER_08: Obviously, he was told by some people to keep his mouth shut.
SPEAKER_07: We're about to come back with an update, so now's the perfect time to catch up with the whole series. Why all this secrecy?
SPEAKER_08: It was like a cover-up. What on earth happened that day?
SPEAKER_06: That's Death in Ice Valley from the BBC World Service and NRK. I think we'll break this case right now.
SPEAKER_07: Just search for Death in Ice Valley wherever you get your podcasts.
