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Gunsmoke and the History of Pencils
Ever see Matt Dillon use a pencil on Gunsmoke? He’s always sitting at his “desk” with his back to the wall writing reports or signing documents while Chester’s in the foreground making coffee, messing with stove wood, or sweeping the office floor.
I’ve always thought that the old timers used pen and ink. I probably got that notion from Hollywood, watching tons of old movies.
I can remember the holes in the front of our old school desks that were there to hold those little squatty bottles of ink. I used to find old glass ink bottles in junk piles back in the woods at old home sites. We’d always look for a seam in the glass, no seam meant that the bottle might be hand blown and worth piles and piles of money. Ha!
Pens were invented all the way back in 700 a.d. and were made from feathers. They called’em quills or quill pens.
Back in 1564 an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered near Borrowdale, England. The locals used the graphite for marking their sheep. The first attempts to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite occurred in Nuremberg, Germany in 1662.
In 1795, a Frenchman discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mix into rods. By altering the mix, the hardness of the graphite rod could be changed.
By 1812 the first American wood pencils were made by William Munroe, a cabinet maker from Concord, Massachusetts.
Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil in 1858. That’s before the Civil War!
Ol’ Joe Dixon developed a way to mass produce pencils and manufactured the first wood and graphite pencils in America. His company later became the Dixon Ticonderoga pencil and art supplies company, the world’s largest dealer of graphite. This was in 1870.
A tradition was started in 1890 when the L & C Hardtmuth Company of Austria-Hungary debuted its Koh-I-Noor brand and painted its pencils yellow.
When I think of a lead pencil today I always imagine it as being yellow, orange, or natural wood.
So next time you’re watchin’ an old black n’ white Gunsmoke episode and Matt Dillon whips out a pencil an’ plops it down on the “desk” for someone to sign a receipt for some reward money they just received for a corpse they brung in draped over a saddle, you’ll know that’s probably one of Ol’ Joe Dixon’s pencils that were made in 1870 and yes, they were using pencils at that time in the old west. With erasers on’em!