ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALBANY, N.Y.
SOURCE: PAUL GRONDAHL ALBANY TIMES UNION
In this age of computer technology, as we lurch toward the promise of a paperless society, whither the pencil?
``Everything begins with a pencil,'' writes Henry Petroski in ``The Pencil'' (Knopf, 1989), his history of design and engineering of the often overlooked writing implement. ``The pencil, like engineering itself, is so familiar as to be a virtually invisible part of our general culture and experience, and it is so common as to be taken up and given away with barely a thought.''
Billions of those thin tubes of sharpened lead encased in hexagonal strips of wood, often painted bright yellow and selling for mere pennies apiece, are produced each year.
The ubiquitous pencil has been as indispensable to the office as, say, the paper clip. The lead pencil's place in the American workplace has grown steadily over the past two centuries, but in 1996, on the cusp of a new millennium, there are signs that its primacy is being eclipsed digitally, byte by byte.
Consider the office lexicon. When was the last time you heard the term ``pencil pusher?''
Has anyone promised to ``pencil'' you in for lunch lately?
Other examples of the decline are as close as your top desk drawer. Any pencils in there?
At a local business school, now in its 79th year, a new crop of secretaries is being trained with office tools that are strictly unleaded.
``The pencil has been replaced,'' says Faith Takes, president and owner of the 450-student Mildred Elley Business School. ``It's considered an office dinosaur. Our students don't have much use for a pencil anymore, even in accounting. Everything's done on computer these days.''
Takes, for instance, keeps her own daily calendar filed in a lap-top computer, makes a printout and gives her secretary the hard copy. Takes also writes her own correspondence on the lap top. That's become common procedure for executives, she says, freeing up a secretary for other activities, sans pencil.
And so, while it might be too early to play the final funeral march for the pencil, it's damn close.
Let's relive some of the pencil's highlights:
* First illustration of a lead pencil. In 1565 in Zurich, Switzerland in an encyclopedia published by German-Swiss physician and naturalist Konrad Gesner. Showed a wooden tube holding a piece of graphite.
* Design breakthrough. In 1686 in Bavaria, graphite was put between strips of wood rather than wound with string or pushed into quills or grape stems. The wood casing was a forerunner of the modern lead pencil.
* Lead variations. In 1795 in France, Jacques Conte ushered in the modern pencil industry by using clay as a binder with refined graphite powder and altering the mix of both to produce variations in degrees of hardness in leads.
* Great pencil quotes:
``My pencil is like a fencer's foil.'' - Andrew Wyeth.
``I am a pencil.'' - Toulouse-Lautrec.
* Pencil fanatic. Inventor Thomas Edison liked thick pencils with very soft lead that were short, only about three inches, so they did not stick out and get caught on things when he carried them in his lower vest pocket. Edison persuaded the Eagle Pencil Company to make this custom pencils for him and ordered them in lots of 1,000 at a time.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB