I, Pencil
My Family Tree as told to Leonard
E. Read
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls
and adults who can read and write. *
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story
is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset
or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those
who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious
attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species
of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril.
For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder,
not for want of wonders.”
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim
I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too
much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which
I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.
I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than
can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well,
because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make
me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that
there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A.
each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s
some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal,
and an eraser.
Innumerable
Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible
for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest
enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain
that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws
and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting
the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless
skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of
steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and
bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging
camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all
the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee
the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine
the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who
construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These
legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small,
pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are
kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed
and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and
the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors,
and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors?
Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific
Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!
Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting
sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital
accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight
grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every
other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so
to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched”
sandwich.
My “lead” itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined
in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and
the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those
who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships
and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted
in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide
is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated
tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through
numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from
a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850
degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are
then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico,
paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of
lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners
of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which
the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons
than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black
mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc
and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these
products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What
is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center
of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the
plug,” the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient
called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made
by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.
Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then,
too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes
from Italy; and the pigment which gives “the plug” its color is cadmium sulfide.
No One Knows
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person
on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one
of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that
I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and
food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position.
I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these
millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes
more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how
the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger
in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can
be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker
in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist
nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or
trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling
on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular
task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does
a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude
who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation
is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this:
Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for
the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these
items.
No Master
Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone
dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into
being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible
Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this?
Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed,
can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can
say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself
as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone
direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span
of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite,
and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even
more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative
human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously
in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human
master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could
make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into
being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness
which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily
losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically,
arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human
necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other
coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient
for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance,
as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails
could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the
reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all
the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual
could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough
know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual
possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith
in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally
and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual
cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered
only by governmental “master-minding.”
Testimony
Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and
women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would
have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about
us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared,
for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or
a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things.
Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver
the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an
event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they
deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours;
they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably
low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from
the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less
money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across
the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited.
Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s
legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative
know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond
to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly
simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this
is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the
good earth.
Leonard E. Read (1898-1983) founded
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946 and served as its president
until his death.
"I, Pencil," his most famous essay, was first published in the December 1958
issue of The Freeman. Although a few of the manufacturing details and place
names have changed over the past forty years, the principles are unchanged.
* My official name is "Mongol 482." My many ingredients are assembled, fabricated,
and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.