The Point of the Pencil : THE PENCIL: A History of Design and Circumstance <i> by Henry Petroski (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 413 pp., illustrated) </i>

Henry Petroski seemed to be looking over my shoulder as I read his rich tale of “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance.” By the time I had turned the last page, I had self-consciously stopped using my yellow Mongol 2 as a bookmark and bewailing the tooth marks up and down its back. All had been explained--the meaning of the words Mongol 2, the habits of writers. Shortly thereafter, my pencil disappeared.

Pencils, like ice-cream cones, are designed to be used up. Unlike pens, their partners in writing, which break, dry up, get pilfered, or shoved to the back of the drawer, pencils disappear in a whir of wood shavings. While not bad-mouthing the pen, Petroski, who teaches civil engineering at Duke University, is out to honor the unsung instrument of his heroes-- engineers (sometimes called pencil-heads). Petroski delineates in exquisite detail the evolution of “the ephemeral medium of thinkers, planners, drafters; the medium to be erased, revised, smudged, obliterated, lost or inked over.” Used up, erased, but not done without, as demonstrated in an experiment where engineers, given pens to draw with instead of pencils, became mentally tongue-tied.

Petroski admires engineers because they do not separate creativity from the workaday world. There may be art for art’s sake and “pure” science, but engineering that can’t compete in the marketplace fails. Engineering is ingenuity directed toward commercial success.

Students of design will benefit from learning about the evolution of one of the world’s least-honored objects. As a collector, Petroski discovered that antique dealers routinely jettison the pencils they find inside old desks and toolboxes. These dealers did not appreciate that the length, the shape, even the eraser on the end--each has a separate story. Most important of all is the lead (which isn’t lead any more), sandwiched between shafts of wood.

Wordsmiths will enjoy discovering the origin of common words like rubber (still used in Britain to mean eraser) to describe the properties of the sap of an Indian tree that when applied to paper, rubbed away the penciled marks. They also will reflect with the author on the way that “the name of an artifact may certainly depend upon symbolic and subliminal evocations, but artifacts themselves do not come from their names.” Their names invoke their origins. So that eyeglasses now as often as not are made of plastic, paper plates of Styrofoam, tin cans of aluminum, silverware of stainless steel. There is no lead in lead pencils any more, but a ceramic combination of graphite and clay.

The modern pencil is traceable to a storm in 1586 that uprooted a tree in Borrowdale, England, revealing a vein of pure graphite that, until the discovery of a mine in Siberia some 300 years later, was the only good source in the world. An act of God thus triggered a small industry around the graphite mine. The quality of this graphite became legendary, and English pencils, or pencils filled with imported English graphite, dominated the trade until the mine wore out in the 19th Century.

But the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 cut the French off from the Borrowdale mine. Generals need pencils to plan strategies, and Minister of War Lazar Carnot sponsored an early research and development program. The result was the development of a ceramic by the engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conte, still known as the Conte Crayon. The Conte Crayon represents an advance in the history of the pencil. Unlike the Borrowdale mine, a result of happenstance, the Conte Crayon was developed deliberately, and the formulas kept secret.

Fifty years later, the discovery of graphite in Siberia near the Chinese border completes the story of the innards of the pencil. With Siberia rich in graphite as the English supply gave out, pencils took on an exotic air as manufacturers capitalized on the eastern association. Thus was the name Mongol born, and the popular yellow color of the varnish.

Another of Petroski’s themes is the gradual Americanization of the trade. Until the 20th Century, the best pencils came from Europe, but Americans were getting into the act before then. The most successful company was built up in Concord, Mass., by Henry David Thoreau, who had inherited the family business. Yet, so irrelevant was the pencil to his consciousness that when he made his famous list of necessities for a short visit to the Maine woods, he omitted the pencil with which he would be taking notes.

By the outbreak of World War I, manufacturers were selling millions of pencils a year and were using up both sources of graphite and sources of cedar, the wood favored to surround the lead. The destruction of resources did not pass unobserved. Petroski informs us that in 1924, Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey decimal system, a proponent of English-language reform and an early ecologist, pointed out that “one-seventh of all English writing is made up of unnecessary letters; therefore one tree out of seven made into pulp is wasted.”

Spinoffs of the pencil include erasers, sharpeners and paper, all with their own technological stories that provide insights into the greater history--like the first carbon papers, which put duplicitous hand-copiers out of business and restored a measure of secrecy.

There were dead ends, too, like a Victorian pencil with an ivory mouthpiece (people preferred to chew the pencil itself). And failed efforts to standardize the grading system, so that my Mongol 2 is only approximately a medium-dark shade. Mechanical pencils, colored pencils, miniatures and giants, all appear somewhere in this volume. There may be more here than a sensible person may have wanted to know, but a thorough read will provide enough fodder for conversation on a walk across the Gobi Desert, or 12 days in the Maine woods.