About those accidental tattoos…I am the unfortunate possessor of such a mark which is only slightly faded after more than 30 years. (This mark was not caused by a geeky kid, it was self inflicted, but then, I was, er, am sort of geeky). Why are jailhouse tattoos not done in pencil, since it is so easy and permanent? I have seen the procedure for mounting a needle to a ballpoint pen cartridge, which looks like much more work than just repeatedly stabbing oneself with a pencil…yuck!
I do technical drawing for a living (maps) and most of us use mechanical pencils these days, which means that not only must one select a grade but also a thickness, i.e. 0.5, 0.7, etc. The mark made will be affected not just by the lead grade but also the width of the lead, and some leads are almost invisible when a very hard lead is made in a very narrow width.
Just curious but can you actually buy natural graphite pencils from anywhere? I imagine that they might be to the drawing world what oxygen free cables would be to the audiophile world.
I’ve got one, too! It’s on the top of my big toe… a bunkmate at summer camp dropped a pencil on it from the top bunk bed when I was standing around barefoot.
It’s unlikely that natural graphite pencils are still available- the mines that yielded the right sort of “plumbago” (as it was called back in the day) are pretty much beat, and the process of manufacturing pencils from natural plumbago doesn’t lend itself very well to mechanization.
Nowadays most of the graphite used in any application is produced from coke or from petroleum- even the graphite used as a moderator in the first chain-reacting fission pile (CP-1), which had to be of extremely high purity, was made from coke.
If you want a Cadillac among wood-cased pencils, try an Eberhard Faber Blackwing, or the pencils made by the Blackfeet Indian Writing Company.
BTW, I highly recommend Henry Petroski’s book “The Pencil” (cited in the original Straight Dope article). After I read it, I never looked at an ordinary pencil the same way.
Good column by some geeky kid. Please don’t stab me.
[nitpick]
Is it me or is the column really dated in the future (01-Jul-2003)? I’m always impressed with the work of the SD staff, but I didn’t know they were already folding the space-time continuum.
[/nitpick]
Tusculan, you can sign up for the Straight Dope Mailing List to receive a weekly e-mail Fridays, which includes a link to each week’s Straight Dope column, one of Cecil’s classic columns, and the Staff Report for the following Tuesday.
At age 34, I’m blessed enough to still have two “scars of manhood” resulting from #2 pencils – one in the palm of my right hand, the other in my left knee. Ya know, second grade is a vicious place.
(And they’re worried about kids smuggling in HANDGUNS… yeesh.)
My mother has one of those graphite tattoos. Hers was the result of a sibling spat with her brother, who stabbed her in the arm.
And yes, you can put an eye out with a pencil. That was very nearly proven at my old junior high (a frighteningly violent place) when one kid stabbed another in the eye. Luckily, the pencil missed the actual eyeball and just lodged in the orbit. The school nurse wisely stabilized the pencil with a styrofoam cup with a hole punched in the bottom, and the boy was rushed to the hospital. A friend of my family ended up being the surgeon who removed the pencil without damage to the eye. But had that pencil been only a millimeter to one side, it would have cost the boy his eye.
Also a member of the Pencil Lead Gang, have the tatoo to prove it. Stuck my hand down on a chair as I was sitting down, took the point right into my hand. It’s faded a lot, but I can still see it.
I took technical drawing (drafting) in high school, so I actually knew what the numbers were for, and it definately made a difference. You use the hard pencils for the initial layout, drawing a bunch of lines everywhere to frame out the bracket or table or house you are drafting. Then you fill in the part that you want to actually see in a darker pencil. When you’re done, you can erase the lighter marks really easilly without disturbing the main (darker) outline. Stuff that’s on the “back” of a 3 dimensional drawing could be done in a harder pencil too, adding to the illusion that you’re looking “through” the object.
It was actually one of my favorite classes, although the test was a beast. 3 hours of bending over a little drafting table is not cool. Stupid O Levels.
Question for sketchers - do you ever use different pencil hardnesses for sketching? Can you get different effects from different grades of graphite, or is it more about how you use the pencil?
When I was a kid, I told my little brother to look through the keyhole of a door in our house. Then I stuck a pencil through it. He’s still got a little dot in the skin right by his eye, and people are always telling him he’s got a pen mark right there. I still feel totally bad because I really could have put his eye out. Or in.
Mechanical pencil leads come in different thicknesses like 0.3, 0.5 and 0.7 mm. How thick are traditional pencil leads (at their widest)? Does it vary among the different grades?
You may have encountered a curious type of particulary cheap pencil that feels somewhat plasticky and can bend a good 30 degrees without breaking. Are those things made of just plastic, balsa wood, or something far more sinister?
sycorob, I sketch with a hard lead and shade and fill in dark areas with a soft lead. Pressure, posture and forgetting to sharpen can produce some of the same effects as swapping pencils, but it takes practice.
I had an accidental tattoo for a few years. At work, I snagged my arm on a defective taillight lens. When the cut healed, I had a little red tattoo. Twelve years later, the wee flake of plastic worked its way to the surface and came out. I’m now tattoo-free.
I still have the F, 2H and 9H pencils I used for mechanical drawing in junior high. In fact, although I draw almost everything on the computer now, the 9H pencil still comes in handy once in a while for guide lines! I sharpened it ONCE when I got it in 1977, and have not had to sharpen it again since.
While were here getting things right, I found a tiny typo in this informative report. In the middle of the 4th paragraph from the end, 1000° is written with a superscript o (masculine ordinal) where it should be a degree sign. I can tell the difference because in the font I use in my browser, the º character is underlined and °, of course, isn’t. Thank you.