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 [Sri Lanka]. 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 rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia]
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 masterminding! 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 master-minding--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 "masterminding."
## 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.
