Why Are Pencils Yellow?

Why are pencils yellow? In this episode, we examine the manufacturing of pencils, their history, and why they ever came to be associated with the color yellow. Then we chat with award-winning Comedian, Jay Black. 

I love pencils. Any chance I get, I’d much rather use a pencil than a pen. I don’t know why, but there’s something that’s really cool about writing on paper with a pencil. It’s like I’m using a rock to scrawl on a tree. It’s archaic. And I also remember growing up in the 80s, they’d tell you not to put the tip of a pencil in your mouth or you might get lead poisoning. Do you remember hearing that?

Well the truth is, pencils haven’t contained lead since – well they’ve really never contained lead. There are reports that some of the ancient Romans and Egyptians used lead to write on papyrus, but not in the form of what we now know as a pencil. Pencils have never contained lead. And that’s one of those things that sounds like I’m making it up, but it’s true. I always thought, like a lot of you that “no, pencils don’t contain lead now, but they used to at one point, kinda like Coca Cola used to contain cocaine.” But it’s true. The wooden pencil that we know and use never contained lead.

The reason people started calling the dark inner part of the pencil lead was because that’s what they mistakenly thought it was made from. What we call lead in a pencil has always been graphite based. Originally, they were all supplied from the same source: a single huge deposit of graphite that was found in Cumbria, England. It was discovered in the first part of the 1500s and this vein that was discovered was the purest and most solid ever recorded. They called it “plumbago” which was the latin word for lead ore. Because even the people who discovered it mistook it for a type of lead. As they mined the graphite, they found that it could easily be shaped into sticks and those were commonly used for marking sheep in those early days. Eventually, they started mixing the graphite with clay and other substances to try to find the best writing tip.

It wasn’t until around 1812 when a cabinetmaker named William Munroe in Concord, Massachusetts invented what we know as the pencil. That has also been attributed to Henry David Thoreau, who strangely enough, was also in Concord at that same time. There’s also a claim that an Italian couple named Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti came up with the idea in the 16th century. Their pencil was more similar to the flatter carpentry pencils. None of these people patented it, so Eberhard Faber did and started mass producing them in a factory in New York in 1861. They were using graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821, but for the most part – as pencils became popular around the globe, England had a monopoly on producing them because of the Cumbria graphite vein. And that monopoly lasted until the graphite there ran out in the 1860s. In the late 1800s there was a Pencil boom in the US with factories producing them with names you’ve heard of like Faber, and Joseph Dixon of Dixon Ticonderoga. Every day in the US, Americans were using a quarter of a million pencils.

If you’re interested in this stuff like I am, you’ll be interested in a piece written by economist Milton Friedman back in 1980. He delivered it on a PBS series called “Free to Choose” about the free market economy. And whether or not you agree with Milton Friedman’s economic principles, this is certainly interesting. I’m going to play the whole thing in it’s entirety. It’s about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, but I promise this is interesting. 

It’s a wonderful little piece to analogize their free-market ideas. It’s not original, he stole it without credit from a writer named Leonard Read, who came up with the idea in 1958. Maybe Friedman sees stealing the work of others as part of the free-market too. But none of this answers the question that I had. Why is the stereotypical pencil yellow? If you google image search the word pencil, or look at clipart of a pencil, you’ll see one that’s school-bus yellow. The famous yellow pencil. Why? Why were pencils most commonly painted yellow? 

When pencils started being used around the world in the mid 1800s, most of them were just natural wood colored. Nicer pencils would have a lacquer on them, and pencils with lower quality wood would be painted darker colors like purple, red, maroon, navy blue and black. This would help disguise the imperfections in the wood grain, which was usually cedar wood. Then, toward the end of the 1800s, at the world’s fair in Paris, this all changed. 

The 1889 World’s Fair in Paris – the Exposition Universelle – is famously remembered for its shining new marvel – the Eiffel Tower. There were lots of things that were famous about this World’s Fair. It was the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Lots of cutting edge technology was shown to the people like cinema, electricity and mechanical wonders. Annie Oakley put on a shooting demonstration. And the Hardtmuth Company from the area that’s now known as the Czech Republic launched a rebrand of their pencils as the Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth Pencil. Koh-i-Noor is Persian for Mountain of Light. At the time, people knew that word, Koh-i-Noor because at the time, the largest diamond in the world, which was part of England’s Crown Jewels, was called the Koh-i-Noor diamond. So they used this word that had a connotation of royalty and elegance to brand their new pencils, which they called “luxury pencils.” According to Duke University Professor Henry Petroski, who wrote a book called “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance,” the best graphite in the world had come from England, but eventually that supply ran out and a newer, and far superior supply was found in Siberia, near the border between Russia and China. And so for these new luxury pencils, Hardtmuth was using this newer, better graphite supply so they could advertise their pencils as the best in the world. 

And there was something else different about them. They were bright yellow. Nearby to the Siberian graphite mine, the Empire of China used the color yellow to represent royalty. The Yellow Emperor was a mythical cultural hero that had been revered for centuries and modern day royalty in China were the only ones permitted to wear the color. In China, yellow represented glory, happiness and wisdom along with being high-class. In addition to bright yellow paint, the Hardtmuth Company even dipped some of them in 24k gold. The cost of these pencils was something like seven times the cost of a normal pencil. They did everything they could to make these pencils stand out from the other ones on the market. People loved it. The Koh-i-Noor pencil was so popular, the company actually changed their name to the Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth Pencil Company. 

It wasn’t long that the word of these pencils reached the U.S. and other companies followed suit. Faber and Dixon Ticonderoga started painting their pencils yellow and even went so far as to give some of their pencils asian-sounding names. Their pencils were inferior to the ones using the real Siberian graphite, but by this point, people didn’t care. There’s even a crazy story about Faber – they did a field test of the popularity of their pencil colors. They gave half yellow pencils and half dark green pencils. The pencils were identical in every other aspect. The people who got the green pencils hated them and returned them because they said they were bad quality. 

This pattern can be seen with retail markets all throughout time. One company creates a luxury product, they create a demand and other companies try to cash in on it. I had some shoes when I was a kid. They were L.A. Gear – which was like a cheap knock off brand of shoe. But they had these little clear rubber windows in the heel. They were trying to knock off the popularity of Nike’s Air Max, who had manufactured a premium shoe with a bubble of air in the heel. The L.A. Gears I had didn’t have a bubble of air, but they were making a cheaper product that was meant to sort of look the same. That’s what all these companies were doing with pencils. It stopped being about the actual quality and more about the appearance. Yellow pencils became the most popular. 

In modern times, there are only a few companies – in fact only three companies in the U.S. – who still manufacture wooden pencils. And while pencils are made in all different colors and the royal luxury stigma associated with the color yellow is probably completely gone, yellow pencils are still what comes to mind when you think of a pencil. It’s like the fact that magicians haven’t worn a top hat and tux for centuries, but if you google image search a magician, that’s what you’re gonna get. It’s just stuck in time that that is what this thing looks like. And in the case of the yellow pencil it’s all because of the human desire for nice things. We all wanted luxury. So we got yellow. The Internet Says it’s True.

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