Color: A Natural History of the Palette (13 page)

PENCILS

The woman was primarily an artist, and she would surely have liked the idea of trying out alternatives to charcoal as a drawing material. There is a popular anecdote to the effect that NASA scientists in the 1960s spent millions of dollars developing writing instruments that would work in zero gravity. “What have
you
done?” they then asked their Russian counterparts, who looked bewildered. “We have the common pencil,” they said.

Nowadays we can call the lead pencil “common” with impunity, but once this stuff was valued so highly that people risked their lives to find it and steal it. The maid of Corinth would probably have had to wait until the sixteenth century before she found anything like lead pencils in Europe—up until then artists tended to sketch using what they called “silverpoint”—pens with tips made of silver wire, which made dark marks on surfaces covered with chalk or bone ash. However, had she been a maid of Copacabana or of Colombia then she might have had a chance to use them in her own classical world several millennia before that. When Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519 he recorded that the Aztecs used crayons made of a gray mineral,
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although he did not say what they were for.

The first curious discovery—for me—was that pencil “lead” had no lead in it at all. The rules I remember from my schooldays about not chewing our pencils were not misplaced (pencils are not the healthiest of snacks) but they were not life-saving either. At several points in history real lead was used for drawing—Pliny refers to lead being used for ruling lines on papyrus, perhaps to keep junior scribes from making unsightly notes, and in fourteenth-century Italy early artists’ pencils were sometimes made of a cocktail of lead and tin which could, apparently, be rubbed out using bread-crumbs, just like charcoal. But ever since the middle of the sixteenth century “lead” drawing materials have been made of a very different material, a material that is scarcely metallic at all.

It was a slip of the divine compressing machine which decreed that the treasure hidden in the hills of the British Lake District should not be diamonds but a black carbon cousin known as graphite. It may not have been useful for cutting or for dazzling, but it too was valuable in its own way. Not, in the beginning, as a drawing material, however. The big money from graphite in the sixteenth century (when it was called plumbago, blacklead or wad) was in ammunition. Rubbing a thin layer of graphite around the inside of a cannonball would make the finished missile pop out of the cast like a cooked cake from a buttered tin. It was only much later— at the end of the eighteenth century—that this oily stone was renamed “graphite” for its potential for making marks on paper.

There is a Pencil Museum in Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District, built to celebrate the area’s famous graphite deposit and its later reputation for world-class crayons. It has a mock tunnel with life-size models of miners extracting plumbago with pickaxes, a full-scale diagram of the three-hundred-year-old trunk of a Californian cedar (thousands of which are felled to keep the world producing six billion pencils a year) and even an example of the only painted pencils to be made in Britain during World War II. They were green (every other British pencil was left plain because of the war effort) and they contained silk maps and even a tiny compass hidden under the eraser, for use by airmen flying over enemy territory. They were invented by Charles Fraser-Smith, who was the inspiration for the character Q in the James Bond films. The museum is full of information, but when it came to actually locating the mine itself—which was not on my Ordnance Survey map— nobody could help. “No point in going there,” said the friendly woman at the desk. “All you’ll find is a hole in the ground.” I explained that this was exactly what I wanted. She wasn’t sure where it was, so I drove to the place where graphite was first discovered— a hamlet called Seathwaite—and then I looked around the steep fells to see what I could see.

At first it was hard to see anything: snow had fallen all morning, and the whole landscape looked like a pencil drawing—a few black lines on white. This was the wettest inhabited place in England, with 3.5 meters of rain a year, a National Trust information board told me: it was enough water to cover the board three times over. I knocked on the door of what in summer is a tearoom and in winter is closed, and a woman almost toppled off her ladder. The mines are up there, she said when she had recovered herself, and she pointed to a steep peak on the road toward another hamlet called Seatoller. “Can you see those slag heaps?” I could: they were three great white mounds in the snow that looked as if they had been made by a monster mole—but more alarmingly they seemed awfully far up. “Be careful,” she said. “You can fall a long way.”

There was an upturned tree on the path—and I looked carefully at the roots, to see whether there was any graphite shining there. One legend of Borrowdale’s graphite is that the treasure of the valley was uncovered in 1565 when a traveller noticed what seemed to be silver caught up in the roots of a storm-damaged tree. I saw nothing on my tree, but that earlier discovery caused a flurry of interest in London. Queen Elizabeth I was particularly keen to hear all about the new discovery in the Lakes, and ordered a Company of Mines Royal to be set up at Keswick, employing German miners (accustomed to working in the small Bavarian graphite mines) to tunnel into the volcanic mountain.

There is another Borrowdale legend which had caught my attention. It suggested that the earliest use of graphite was long before 1565, and it was neither for drawing nor for cannonballs, but for marking sheep. However, I wonder now whether those writers who have repeated this story had ever been to Seathwaite. Because when I arrived at the remote valley I laughed aloud. All the sheep looked as if they had been painted with gray graphite, which covered their bodies naturally in uneven markings, as if God had been absentminded with his shading. Why should people mark sheep with graphite when there were perfectly good dyes like walnut available? It would be much easier to daub a colored solution than to hold down a bleating animal and rub it with a great heavy silvery stone. But more importantly why should they do that to sheep that were already naturally marked with gray patches? Surely it was a joke told to gullible visitors which eventually, as these things do, became taken as truth. Later that night I tried painting my sheepskin slippers with a small lump of greasy graphite I had bought from the museum. It was possible but it took quite a lot of time. And my slippers weren’t wriggling.

“I’m curious about the sheep,” I said to the local farmer, when I passed him on the path. “They’re a strange color,” I elaborated. “They’re not strange, they’re beautiful,” he said, correctly. “They’re the color of these walls,” he continued, pointing at the mossy dry-stone boundaries of his land. They are called Herdwicks, and sheep like that have been in the area since the Norsemen. The tragedy, he said, is that the market thinks they’re odd too: farmers can’t sell the gray wool for as much as it costs to shear it.

To get to the plumbago slag heap I had to cross many little streams covered by the snow, and by the time I reached it my right glove was dripping with icy water and my left boot was full of brown bog. But it was worth it: there was the promised hole in the ground—not used for a hundred years or more, ever since the graphite ran out. It had not been blocked, but I didn’t go inside. It was very low—no more than a meter high—and very wet, leading to a nearly horizontal tunnel. But when I threw a stone along it, it sounded as if it were falling into an underground lake. Flanking the mine shaft were two ruined stone rooms, and (standing in one of them) I tried to imagine what had happened in this place, 250 years before. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, graphite was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds—and a considerable defense advantage—to the English Treasury, and the operations of the mine were kept as secret as if it were a military base. At one time there were plenty of mysterious comings and goings around this desolate place—which was open for only about seven weeks a year (and at the end of the seventeenth century it was closed for several decades) to keep the international price of graphite high. Armed security guards used to stand in those two rooms, forcing the men to strip and allow their clothes to be examined at the end of each shift to check they weren’t concealing valuable nuggets. Wad was worth the equivalent of £1,300 a ton, and some people felt it was worth risking a whipping to smuggle it out.

Some of the thieves became legends in their own lifetimes— one woman who became known as Black Sal was one of the most efficient wad smugglers in the Lakes, although myth has it she was hunted to death by the mine owner’s wolfhounds. And a man called William Hetherington resourcefully opened a small copper mine on the same mountain in 1749, with a secret passage leading straight to the wad.
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He was lucky—had he been caught three years later he might never have seen Borrowdale again. In 1751 there was a particularly violent showdown between the guards and one especially notorious gang of smugglers, who were stealing the modern equivalent of about £150,000 a year. The following year Parliament passed an act decreeing that anyone caught in possession of illegal graphite could face a year’s hard labor, or be transported into slavery in the colonies.

Although the war industry was where the big money was, some graphite was always used for drawing. The Keswick museum reports how in 1580 Borrowdale graphite was being sent to the “Michelangelo School of Art in Italy” (Michelangelo died in 1564, but that evidently didn’t deter an art school from taking his name). The artists would wrap the graphite with string or wool: it was too brittle to hold in the hand and nobody thought of putting it in a hollow stick of wood until the seventeenth century. By the time of the Napoleonic wars the British army was using dry sand to cast its bullets, and graphite became less important. But, curiously, just as it started being more useful in art than in war, blacklead was to be the cause of a different row between the British and the French. It is not a well-known feud, but I like to think of it as the War of the Pencil.

The battle lines were drawn, so to speak, in 1794, when a Frenchman called Nicolas Conté was asked to find a substitute for the English pencil. Inventors had spent years trying (and failing) to stop the British near-monopoly on pencils, but Conté managed it in just eight days. He took low-quality graphite—which could be sourced in France—and found a way of powdering it and mixing it with clay so that not only could it do justice to the sketches of the most prestigious French artists, like the portraitist Jacques-Louis David, for example, but it could also be made in different grades of softness. It is ironic that Conté, whose inventions included hot-air balloons for military reconnaissance, should best be remembered for the humble pencil. Although he probably would have been pleased: his first job, before the French Revolution in 1789, was as an artist.

The grading system came later, but it is because of Conté’s discovery that today we can select our pencils depending on how much clay was used in the recipe. In English the grades are given in Hs and Bs. H refers to hardness while B is a measure of a pencil’s “blackness.” The more Hs there are, up to a maximum of 9H, the lighter the pencil mark and the easier to erase, while 9B pencils have the least clay, and are the most satisfying for smudgy sketching. HB is traditionally the middle grade.

Within thirty years of Conté’s invention there were pencil factories all over Europe.
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England’s first pencil factory opened in Cumbria in around 1792, although the management must have been furious at having to buy all their graphite in London, as the mine owners insisted that everything had to go through their London warehouse and then be sold at auction on the first Monday of every month.

The next challenge to world pencil dominance was also from a Frenchman: and it started unexpectedly in 1847 beside an icy river in Siberia. Jean-Pierre Alibert was looking for gold that morning, although probably the twenty-seven-year-old merchant was looking for
anything
that might help pay for the mad expedition he had embarked on. I wonder what it was that—as his pan came up once again from the streambed with no buttery nuggets in its mesh— made him look again at the smoothed and rounded black pebbles that had washed in instead. Could it be that he knew this was a rare formation of carbon, and that it was valuable? Perhaps he recognized it from some half-forgotten geology class, but I like to think that on this particular morning the Siberian sunshine caught on the edge of the graphite and made it shine like precious metal.

Certainly the experience was startling enough to force him to divert his group by 430 mountainous kilometers as he followed the river back to the deposit. His determination was rewarded, and at a place called Botogol Peak, Alibert found the world’s richest seam of blacklead, just a graphite pebble’s throw from the Chinese border. English scientists reluctantly conceded that it was as good as the Borrowdale supply, which had almost run out. French scientists, naturally enough, testified that it was much better, and the Americans agreed.

Suddenly everyone wanted “Chinese” pencils. It was therefore a brilliant marketing move a few decades later when mass-produced pencils in America began to be painted bright yellow. They copied the color of Manchu imperial robes, and symbolized the romance of the Orient, while suggesting that the pencils came from that valuable Alibert mine, even though they probably did not. Most pencils made in the United States are still painted yellow today, even though Siberian graphite has not been used for years. Alibert began to mine a kind of gold that day, even though it was not quite in the form he had expected.

INK

Pencils are all very well, but our Corinthian artist would probably have rejected graphite. She was, we can assume, not out for profit but for permanence, and she was most likely looking for a nice stable ink instead of a fickle charcoal or an erasable pencil. Ink would be far more symbolic of the longevity of her love and, of course, would also be particularly useful for writing letters to her sailor on his foreign travels.