Why Are Pencils Yellow? The Royal Story Behind the Humble No. 2

Picture a pencil. Go on, any pencil. We’d bet a coffee that the one in your head is yellow, with a pink eraser, a little metal collar and six flat sides. That’s no accident. The humble No. 2 is wearing a color scheme picked for a luxury launch in 1889, and pretty much the whole pencil world copied it.

Here’s how a lump of English sheep-marking rock, a French inventor, an Austrian pencil maker and a famous diamond added up to the most familiar object on your desk. And yes, you get to draw with one at the end!

A.Eraser, attached by a metal band B.Ferrule, the little metal collar C.Cedar body, six sides so it won’t roll D.Sharpened wood, lacquered yellow outside E.The “lead”: graphite and clay, no lead at all Fig. 2.Cut one in half and you get a hexagon

It started with sheep

Somewhere in the valley of Borrowdale, in England’s Lake District, people found a seam of something black, soft and remarkably pure by the middle of the 1500s. It left a dark, clean mark, so locals did the obvious thing with it: they used it to mark their sheep. People called it wad, black lead or plumbago, which comes from the Latin for lead ore, because everyone assumed that’s what it was.

It wasn’t lead. It was graphite, and it turned out to be very valuable. In 1752, Parliament made breaking into a graphite mine a crime. Around 1800, guardhouses went up over the mine entrances, workers were searched at the end of their shifts, and the graphite was sorted under the eye of a steward holding two loaded blunderbusses. For a pencil, that’s quite the origin story!

France gets creative

When war with Britain cut France off from English graphite, the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté came up with a workaround. In January 1795 he patented leads made of powdered graphite mixed with clay and fired in a kiln. Change the ratio of graphite to clay and you change how hard the pencil is, which is why we have grades like 2H, HB and 6B today. The Austrian maker Joseph Hardtmuth has a rival claim to working out the same trick a few years earlier, around 1790. That name will come back in a minute.

A diamond, an empire and fourteen coats of yellow

Hardtmuth’s company, L&C Hardtmuth, moved to Budweis in what is now the Czech Republic and became one of Europe’s great pencil makers. For its finest pencil it borrowed the name of the most famous diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Noor, which means “mountain of light” in Persian. The pencils were shown under that name at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the same fair that gave the world the Eiffel Tower. The company’s own American trademark filing says the name was in use from 1890.

And it was yellow. Gloriously, unmistakably yellow. The pencil historian Henry Petroski describes it as wearing fourteen coats of golden-yellow lacquer. Most pencils before it were dark or left as bare wood, so the color alone said this one was special.

So why yellow? Nobody knows for certain, and the company left no explanation behind. Petroski’s version ties it to the black and gold of the Austrian imperial Habsburgs: the graphite inside was black, so the outside should be gold. The other popular story says yellow meant China, where some believed the finest graphite came from, and yellow was the imperial color. That one is repeated everywhere but has never been backed by a document. We like the Habsburg version, but both make for a good story at a dinner party.

Then everyone copied it

Rival makers noticed that yellow signaled quality and rushed to paint their own pencils the same color, good pencils and cheap ones alike. In America the look stuck so hard that Petroski estimated in 1989 that about three out of four pencils made were yellow. Pencil sellers today put it lower, but walk into any classroom and you’ll see who won.

Dixon, which started in Salem, Massachusetts, and moved to Jersey City in 1847, added the Ticonderoga name in 1913 after a graphite source near Ticonderoga, New York. By 1926 it had Norman Rockwell painting its ads. Not everyone fell in line, though. In 1905 Faber-Castell launched its premium Castell 9000 in a deep green, as if to say: we don’t need to look like Koh-i-Noor.

Five hundred years in one scroll

So what does HB mean?

Thanks to Conté’s clay trick, pencils come in grades. H pencils are harder and lighter, B pencils are softer and darker, and HB sits right in the middle. The American No. 2 is roughly an HB. There’s no universal standard, though, so one brand’s 2B can be another brand’s B. By 1920, Venus was advertising seventeen grades, from 6B, the softest, all the way to 9H.

You can feel the difference for yourself right here. The 2H barely whispers, and the 6B goes on like velvet.

Small details with big stories

Six sides, on purpose. Pencils went from round to hexagonal because round ones kept rolling off the table, according to Faber-Castell. Now you know why yours stays put.

The $100,000 eraser. On March 30, 1858, Hymen Lipman patented a pencil with an eraser attached. He sold the patent in 1862 for $100,000. In 1875 the Supreme Court threw it out, ruling that sticking two known things together wasn't really an invention.

Henry David Thoreau, pencil maker. Before Walden, there were pencils. Thoreau's father ran a pencil business in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the 1840s Henry worked out a better blend of graphite and clay and built a machine to grind the graphite extra fine. One historian put it plainly: no one in the United States made better pencils than the Thoreaus.

Half the pressure, twice the speed. That slogan was stamped on the Blackwing 602, introduced by Eberhard Faber in 1934. John Steinbeck, Chuck Jones and Stephen Sondheim all loved it. In 1951 Steinbeck wrote that he had found "the best I have ever had" and that Blackwings "really glide over the paper." He reportedly started each writing day with 24 sharpened pencils lined up and ready.

Pencils in space. You've probably heard that NASA spent millions on a space pen while the Soviets just used pencils. Not true! NASA did buy 34 mechanical pencils in 1965, at $128.89 each, but pencils were risky in orbit: broken tips float into equipment and wood and graphite can burn. The Fisher Space Pen was developed with the company's own money.

So the next time you grab a yellow pencil, you're holding a bit of 1889 Paris glamour, painted on to impress, and copied so many times it became the default. Draw something lovely with the pencil above, hit save, and tell us in the comments what color your favorite pencil is. We suspect a few of you are green Castell people.

By Moss & Fog Staff