From The Pencil

From Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990):

Pencils can be as important as toys, and they often have been used as toys. We once wrinkled our faces to hold mustache pencils between the upper lip and the nose, and we scribbled pencil mustaches on posters in the days of erasable graffiti. Young boys made pencil tusks hang from their nostrils, and older girls put pencils under their breasts to test if they needed a bra. We twirled, chewed, tapped, doodled, and sometimes even took notes with pencils during classes, as we would later during meetings.

We use pencils to stir paint, prop up windows, open stubborn plastic bags, dial telephones, and punch holes in aluminum beer cans whose ring openers have come off in our fingers. As calculator buttons grew smaller we used, in an ironic twist, the eraser end of a pencil to tap out our sums. Still later, as parents, we showed our small children how to fit the pencil eraser into the holes left by the broken buttons on a Speak & Spell, and now our children show us how to use a pencil to remove tapes from a videocassette recorder whose eject button has fallen inside. It works because a pencil lead conducts electricity.

Some of us, before our arthritis got too bad, tried to experience the sensation known to the medical profession as Aristotle’s anomaly: “When the first and second fingers are crossed and a small object such as a pencil is placed between them the false impression is gained that there are two objects.” Apparently, for some people at least, when the pencil touches two parts of the skin that are not ordinarily touched simultaneously by a single object, the one pencil is perceived as two. As our arthritis got worse, our doctors prescribed medicine in containers designed to be opened with a pencil acting as a lever.

The pencil is always an extension of the fingers. With a pencil we can count beyond our ten digits, usually striking out every four marks with a fifth — four vertical fingers made into a hand by a diagonal thumb. We can turn the pages of slick magazines and catalogues more quickly with the dry eraser than the licked finger. We can dial or press telephones that our nails are too long or our fingers too fat to work. We can hold more places in books by sticking pencils where our fingers were. We can point to details that our fingers would obscure. We can exaggerate our gestures. We can make visible what our fingers can only trace in air. We can vote not by raising our hands but by marking our secret ballots.

A related post
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)