Why pencils are yellow

It was believed that the emperor was located in the center of the five directions. The center was represented by the element earth and the color yellow. Just as there cannot be two suns in the sky, there cannot be two emperors in a nation.

From then on, yellow was worn only by emperors. In this way, the emperor and princes would easily stand out in court and the purpose of discerning rank was achieved. The imperial household records kept the recipe of the dyes: the bright yellow is dyed with pagoda bud and alum, while golden yellow and apricot yellow are dyed with pagoda bud, smoketree and alum.

Alum is used both to strengthen the bond to the fabric and to brighten the shade. Its latest creation was formed, as all pencils are, of a graphite core housed in a protective wooden sheath. Prior to , high quality pencils were natural polished wood colors. Paint was used to mask imperfections in lower quality wood.

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Log In Sign In. Forgot password? The common pencil was just that…common. It as brown, boring, and banal. How do you position a common tool like the pencil as a luxury item?

You have to change your marketing approach. The new luxury pencil had a name associated with the largest diamond ever, a diamond that was going to be put into a crown for the Queen of England. A whopping, sparkling, astounding stone of more than carats. The pencil-pushing world took note. Probably literally, with their common brown wooden pencils in hand. He was a real innovator, and from what I understand about his history he was kind of bored.

This is such a lame family business, what do I do to make this more interesting? And so a lot of very early pencil innovation, like pre-Industrial Revolution technology, happened because of Henry David Thoreau. Word on the street is that he heard that over in Europe, they were making what they called polygrade pencils where there are different ratios of graphite and clay.

So he did pretty much the same thing here and made four, and 2 ended up being the most balanced one. That was the one that people decided was for general use. It's just the thing that stuck. Pencilmaking in general caught on in America very, very quickly. They were made in Europe first, but it was Joseph Dixon who really was at the forefront of developing equipment during the Industrial Revolution for mechanizing the manufacture of pencils.

This idea of mass production of pencils happened very quickly in the U. Up until that point, with the Thoreaus and all these guys in Massachusetts who were carving pencils, they were all using this scale, and when they started mass producing them, it's the only thing they knew.

So that's just what they did, and then it stuck. That's another thing that there's no definite answer to. The first attached eraser was patented in the U. In the early s, when they figured out that you can use this bit of metal called the ferrule to attach it, that's when it really stuck—and it just never caught on anywhere else.

There's a real trend with that, like with the grading conventions, the ferrule, even the color yellow—all of those things are particular to American pencils.

I don't know if that says something about how American industry works, or how it did back then, but once they did it one way that's how it was always done. The one thing that is agreed upon is that in the late s, when people started painting pencils, the finest graphite in the world was coming from China.

And so yellow became a color that was associated with a pencil because it was a way of indicating that your pencil was made with superior Chinese graphite. The Koh-i-Noor was the first yellow pencil. The original ones were dipped in karat gold, and they cost, I think, seven times the cost of a normal pencil.

It was crazy. It was very controversial. It was the first expensive pencil to be painted. At the time, only cheap pencils were painted because it meant you were hiding something; that you weren't using high-quality wood and so you were trying to hide the woodgrain by painting it.

And then this one came out, which is seven times as expensive as the average pencil, and it's painted yellow, and it's dipped in gold. It was completely obscene. There are really only three companies that make pencils in the U. Two are in Tennessee, and one is in Jersey City. One of the ones in Tennessee and the one in Jersey City are still family owned. General Pencil Company in New Jersey has been around since the s, and Jim Weissenborn, their current owner, I think is fifth generation.

That's a thing that happened really in the s and the s: A lot of these companies were buying each other out or they were merging with larger European companies. But the ones that are still around are really good about maintaining the heritage of their brands, and they celebrate that, and they make a lot of the exact same products they made years ago, which I think is so cool.

The typography on these old American pencils is awesome, I love them. And they're inexpensive, too. They're a lot less expensive than the ones you get from Europe or from Japan. There are better pencils that are still made in this country that have a more interesting history.