Chapter 6 FROM GOOSE QUILLS TO FOUNTAIN PENS AND LEAD PENCILS

Whenever there was a convenient goosepond on the way to school, the children of less than one hundred years ago used to stop there to hunt for goose quills. They carried these to the teacher, and with his penknife-which took its name from the work it did-he cut them into the shape of pens. The points soon wore out, and "Teacher, will you please mend my pen?" was a frequent request.

When people began to make pens of steel, they made them as nearly like quill pens as possible, with pen and holder all in one. These were called "barrel pens." They were stiff, hard, and expensive, especially as the whole thing was useless as soon as the pen was worn out, but they were highly esteemed because they lasted longer than quills and did not have to be mended. After a while separate pens were manufactured that could be slipped into a holder; and one improvement after another followed until little by little the cheap, convenient writing tool that we have to-day was produced.

A pen is a small thing, but each one is worked upon by twenty to twenty-four persons before it is allowed to be sold. The material is the best steel. It comes in sheets five feet long and nineteen inches wide, and about one fortieth of an inch thick, that is, three times as thick as the finished pen. The first machine cuts the sheet crosswise into strips from two to three inches wide, varying according to the size of the pen to be made. These strips are put into iron boxes and kept at a red heat for a number of hours to anneal or soften them. Then they pass between heavy rollers, a process which not only helps to toughen them, but also stretches the steel so that it is now fifty inches long instead of nineteen.

At least six or seven people have handled the material already, and even now there is nothing that looks like pens; but the next machine cuts them out, by dies, of course. The points interlap; and the cutting leaves odd-shaped openwork strips of steel for the scrap-heap. This part of the work is very quick, for the machine will cut thousands of pens in an hour. Now is when the little hole above the slit is punched and the side slits cut. To make the steel soft and pliable, it must be annealed again, kept red hot for several hours, and then cooled. Thus far it has looked like a tiny fence paling, but at length it begins to resemble a pen, for it is now stamped with whatever letters or designs may be desired, usually the name of the maker and the name and number of the variety of pen, and it is pressed between a pair of dies to form it into a curve. The last annealing left the metal soft so that all this could be done, but too soft to work well as a pen; and it has to be heated red hot again, and then dropped into cold oil to harden it. Centrifugal force, which helps in so many manufactures, drives the oil away, and the pens are dried in sawdust. They are now sufficiently hard, but too brittle. They must be tempered. To do this, they are placed in an iron cylinder over a fire, and the cylinder revolved till the pen is as elastic as a spring.

The pen is of the correct shape, is tough and elastic; and now it is put into "tumbling barrels" which revolve till it is bright and ready for the finishing touches. If you look closely at the outside of a steel pen just above the nib, you will see that across it run tiny lines. They have a use, for they hold the ink back so that it will not roll down in drops, and they help to make the point more springy and easier to write with.

The pen must be slit up from the point. This is done by a machine, and a most accurate one, for the cut must go exactly through the center of the point and not reach beyond the little hole that was punched. Only one thing is lacking now to make the pen a useful member of society, ready to do its work in the world; and that is to grind off the points and round them in order to keep them from sticking into the paper.

After so much careful work, it does seem as if not one pen out of a thousand could be faulty; but every one has to be carefully examined to make sure that the cutting, piercing, marking, forming, tempering, grinding, and slitting, are just what they should be. These pens carry the maker's name, and a few poor ones getting into the market might spoil the sale of thousands of boxes; therefore the examiner sits before a desk covered with black glass and looks at every pen. The faulty ones are heated so that they cannot be used, and they go to the scrap-heap.

Now the pens are ready so far as usefulness goes, but people have preferences in color. Some prefer bronze, some gray, and some black; so off the pens go to the tempering-room, their last trip, and there are heated in a revolving cylinder till the right color appears; then they are chilled and lacquered, put into boxes, labeled, packed, and sold for such low prices that the good folk of a century ago, who paid from twenty-five to fifty cents for a pen, would have opened their eyes in amazement. When the typewriter was invented, some people said, "That will be the death of the steel pen"; but as a matter of fact, it has greatly increased its sale. The typewriter makes writing so easy and so quick that many more letters are written than formerly. All these letters have to be answered, and few people compared with the whole number own typewriters, and therefore the pen still holds its place.

The lacquer on a steel pen protects it until it has been used for a while. After that, it will rust, if it is not wiped, and it will wear out whether it is wiped or not. All that the gold pen asks is not to be bent or broken, and it will last almost forever. It has the flexibility of the quill, but does not have to be "mended." Gold pens are made in much the same way as are steel pens; but just at the point a tiny shelf is squeezed. Upon this shelf a bit of the alloy of two exceedingly hard metals, iridium and osmium, is secured by melting the gold around it; and it is this bit which stands all the wear of rubbing on the paper. When gold pens were first made, tiny bits of diamonds or rubies were soldered on for points; but they were expensive, and they had a disagreeable fashion of falling off.

A century ago, writers would have thought it the height of luxury to have a gold pen; but now they are not satisfied unless they can be saved the trouble of dipping it into an inkstand, and they look upon the fountain pen as their special friend. The fountain pen carries its supplies with it. The pen itself is like any other gold pen, but the barrel is full of ink. A little tube carries the ink to the point, and the slight bending back of the pen as one writes lets it run out upon the paper. At the end of the slit, at the back of the pen, is a hole to let air into the barrel as the ink runs out. A perfect fountain pen ought to be prepared to write-without shaking-whenever the cap is taken off, and not to refuse to work so long as a drop of ink remains in the barrel. It should never drop ink at the point and, whether the point is up or down, it should never leak there or anywhere else.

The stylographic pen is quite a different article. There is no pen to it; the writing is done with the end of a needle which projects through a hole at the point. The barrel and point are full of ink; but even if the pen is held point down, it will not leak because the needle fills up the hole. When you press the point on paper to write, the needle falls back just enough to let out what ink is needed. The flow stops the instant the pen ceases to touch the paper. The special advantage of the stylographic is that the mere weight of the pen is sufficient pressure, and therefore many hours of writing do not tire the muscles of the hand. The advantage of the fountain pen is that it has the familiar action of the gold pen, and that it will adapt itself to any style of handwriting.

A pen of almost any kind is a valuable article, but for rough-and-ready use we should find it hard to get on without its humble friend, the lead pencil. A lead pencil, by the way, has not a particle of lead in it. The "lead" is all graphite, or plumbago. Years ago sticks of lead were used for marking, and made a pale-gray line. When graphite was introduced, its mark was so black that people called it black lead, and the name has stuck. No one who has ever tried to use a pencil of real lead could fail to appreciate graphite, and when a graphite mine was discovered in England, it was guarded by armed men as watchfully as if it had been a mine of diamonds. That mine was exhausted long ago, but many others have been found. The best graphite in the world comes from Ceylon and Mexico.

When graphite was first used for pencils, it was cut into slabs and these slabs into small strips. The broken and powdered graphite was not used until it was discovered that it could be mixed with clay and so made into sticks. In a lead pencil there are only three substances, graphite, clay, and wood, but a really good one must be manufactured with as much care as if it were made up of twenty. First of all, the graphite is ground and ground and ground, until, if you take a pinch of it between your thumb and finger, you can hardly feel that anything is there. It is now sifted through fine silk and mixed with water and finely powdered clay, and becomes a wet, inky mass. This clay comes from Austria and Bohemia and is particularly smooth and fine. The amount put in is carefully weighed. If you have a hard pencil, it was made by using considerable clay; if your pencil is soft, by using very little; and if it is very soft and black, it is possible that a little lampblack was added.

This inky mass is ground together between millstones for several weeks. Then it goes between rollers, and at length is squeezed through a die and comes out in soft, doughy black strings. These are the "leads" of the pencils. They have been thoroughly wet, and now they must be made thoroughly dry. They are laid on boards, then taken off, cut into pieces the length of a pencil, and put into ovens and baked for hours in a heat twenty times as great as that of a hot summer day. They certainly ought to be well dried and ready for the wood. The red cedar of Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama is the best wood for pencils because it is soft and has a fine, straight grain. It is cut into slabs about as long as one pencil, as wide as six, and a little thicker than half a pencil. Every piece must be examined to make sure that it is perfect, and it must be thoroughly seasoned and kiln-dried to free it from oil. Then it goes through a grooving-machine which cuts out a groove half as deep as the lead. The lead is laid into one piece, another is glued on top of it; and there is a pencil ready for work.

Courtesy Joseph Dixon Crucible Co.

HOW THE LEAD GETS INTO A PENCIL

(1) The cedar slab. (2) Planed and grooved. (3) The leads in place. (4) Covered with the other half of the slab. (5) The round pencils cut out. (6) The pencil separated and smoothed. (7) The pencil varnished and stamped.

Such a pencil would be useful, but to sell well it must also be pretty; and therefore it goes through machinery which makes it round or oval or six-sided, as the case may be, rubs it smooth, and varnishes it, and then, with gold leaf or silver leaf or aluminum or ink, stamps upon it the name of the maker, and also a number or letter to show how hard the lead is.

The pencil is now ready for sale, but many people like to have an eraser in the end, and this requires still more work. These erasers are round or flat or six-sided or wedge-shaped. They are let into the pencil itself, or into a nickel tip, or drawn over the end like a cap, so that any one's special whim may be gratified. Indeed, however hard to please any one may be, he ought to be able to find a pencil to suit his taste, for a single factory in the United States makes more than six hundred kinds of pencils, and makes so many of them that if they were laid end to end they would reach three times across the continent.

There are many exceedingly cheap pencils, but they are expensive in the end, because they are poorly made. The wood will often split in sharpening, and the lead is of poor materials so badly mixed that it may write blacker in one place than another, and is almost sure to break. Good pencils bearing the name of a reliable firm are cheapest.

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