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The Pencil Factory in Shelbyville, Kentucky, is Still a Family-Owned Business
The Pencil Factory in Shelbyville, Kentucky, is Still a Family-Owned Business
The humble pencil might look simple in design, but it took centuries of trial and error, collaboration and innovation to reach this point.pencil factory The next time you pick up your #2, remember the many minds and hands that came together to make it less brittle, more durable, and even able to hold an eraser.
The modern pencil was born in 1564 after a high-quality deposit of graphite was discovered in England.pencil factory It quickly replaced lead as the preferred writing instrument because it produced a darker, more erasable line.
In 1795, French inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conte devised a process for manufacturing softer, stronger and more versatile pencils using cheaper, less pure graphite by roasting it with clay in a kiln.pencil factory This technique is still used today, and the relative fractions of clay and graphite can determine the strength and softness of the resulting "lead."
A century later, Shelbyville, Kentucky became the world's largest pencil factory after the discovery of high-quality cedar in the region.pencil factory At the peak of its success, it produced 10 percent of the nation's pencils, or roughly 100 million a year. However, the industry hit a slump in the 1970s and '80s, when cheaper imported pencils flooded American stores. In the 1990s, Shelbyville's three remaining factories closed or sold out to larger manufacturers.
But a few major pencil makers managed to stay in business. And one of them, the General Pencil Company in Jersey City, remains a family-owned business that turns huge quantities of raw materials into the pencils you find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office supply shops across the country.
Inside a two-story warehouse, unadorned save for a 25-foot-long No. 2 pencil painted on the outside, nearly 100 employees crank out around 72 million pencils a year. Company president James Musgrave Johnson, 58, is the fourth generation of his family to run the business, which his grandfather established in 1889. He tells Business Insider Today that his favorite part of the job is solving the countless puzzles of precision and optimization that keep the operation running smoothly, especially in the face of ever-cheaper imports.
He and his team grind the raw materials that will become the pencils' cores, which are a mix of graphite and clay. The resulting mixture is encased in a wooden surround, which can be round, polygonal or square depending on the intended use of the pencil. The final pencils are carved, smoothed and sprayed with lacquer, before having an eraser added to the top. The pencils are then ready to be shipped out to the world.
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