The Pencil by Henry Petroski

Author:Henry Petroski [Petroski, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77243-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Two ways of shaping triangular pencils from leaded slats, showing the practical way to be wasteful of wood (photo credit 14.1)

While machines might be efficient for making pencils, during World War II rotary pencil sharpeners were outlawed in Britain because they wasted so much scarce lead and wood, and pencils had to be sharpened in the more conservative manner—with knives. But the importance of economy in the use of wood did not begin with the war or even with the pencil industry, as a biography of Marc Isambard Brunel, the great engineer of the first tunnel under the river Thames and the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, makes clear. The older Brunel was born in France in 1769, served as architect and chief engineer for New York City in the 1790s, and moved to England in 1799. There, one of his first and most innovative contributions was to design new sawmills and introduce efficient sawing techniques into the industry. He developed a mechanized system for making more than 100,000 wooden pulley blocks annually for the British Admiralty, utilizing machines designed by him and produced by Henry Maudslay, but the system earned a royalty that was disappointingly small when compared with the £17,000 that were saved each year by the government.

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