Pencil Notes: Reflections on Henry Petroski’s "The Pencil"

“Yet, perhaps in part because specialization was no doubt as common in ancient times as it is today, the written history of engineering is sparse. Even the most able and articulate of ancient engineers, whether they were known as artisans, craftsmen, architects, or master builders, might have had no more time or inclination or reason to articulate what it is they did and how they did it than do some of the most able of today’s engineers.” – page 17

That is why they hire technical writers. To me, it is a right-brain/left-brain situation. Engineers tend to be right brain thinkers. Technical writers bring that with them, also, the ability to read, edit, and create drawings, whether architectural plans or software flowcharts. Ultimately, though, the images get verbal explanations. That may explain why so many technical writers are women: the left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected by the corpus collosum, which tends to be more highly developed in females than in males.

 

It is difficult to be certain how this or that better design for a brush, plow, house, or sword evolved from its predecessors, for the process was at best sketched metaphorically in pencil and seldom if ever copied in pen. It is because of this that the ideas and artifacts of technology—the processes and products of engineering—are so very different from the creations and theories of literature, philosophy, and science. … The classics, even if superseded in factual or theoretical sophistication are considered models of thinking from which one can today still benefit by emulation, or at least inspiration. […] Curators of technological artifacts, industrial archaeologists, and historians of technology represent rather new careers…” – pages 20-21

1. First, that is why we have industrial archaeology now, to recover and understand those earlier activities and artifacts. 
2. Second, we have lost some mathematics. Richard P. Feynman wanted to demonstrate to his class how Newton proved Kepler’s laws, and he wanted to do it in Newton’s own language. He could not. Feynman could not recreate the geometry that was fundamental to the Principia. We have become so dependent on algebra and calculus that we have forgotten the admittedly more cumbersome tools of earlier mathematics.
3. We also lost the machinery of the Antikythera Mechanism. It would be almost 1500 years before clocks were again so complicated, accurate, and precise.
4. Fourth, and to Petroski’s point, antiquarians do inform the present. Though we had advanced past the hand-hammered methods of coinage, it is famous that President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to give America coinage as compelling as that of the ancient Greeks. 

Professional Coin Grading Service "Coin Facts" website
TOP: Half Dollar of Charles Barber imitating the work
of Oscar Roty for France. BOTTOM: Something better. 

“[Sir Isaac Newton’s] seashore metaphor allows that one shell (theory) may be prettier (more elegant) than another, and perhaps the searcher becomes less fond of the old shells as prettier ones are found, but the implication is still that the truths are whole in the ocean and it is just a matter of time before they are found thrown up on the shore.

“While pencils may be helpful in formulating abstract theories of motion and gravitation, abstract theories do not make pencils.” – page 74.

 

The history of modern physics may refute that. The mathematics describing atomic and nuclear processes energy became the design specifications. We did not tinker our way to nuclear power.

 

Of all the revelations and insights here, I was captivated by the story of Henry David Thoreau (Chapter 9: An American Pencil-Making Family). We recently watched the most recent remake of Little Women (Greta Gerwig director). We see Jo March’s ink-stained fingers and we watch her on the floor, scribbling in pen. But we all also know that the family was connected with the Transcendentalists, among them Henry David Thoreau. But who knew that his family made pencils? In his list of supplies taken to Walden Pond, mostly likely written with the pencil he carried, Thoreau omitted the pencil. Thoreau also billed himself as a surveyor and civil engineer, two professions that even in 1840 depended on good, reliable graphite pencils. 

 

I wrote here last week about the passage on pages 223-225 describing how engineers often were trained to draw by copying architectural treatments. It is, of course, how architects learned to draw. That opened up a new vista on an early passage in The Fountainhead. That being as it may, it is nonetheless true that to learn science, we recreate the important experiments of the past. We just do not slavishly recreate them with archaic beakers, wires, and flyball governors. I believe that it is a valid criticism of physics in particular, stated in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that we are handed science as a completed artifact and do not trouble ourselves much with discarded paradigms—or why we discarded them. (My review for this blog is here.)

 

“One desirable quality is often gained at the expense of another, for how the properties of complicated materials will change with changing ingredients and methods of preparation, whether they be pencil leads or concrete, is not always easily predictable. While a new mixture might give a stronger material, it might also give a more brittle one that will be greatly weakened by a small crack.”—page 236

 

“The stories of the Munroes and the Thoreaus and their pencils illustrate in microcosm the often conflicting objectives of real-world engineering and business: making pencils as fine as possible as an end in itself; making pencils better in quality or price than other pencil makers; making pencils secretly in order to have an advantage over the competition; making pencils overtly to conceal a more profitable business; making pencils for the social and cultural good of artists, engineers, and writers of all kinds. There is no such thing as pure engineering, whether in the artifact or in the abstract—for that would be nothing but irresponsibility or a mere hobby. Engineering, far from being applied science is scientific business.” – page 276-277.

It reminded me of the discussions among Austrian economists over what entrepreneurship essentially is. (See NecessaryFacts here.) Being rationalists  they seek one or a few axioms from which all of the remainder can be derived by pure reason. Do entrepreneurs bring new inventions to market? Do they arbitrage risk? Do they carry goods from where they have lower value to where they are valued more? Do they drive each other out of business by any means possible? Do they find cooperation where others find conflict? Do they take advantage of the unwary or do they profit from intelligent decisions? Mises pointed out at some length that the entrepreneur can be so self-centered that they invest all of their resources in a lost cause when a rational person would just get any good-paying job and keep it. There is no such thing as pure entrepreneurship unless it is a hobby. 

 

In 1933 [the Lead Pencil Institute] has ten members who together manufactured 90 percent of all American pencils. Thus the institute effectively represented the entire industry, which at that time included thirteen firms. They were roughly in order of size: Eagle Pencil Company, New York, N.Y.

Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, Brooklyn, N.Y.

American Lead Pencil Company, Hoboken, N.J.

Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, Jersey City, N.J.

Wallace Pencil Company. Brentwood, Mo.

General Pencil Company, Jersey City, N.J.

Musgrave Pencil Company, Shelbyville, Tenn.

Red Cedar Pencil Company. Lewisburg, Tenn.

Mohican Pencil Company, Philadelphia, Pa.

Blaisdell Pencil Company, Philadelphia, Pa.

Richard Best Pencil Company, Irvington, N.J.

Empire Pencil Company, New York, N.Y.

National Pencil Company, Shelbyville, Tenn.

(Page 293)

 

I found it disappointing that Petroski quoted John Middleton Murray at length on the poetry of being a pencil, but never mentions “I Pencil” by Leonard E. Reed.

 

The old meets the new. These pencil extenders are built
from STL files provided to 3-D printers

“Who today but a frugal draftsman would use a pencil down to such a stub? But our pencils, unlike many of those of the Victorians, have lead from end to end, and some engineers and draftsmen, when a good pencil’s stub is too small to hold even in a pencil extender, have been known to cut away the last of the wood case and use the left in their compasses.” – page 354

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Imaginary Numbers are Real but Pegasus is not 

Forbidden Planet 

Spoken American Grammar 

The Map that Changed the World