Lead pencil, 1564

Any schoolboy worth his salt knows pencils do not in fact contain potentially poisonous lead. And they never did; the pencil arrived with the discovery in 1564 in Borrowdale, Cumbria, of a pure deposit of graphite, then thought to be a type of lead. A year later, the German naturalist Conrad Gesner described a wooden writing tool that contained the substance. Nicolas Conté perfected the pencil more than a century later by mixing graphite with clay and gluing it between two strips of wood.

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  1. =)) actually they did have lead pencils back in the day (9b-9h lead pencils did excist)

    So no you are wrong

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Thanks for the feedback

 
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