General PencilsGeneral Pencil Company's artist products come to you from our factory in Jersey City, New Jersey. We believe in quality, tradition, value, and the fun of creating.

This is a tremendous resource focused on Leadholders and other forms of pencils used for drafting. It essentially is a museum of leadholders similar to the concept we are working to build up with our Pencil Wiki Library here on Pencil.com for woodcased pencils. This site does have a nice section on woodcased drafting pencils and where appropriate we link to relevant pages there from like items in our Pencil Library.

Wondering what a leadholder is? In their own words:

On April 1, 2008 Staedtler posted a brief press release on the 170 year history of made in Germany. Among other things the press release discusses the origin of the Mars brand's blue color and helmet logo.

This is something I missed about a month ago. I had several people asking me about March 30th, 2008 being the 150th anniversary of the invention of the pencil. I was telling them the wood cased pencil was much older and that they must be mistaken. It appears they were refering to the 150th anniversary of the Hymen Lipman patent which actually was for a specific design to encase an eraser in the opposite end of the pencil from the writing end. Either end could be sharpened.

Hyman Lipman Patent Drawing

This post from Today in Technology History covers more details on the history. As it turns out there were countering claims from another inventor who developed the use of a ferrule to attach an eraser (as per today's common method) and with Faber who claimed these were not patentable innovations since pencil and erasers previously existed and the combination did not change the basic function of these two items. The case eventually went to the US Supreme Court.

Here are links to two versions of a post on the development of the worlds first extruded plastic pencils from Irv Aron's Journal. Irv is a scientist that worked on the development of the extrusion materials. The updated link here includes some photos of his favorite plastic pencils.