Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 138, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1912 — Hard and Soft Pencils. [ARTICLE]

Hard and Soft Pencils.

“What makes a pencil hard or soft? Graphite, which composes the writing crayon in the pencil, is, as everybody knows, so soft that it will not scratch the most highly polished surface of burnished gold. Yet there are pencils so hard that they actually scratch the paper. A pencil Is hard or soft in proportion to the amount of clay added to the graphite. A pencil cannot be composed Wholly of graphite, for the reason that it would fall into a powder. Hence the use of clay as a binding element Sometimes the clay ts not evenly distributed through the mass and then one strikes a place that sets one's nerves on edge. That does not happen so much as was ths case a few years ago. Graphite is pure carbon, like that contained In the diamond The clay used Is \he finest that can be found and without grit—Harper’s Weekly.