Shade Tree Wisdom 9/21/10

When you need one, it always seems to be missing. And you search and find and lay them handy for the next time. It’s that ubiquitous pencil, you know, the item people thought would become obsolete with the computer age.

Not so, the pencil, used by General Grant to jot down battle plans, and by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismark to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, is still very much alive today. Abraham Lincoln probably composed the Gettysburg address with a pencil.

And as a matter of fact, roughly 15 to 20 billion are made each year, some half of them in China. Craftsmen have made pencils in Stein, near Nuremberg, for nearly four centuries. The world’s biggest branded pencil manufacturer is Faber-Castell, a German firm in business since 1761. The great grandson of the founder of the company invented the hexagon pencil in 1839, by doing that, it kept the pencil from rolling off the school desk.

“Do you have a pencil handy?” Isn’t that the question a person asks when they want you to make a note of something? And we have them around at home and at work.

Lately, an innovation is to make the case three cornered, and add small rubber dots to make the pencil easier for small hands to hold.

Such a common item, but so useful, and necessary. No, I do not believe it will be replaced by a computer, at least not for a while.

To me, it is a reminder that some things remain the same, cannot be improved, and never change. And the first among those truths is the truth that God speaks, and the Truth that Jesus Christ, the Son of God died on the cross of Golgotha to pay for the sins of the worlds.. 1 John 2,2. “For Christ died for the sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteousness, to bring you to God.” 1 Peter 3,18.

That Truth remains the Truth for all time.

GPD 9/21/10
Facts about the pencil gleaned from the Economist 9/18/10