“Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as ‘the plug,’ the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature.” How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black? Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!” That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are.” To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.” After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions-as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow-animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. “The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships.” “My ‘lead’ itself-it contains no lead at all-is complex. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!” The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. These are kiln dried and then tinted… People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto?” “The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods.” Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. “My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. “I am a lead pencil-the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write… Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.” While trade barriers are not expressly discussed in the story, the reader can infer potential consequences rippling through the supply chain. It was first published in 1958 to explain how free-market economies work and to discredit centrally-planned economies, such as the Soviet Union. This is the story of how a simple pencil is manufactured using numerous raw materials from all over the world, as told in the first person by the pencil itself.
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