Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Wealth
& Economics:
Leonard
Read's I, Pencil
If you've never read the little economics classic, I, Pencil, you're in for a
treat:
I, Pencil
I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil
familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is
interesting. And, next, I am a mystery — more so than a
tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those
who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious
attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous
error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K.
Chesterton observed, `"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of
wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall
attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me —
no, that's too much to ask of anyone — if you can
become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom
mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this
lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This
sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and
one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a
bit of metal, and an eraser.
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to
name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress
upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows
in Northern California and Oregon. 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. 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. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers
drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the
individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and
install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my
antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil- length
slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted
for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not
a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. 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!
Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty
carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital
accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine--each slat is given eight grooves by a
complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue,
and places another slat atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are
mechanically carved from this "wood- clinched'" sandwich.
My "lead'" itself--it contains no lead at all--is complex. The graphite is
mined in Ceylon. 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. Even the
lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in
the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow--animal fats
chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. 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. 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.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. 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. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow
involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with
resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. 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. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is
it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it
would take pages to explain.
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. An ingredient called
"factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting
rape- seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the
common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and
accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the
plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of
this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even
knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating
the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation;
that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person
in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more
than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only
difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type
of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the
chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field--paraffin being a by-product of
petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the
digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the
one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of
the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less,
perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast
multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is
other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can
thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may
not be among these items.
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone
dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No
trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is
the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that "'only God can make a tree.'" Why do we agree with
this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we
even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance,
that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there
among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that
transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so
on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary
miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies--millions of tiny
know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and
desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I
insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to
bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the
miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily
losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes,
automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to
human necessity and demand--that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive
master-minding — then one will possess an absolutely
essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without
this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the
delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be
efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges
that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also
recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No
individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any
individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in
free people — in the unawareness that millions of tiny
know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity — the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous
conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can
accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However,
there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is
exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a
calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of
other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they
deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event
visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150
passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas
to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they
deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — halfway around the world — for
less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the
street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely
organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove
all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith
that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony
that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good
earth.
—Leonard E. Read
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