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 * Home  /  
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 *   /  "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read"

ECONLIB Books

Feb 5 2018

Leonard E. Read


"I, PENCIL: MY FAMILY TREE AS TOLD TO LEONARD E. READ"

BY LEONARD E. READ

I am a lead pencil–the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and
adults who can read and write…. [From “I, Pencil”]

BOOK COVER

FIRST PUB. DATE

1958

PUBLISHER

Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

PUB. DATE

1999

COMMENTS

Pamphlet

COPYRIGHT

The text of this edition is copyright ©: 1999. Foundation for Economic Education
(FEE). (Second printing, August 1999.) The Library of Economics and Liberty is
grateful to FEE for permission to produce this essay in electronic form.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 1. Introduction, by Milton Friedman
 2. rdPncl0.html#Introduction, by Milton Friedman
 3. Afterword, by Donald J. Boudreaux

FIRST
3
LAST


I, PENCIL

MY FAMILY TREE AS TOLD TO LEONARD E. READ



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.






INNUMERABLE ANTECEDENTS



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 involve 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.






NO ONE KNOWS



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.






NO MASTER MIND



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 masterminding—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.”






TESTIMONY GALORE



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 (1898-1983) founded FEE in 1946 and served as its president
> until his death.
> 
> “I, Pencil,” his most famous essay, was first published in the December 1958
> issue of The Freeman.
> Although a few of the manufacturing details and place names have changed over
> the past forty years, the principles are unchanged.







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



> * My official name is “Mongol 482.” My many ingredients are assembled,
> fabricated, and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.



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