i’m curious what arbitrary and specific flavors people dislike are. rb and tag a Taste you simply don’t fuck with. for flavor reasons not texture reasons. for me? i do not like elderflower or caraway for whatever reason
i like this era of kirby ads where due to the anime n Technological Advancement™ they could no longer pretend hes secretly tough or goofy so they just decided to keep advertising him as dangerous just hes cute also
if you need us the missus and me will be in the other room having a duel with old flintlock pistols missing each other with every shot not only because we love each other but also because we both are dog shit at this
I always assumed pencil lead was so called because it did in fact used to be made of elemental lead, which was replaced by graphite in more recent times, possibly because of lead’s toxicity. Turns out that assumption was dead wrong. Lead has been used for writing at various points in history, yes, but never as part of any implement we would recognize as a pencil. I’m fact, prior to the early 1500s, the closest things to a pencil that existed were the tools used for metalpoint drawing, which consisted of a wire of some metal, often jeweler’s silver but never, as far as I know, lead, inserted into a wooden rod. What changed in the early 1500s you ask? Well, that was when a large deposit of strikingly pure graphite was discovered in northern England. People quickly began cutting sticks of the stuff and using it to write, but because of its softness it had to be encased to handle. Initially rope and sheepskin were used, but eventually the transition was made to wood and the modern pencil was born.
In other words, pencil lead has always been made of graphite. The thing is, for centuries people assumed that the stuff in this deposit was just some weird kind of lead ore (this is why graphite was archaically referred to as plumbago), a belief which becomes more understandable when you realize that to this day, this is the only large deposit of pure, solid graphite ever discovered. As there was no means of artificially producing solid graphite back then they had no way of knowing of its existence as a unique substance, and lead was the material whose properties most closely resembled those of the stuff in the new deposit. Or to cast it in a completely different light, today we would say it’s wrong to call graphite lead because lead is the 86th element whereas graphite is a form of carbon, but if, prior to this chemical definition, lead was just a colloquial term for any soft, dark gray metallic substance, were they even wrong? Would they have understood if we tried to correct them? Maybe it’s more accurate to just say that the definition of the word has changed.
(As a fun aside, one of the other early uses for graphite was as a lining for cannonball molds, making for rounder and thus more effective cannonballs, and so the deposit was quickly put under the strict control of the crown. This meant that for years graphite for pencils actually had to be smuggled out of the mine.)
Wow!! That’s so interesting. If you know, what does being assumed to be a lead ore have to do with the name plumbago?
plumbum is the technical name for lead, coming from latin.
Wait tell us more about the forbidden smuggled pencil lead
Wait tell us more about how and when they starting making synthetic graphite
Wait tell us about how that deposit of graphite came into existence
I was curious about this too. The origin of natural graphite deposits is apparently a bit of a contentious issue, but I found this paper which looks at the Borrowdale deposit in particular (which is the one I was referring to in my original post). I’m not a geologist so the details are over my head, but the gist of what they’re suggesting seems to be that volcanism in the area brought relatively carbon-rich rocks from deep in the crust up closer to the surface where that carbon ended up saturating hydrothermal fluids. As that water circulated through the hills in the region the conditions were right for that carbon to then crystallize out as graphite.
I should also clarify that graphite in general isn’t rare in the Earth’s crust, it just isn’t usually in a particularly usable form to begin with, being either very impure or consisting of tiny flakes. What makes the Borrowdale deposit unique is that it contains relatively pure graphite chunks large enough to hold in your hand, or to, say, cut into lead for pencils. Over the years though we’ve discovered ways to purify and make use of graphite even in its more commonly found forms. Modern pencil lead, for instance, is made by mixing graphite powder with clay and then baking it, so it isn’t actually pure graphite at all. This is why pencil lead comes in different softnesses (HB vs B4, etc.)–the higher the ratio of clay to graphite, the harder the resulting lead. According to Wikipedia this process was invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795 while France was cut off from England’s natural graphite supply because of the Napoleonic Wars, so there’s yet another way the histories of pencil lead and British military affairs are oddly linked.
There are apparently other ways of synthesizing graphite, including ways of producing high-quality graphite crystals for scientific and industrial uses, but you’ll have to look into that yourself if you want to know the details of how they work.
This is called “The Toaster House.” It was built in 1962 in Mattituck, NY, has 3bds, 4ba, 2,595sqft, $1.5m. It’s surprisingly different inside and looks like it belongs to an artist.
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