i am a pencil box essay

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My Pencil Box (Essay Sample)

My pencil box.

I received my pencil box from my elder brother as a birthday present with vast wishes for an exceptional career. It was the best present ever. It is rectangular and flat and is made up of strong wood covered by a blue fabric. Many times I have realized its sturdy nature when it fell by mistake on the ground. Even as it was fallen on the ground it never showed any kind of damage to the accessories placed inside it.

Inside my pencil box, I have 2 erasers I use them to erase my mistakes, a ruler I use it during my maths lessons, a pencil sharpener I use it to sharpen my pencils, a glue stick I use it to stick my book cover, a USB key I use it to save my soft copy documents, a compass I used it during my geography lessons, pencils of different colors which help me to write, mini stickers and pens of different colours. I love color blue, and I, therefore, find my pencil box vastly beautiful. My pencil box has a hard and rigid shell and is decorated with stickers of stationery. My pencil box is colorless and black on the backside. My pencil box is 12 cm long and 2cm wide.

The inner section of the box is designed separately, and thus there are various parts where I can place my stationery. I organize my pencil box neatly, and I access it with ease as am very familiar with it. I find my pencil box useful and thus systemize it every night after dinner to keep it neat and organized. I also take care of it every time, whether during school days or tuition session. I have a manual from the company that the box was bought, and it helps me use my pencil box correctly.

My pencil box allows me to place all my necessary accessories together in one place. The box allows me to carry my small items easily. My pencil box occupies 50% importance compared to my other study materials. I once lost my pencil box, I was confused whether I left it in the school or in tuition class and I was so devastated. I spent a lot of time searching for it. My parents promised to buy a new one for me but I was not ready to take any other apart from my original pencil box. I looked for it all over, in my class, the tuition area and even in the school bus but I could not find it. During the weekend when I was organizing my room I was lucky to find it under the bed I was thrilled.

I love my pencil box more than anything else in the world, nothing can replace the space it occupies in my heart. I have been using it for the past three years and in good condition, due to the attachment I have developed towards it, I plan to keep it safe and give it as a present to my firstborn in future in her first birthday.  lf I will be blessed with one.

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. » Autobiography Examples » Autobiography of a Pencil

2 Essay on Autobiography of a Pencil for Students of All Ages

Essay on “Autobiography of a Pencil” – a compelling and heartfelt piece that will take you on an emotional journey through the life of a pencil. In this essay, you will encounter a unique narrator, a pencil, that is portrayed as a living being, sharing her experiences and emotions with you.

Through the pencil’s voice, you will learn about its life, from its creation to its purpose and the many roles it has played. The pencil takes you through the ups and downs of its life, revealing the emotions and feelings associated with being a writing tool.

As you read through the essay, you will discover the significance of the pencil as an essential tool for communication, education, and artistic expression. You will also learn about the challenges that the pencil faces in a world where technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace.

The pencil shares its joys and sorrows, the elation of being sharpened and the despair of being broken, the fulfillment of being used to create art and the frustration of being discarded when it runs out of lead.

Through the pencil’s life story, you will gain a newfound appreciation for this everyday object and the role it plays in our lives. You will be moved by the emotions and sentiments that the pencil shares and come to understand its significance in our lives.

In conclusion, “Autobiography of a Pencil” is a poignant and moving essay that will leave you with a new perspective on this everyday object. So, come along on this emotional journey as the pencil shares its life story with you.

• Autobiography of a Pencil

Autobiography of a Pencil 1 –

I am a humble pencil, just a simple writing tool with a graphite core and a wooden exterior. But, as it turns out, my life story is quite unique and worth telling.

I was born in a small factory in rural China, one of many identical siblings being mass-produced to meet the demands of the global market. However, fate had other plans for me.

One day, I found myself in the hands of a young girl, who was just learning how to write. She was clumsy, often dropping me and making mistakes, but with each stroke of my lead on paper, she grew more confident in her writing and I found myself filled with a sense of purpose.

As time went on, the girl became a woman, and I remained her constant companion through thick and thin, transcribing her deepest thoughts and fondest memories. I was there for her through heartbreak and happiness, and I took pride in my role in preserving her story for posterity.

Years passed, and my wooden exterior grew worn and my graphite core became shorter with each passing day, but still I pressed on, not wanting to abandon my companion. And then, one day, she gifted me to her own daughter, passing on both her love of writing and her trust in me to keep her legacy alive.

From that day on, I belonged to a new generation, bearing witness to the hopes, dreams, and struggles of yet another young writer. And so, my journey continued, from one hand to another, each adding their own unique mark to my story.

Through it all, I have come to realize that I am more than just a simple writing tool. I am a vessel, carrying the memories and emotions of those who have held me, a testament to the power of the written word and the enduring connection between people and their stories.

I may be just a pencil, but I have lived a rich and fulfilling life, touching the lives of countless individuals and leaving a lasting impact on the world. And who knows, perhaps one day, when I am no longer able to write, someone will look back on my story and see the value in preserving even the seemingly ordinary and unassuming among us.

In conclusion, as a pencil, I may have started as just another mass-produced object, but through the experiences and memories I have been a part of, I have become so much more. I am a symbol of the enduring power of the written word, a reminder of the importance of preserving our stories, and a testament to the unique and meaningful lives that can be lived, even by something as simple as a pencil.

Autobiography of a Pencil 2 –

I am a pencil, and I have lived a life unlike any other writing implement. You see, I am not just a simple tool for putting words on paper, but I am a traveler, a witness to history, and a symbol of the human spirit.

My journey began in a small workshop in Europe, where I was crafted from the finest materials by a master artisan. My graphite core was carefully shaped and my wooden exterior was smoothed to perfection. I was made to be the finest writing instrument the world had ever seen.

And so, I set out on my first adventure, traveling across the seas to a new land. It was here that I found myself in the hands of a great artist, who used me to create beautiful works of art that inspired and moved the masses. I was proud to be a part of such magnificent creations, and I felt a sense of purpose that I had never known before.

But my travels did not stop there. I continued to be passed from hand to hand, traveling the world and experiencing new cultures, languages, and ways of life. I saw wars come and go, revolutions rise and fall, and I was there to transcribe the stories of those who lived through these events.

And yet, through it all, I remained steadfast, always ready to serve as a tool for self-expression and communication. I was a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit, a testament to the power of the written word, and a reminder that even in the darkest of times, there is always the possibility of hope and progress.

It is this spirit that has defined my life, and it is what has allowed me to touch the lives of so many individuals. I may be small and unassuming, but I have lived a life of adventure, purpose, and meaning that few could ever imagine.

In conclusion, I am a pencil, and my story is one of a life well-lived, of a journey that has taken me to the far corners of the earth, and of a spirit that will endure for generations to come. I may be just a simple writing tool, but I am a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit, and a reminder of the importance of preserving and sharing our stories for generations to come.

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27 pages • 54 minutes read

I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read

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Summary: “i, pencil”.

The essay “I, Pencil,” also known as “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read,” was first published by the American businessman and libertarian advocate Leonard E. Read in 1958. The essay first appeared in The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), a think-tank he co-founded in 1946. Read was a staunch critic of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” an ambitious series of government policies and public-works programs aimed at re-inflating the US economy during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The essay is considered a classic critique of economic central planning and defense of free-market capitalism.

This guide uses the PDF ebook published by FEE in March 2019.

Writing in the first person from the perspective of a pencil, Read opens with the counterintuitive claim that this seemingly simple object should elicit “wonder and awe,” because “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me” (4). He illustrates the point with a “genealogy” identifying the complex, globe-spanning chain of events required to produce even so simple an object as a pencil, let alone something as complex as “an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher” (4). From there, Read concludes that no centralized authority could ever possess all of the knowledge and skills needed to efficiently coordinate these events, whereas market economies do it automatically.

Beginning with the logging of a cedar tree in the Pacific Northwest, Read catalogs “the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding,” and then “all the persons and the numberless skills” required to produce that gear: “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” (5). Read posits that the loggers could not do their job without “the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods” (5).

Read continues through the remaining links of the supply chain, detailing how the logs are shipped by rail to a mill, where specialized machines fashion them into pencils; how the “lead” core is made from graphite mined in Sri Lanka and mixed with Mississippi clay, Mexican candelilla wax, and various chemicals; how the lacquer, made from castor oil, is applied; how the label is imprinted using resins and carbon black; and how the ferrule is manufactured from brass and black nickel, and the eraser from Indonesian rapeseed oil, Italian pumice, and cadmium sulfide.

Read’s point is twofold: “[M]illions of human beings have had a hand” in making the pencil, and no single individual “contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how” (7) to the complex process. Because each step in the supply chain is indispensable, so, too, are the knowledge and skills of each worker. Even the president of the pencil company represents only one link in the chain; he knows no more about mining iron ore than the miner knows about running a corporation, and without iron there would be no pencils.

Furthermore, none of these individuals “performs his singular task because he wants me” (8). In other words, what motivates the oil-field worker to show up at his job every day is not a specific desire to produce petroleum for making paraffin wax used in pencil leads. Nor is he compelled to do so by some “master mind […] dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions” (8). Instead, all of this labor is elicited and coordinated by “the Invisible Hand”—a metaphor for market economics famously coined by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in his groundbreaking 1776 book The Wealth of Nations . The oil worker is motivated solely by the desire to “exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs and wants” (8), which may or may not involve pencils. From the miners and loggers to the company executives, everyone works in order to earn money to spend as they see fit; then others work to supply them with those desired goods and services. This is the “extraordinary miracle” of markets: “[M]illions of tiny knowhows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding!” (8).

People who fail to understand the “miraculous” logic of supply and demand often conclude, erroneously in Read’s view, that such complex coordination can be achieved only by a central authority. When the government monopolizes the provision of a good or service—he gives the example of mail delivery—many citizens come to believe that the private sector would be incapable of providing it efficiently. However, humans successfully perform much more complex tasks than delivering mail, such as manufacturing an automobile or operating an airline, when they are “left free to try” (9) without government coercion. This pernicious lack of “faith in free people” has encouraged an expansion of government control that is presently making societies less free. Read argues that maintaining a free society requires widespread public understanding of “the Invisible Hand” (9).

The final piece of Read’s argument is implied rather than explicitly stated: that government “masterminding” is not only unnecessary but inherently less efficient than spontaneous market coordination. The best role for government, therefore, is to stay out of the way as much as possible and “leave all creative energies uninhibited,” intervening in economic affairs only for the purpose of removing “all obstacles” (10) to the free functioning of markets. For Read, the logic of “the Invisible Hand” is so unerring that it is akin to natural law: faith in free markets is as “practical,” or reasonable, as faith in “the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth” (10).

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Originally published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman , this essay is written in the first-person from the perspective of a pencil, explaining its complexity and defending Adam Smith 's concept of an invisible hand acting in free markets.

• 1 Complicated Machinery
• 2 No One Knows

​ I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. [1]

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, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders." [2]

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 from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

​ 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 of 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 cadium sulfide .

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

No One Knows

​ 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 men . 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 a faith in free men—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 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 —half-way 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 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.

• ↑ My official name is "Mongol 482." My many ingredients are assembled, fabricated, and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, Wilkes-Barre , Pennsylvania .
• ↑ G. K. Chesterton .

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Life of a Pencil

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“I, Pencil” is an essay by Leonard Read. The full title is “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read” and it was first published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. It was reprinted in The Freeman in May 1996 and as a pamphlet entitled “I… Pencil” in May 1998. In the reprint, Milton Friedman wrote the introduction and Donald J. Boudreaux wrote the afterword. Friedman (the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics) used the essay in his 1980 PBS television show Free to Choose and the accompanying book of the same name. In the 2008 50th Anniversary Edition, the introduction is written by Lawrence W. Reed and Friedman wrote the afterword.

“I, Pencil” is written in the first person from the point of view of a pencil. The pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port.

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I, Pencil: A Brilliant Vintage Allegory of How Everything Is Connected

By maria popova.

In 1958, libertarian writer and Foundation for Economic Education founder Leonard Read (September 26, 1898–May 14, 1983) set out to remedy this civilizational injustice in a marvelous essay titled “I, Pencil,” published in Essays on Liberty ( public library ). In a clever allegory, Read delivers his enduring point about the power of free market economy. Casting the pencil as a first-person narrator, he illustrates its astounding complexity to reveal the web of dependencies and vital interconnectedness upon which humanity’s needs and knowledge are based, concluding with a clarion call for protecting the creative freedom making this possible.

Read begins:

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, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

Half a century before Thomas Thwaites set out to illustrate the complex interdependencies of what we call civilization by making a toaster from scratch , Read writes:

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 .

Tracing the pencil’s journey from raw material — “a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon” — to the hands of “all the persons and the numberless skills” involved in its fabrication, Read considers the rich cultural and practical substrata of all these skills and production mechanisms:

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 from California to Wilkes-Barre!

He goes on to delineate the global reaches of the production process — from the pencil’s lead derived from graphite mined in Ceylon to Mexican candelilla wax used used to increase its strength and smoothness to the rapeseed oil Dutch East Indies involved in the creation of its “crowning glory,” the eraser — ultimately pointing to the pencil as a supreme example of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” at work:

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… 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.

Above all, Read suggests, the pencil attests to the godliness of the human capacity for connected imagination. In a sardonic dual jab at religious creationism and excessive government control, Read summons the last line from Joyce Kilmer’s 1918 poem “Trees” and writes:

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 men . Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Just a few years earlier, pencil-lover Steinbeck had written in East of Eden : “The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.” Whether Read read Steinbeck and succumbed to cryptomnesia or arrived at this strikingly similar sentiment independently is only cause for speculation, but his larger point — one as pertinent to public policy as it is to the private creative endeavor — is what endures with its own timeless miraculousness:

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men 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 — half-way 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 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.

Half a century after Read penned his brilliant essay, it was adapted into an animated film illustrating how the same “complex combination of miracles” plays out on various scales in our modern lives:

For an equally pause-giving contemporary counterpart, see The Toaster Project .

Perhaps Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer — and what, if not computing, is the height of Read’s miraculous web of know-hows? — put it best when she wrote that “everything is naturally related and interconnected.”

— Published June 3, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/06/03/i-pencil-leonard-read/ —

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Writing an Autobiography

Autobiography of a pencil.

I’m a pencil. I’m writing my autobiography. Let’s take a look at my life.

I was born in a big factory in the city. My name is Atlas. I’m smart and thin. I am basically made up of wood. After manufacturing, they packed me with different coloured papers. After my packing was done, I was transferred to a truck, and the driver took me to the stationery shop. In that shop, I met so many friends, like pens, rubbers, and erasers. The shop was very beautiful and was always crowded.

Amaan, my owner, finally bought me one day. I must have committed some sin in my life, which is why I got Amaan as my master. He was arrogant and harsh. He throws me against walls. He used to make me scream and listen to me cry. I’m always scared of sharpeners, but that child sharpens me like 100 times in a day. But hey, this is not the end of the world. People sharpen me to make me look sharp, so I can write clearly.

One day was lucky for me, as Amaan misplaced me somewhere. Then he forgets about me. The next day, Amaan’s friend placed me at the desk of the teacher. Now I’m happy and glad. The teacher took me and used me very carefully and decently. Finally, I was in good hands. I got rid of Amaan, who was one of the naughtiest kids I met in my life. The teacher took me home, and she has a happy family.

Every morning she used me with a cup of tea and checked her English papers. She only sharpened me when it was needed, and it made me young again. Now I’m in my last days of life. One or two trims, and I will be dead.

I lived a happy life after I got a nice teaching job. I fulfilled the sole purpose of my life, i.e., writing through my lens to help other people. I was full of hope for education. It always made me proud that God had created me into such a useful thing.

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“I, Pencil” Revisited

Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” which is now 50 years old, is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. Read saw an “extraordinary miracle … [in the] 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! ”

His subject and its relation to freedom and prosperity were certainly worth capturing in such a clever, pleasing, and illuminating essay, which is why it is one of the best-known works in the popular free-market literature.

But there’s another lesson in “I, Pencil” that has been largely overlooked, perhaps by Read himself. “I, Pencil” is also an excellent primer in the Austrian approach to capital theory. It’s worth looking at Read’s essay in that light.

Early on, Read’s pencil describes his family tree, beginning with the cedars grown in northern California and Oregon that provide the wooden slats. But he doesn’t really start with the trees. He notes that turning trees into pencils requires “saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding,” and those things have to be produced before a pencil can be produced. “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!”

What emerges here is what Austrian economists call a structure of production. This structure is characterized by two closely related elements: multiple stages (distinguished by their “distance” from the consumer) and time. The pencil that eventually emerges at the end of the process must first proceed, in various states of incompleteness, through a series of stations at which components are transformed in ways consistent with making pencils. The stations themselves have to be prepared through earlier stages of production. Thus before trees can be cut down and turned into wooden slats, saws, trucks, rope, railroad cars, and other things must be produced first. Before steel can be used to make saws, trucks, and railroad cars, iron ore must be mined and processed. And so on. The same kind of description can be provided for each component of the pencil: the paint, the graphite, the compound that comprises the eraser, the brass ferrule that holds the eraser.

Tracing the pencil’s genealogy back to iron, zinc, copper, and graphite mines; hemp plants; rubber trees; castor beans; and much more demonstrates the “roundaboutness” of production, the term of the early Austrian economist Eugen von B ö hm-Bawerk . Much time and effort are spent not on making pencils but rather things that will–sooner or later–help to make pencils. Without central direction, entrepreneurs set up production this way because more, better, and cheaper pencils can be made more profitably than by some more direct process.

Price Communication

Several things are worth pointing out about the structure of production. First, while no central planner is responsible for pencil production overall, entrepreneurs and workers at each stage do have plans and expectations, which they strive to coordinate with one another across stages and time periods. The key to coordination is the price system. If there’s a brass shortage, rising prices will communicate that information to the ferrule and pencil makers. The downstream entrepreneurs will have to adjust their plans in response to the new conditions–say, by finding a substitute material. The demand for a substitute material will in turn set appropriate processes in motion as entrepreneurs react. In the real world of disequilibrium, change is the rule, so plans are always undergoing revision.

Moreover, a quantity of a resource cannot be used both at an early stage of production and a later stage simultaneously. A unit of iron could be devoted to making ferrule machines or it could be used to make a machine for mining more iron–or many other things in between. Tradeoff is the rule, and consumer welfare depends on having things arranged appropriately. Time-preference and the market for loanable funds–that is, interest rates–govern coordination across time and maximize consumer satisfaction. It all works marvelously well when government stays out of the way, but alas there are many opportunities for mischief by the central bank and the Treasury. For example, artificially depressing interest rates can shift resources from later to earlier stages in defiance of consumer preferences and resource scarcity.

Second, capital equipment wears out. Machines, engines, vehicles, saw blades, ropes and the rest need to be replaced. That requires money, which requires saving–that is, deferred consumption. Saving is also necessary to finance research and development so that better and cheaper machines, tools, materials, and writing implements might be created. Remember this when Keynesian politicians and economists who aspire to stimulate the economy deride saving as inimical to economic growth and increased consumption. Such derision invariably ignores the need for capital at stages of production remote from the final consumer level. That’s what inappropriate aggregation gets you.

Third, the stages of the capital structure consist in discrete, specific, scarce, and complementary things–buildings, machines, tools, materials, and more–in particular places at particular times. They were put in place, as part of an entrepreneur’s plan, to work together with labor to produce other specific things. In keeping with Austrian subjectivism, the plan gives meaning to the capital goods. A change in plan, for example, might convert equipment that was once complementary to the rest of the equipment into something of little or no value (besides scrap).

Menger and Value

This leads to the final point. Carl Menger , founder of the Austrian school, taught that capital goods get their value ultimately from the final consumer goods they help to produce. If there were a machine that could only make pencils and if people stopped wanting pencils, the value of the machine would drop to its scrap value. Capital goods are not a lump of Play-Doh. They are specific things, which means they cannot be adapted to any use whatever. Even when they can be adapted, the conversion will likely not be costless and certainly not instantaneous. Moreover the goods are in particular places. Equipment in the wrong place is not as valuable as equipment in the right place.

These facts have implications for booms and busts, which are much on people’s minds today. If government policy (monetary or other) artificially induces investment in unsustainable projects that are out of alignment with true consumer preferences, the realignment that will have to be undertaken later can be neither instantaneous nor costless. Equipment that was suitable for the now-liquidated projects may not work as well–or at all–in other endeavors. Much “investment” will be seen now as waste, and time and money will have to be spent putting things right. That’s the recession.

This description of the structure of production should raise no eyebrows. We see such things all around. But anyone who has taken a standard economics course will know that capital is usually discussed as though it were a lump of malleable and homogenous Play-Doh (“K”). If you assume this about capital and think in terms of aggregates and averages, you may underrate the need for the market process, which has no rival in its ability to coordinate the plans of strangers in order to raise living standards. The Play-Doh conception of capital may fit in mathematical equations, but that’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. Economics should be a way of thinking about the world we actually confront.

Sheldon Richman is the former editor of The Freeman  and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics . He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families and thousands of articles. 

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“I, Pencil: My Family Tree” as told to Leonard E. Read, Dec. 1958

• Leonard E. Read (author)
• Milton Friedman (introduction)

A charming story which explains how something as apparently simple as a pencil is in fact the product of a very complex economic process based upon the division of labor, international trade, and comparative advantage.

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I Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Reed (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1999).

Published online with the kind permission of the copyright holders, the Foundation for Economic Education.

• Economic theory. Demography

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Read’s essay is inspried in part by the pin factory Adam Smith describes in Book I, Chapter 1 of the Wealth of Nations.

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What can we learn about our own world from Smith? Join the workers in an 18th century pin factory to find out more…

Competitive Enterprise Institute

A guided exploration of Smith’s classic text.

Autobiography of a Pencil – Short Essay

I’m a  pencil . I’m writing my  autobiography . Let’s  take a look  at my  life.

I was  born in the big factory  of the city. My  name is Atlas . I’m  smart and thin . I am basically  made up of wood . Then they p acked  me to  different colour papers . After my packing was done I was  transferred to a lorry  and the  driver took me to the stationary   shop.  In that shop I met so many  friends like pen, rubber and eraser . The shop was very beautiful and was always crowded.

Ravi my owner bought me finally  one day. I must have  done any sin in my life  which is the  reason I got Ravi as my master. He was arrogant and harsh. He  throws me at walls . Ravi used to  make me scream  and  listen to me crying . I’m always  scared of sharpener  but that child shop me like  1000 times in a day . But hey this is not the end of the life. People sharp me to make me look sharp so I can write clear.

One  day was lucky  for me as  Ravi placed me somewhere . Then he forgets about me. Next day Ravi’s  friend placed me  to the  desk of the teacher . Now I’m  happy and glad . The teacher took me and used me very carefully and decently. Finally I was in good hands. I got rid of Ravi who was one of the  naughtiest kids I met in my life . The teacher took me home and she has a happy family.

Every morning  she used me  with a cup of tea and checked his English papers . She only  sharped me when it was needed  and it made me young again. Now I’m in  last days of life . One or two trim and  I will be dead .

I  lived a happy life  after I get into  a nice teachers life . I fulfilled the  sole purpose of my life  i.e. writing through my lead to help other people. I was a light and hope of education. Children learnt through media were a medium for their knowledge. It always made me proud that GOD has created me into such a  useful thing.

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