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This property also makes graphite powder an ideal dry lubricant. The carbon sheet fragments readily rub off the pencil core and onto the paper. The material is soft silicone, durable, and malleable to most writing and drawing tools. This slippery-sheet structure is what makes graphite so oily to the touch and makes it such a good material to write with. The fun monkey design stands out in three available colors. As a result, it is very easy for one carbon sheet in graphite to slip past the other sheets. The carbon atoms within a sheet are very strongly bound together, but the sheets themselves are very weakly bound. Each carbon atom in the sheet is bonded to the three nearest carbon atoms. Each carbon sheet is one atom thick and consists of a hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms bonded together. In contrast, graphite contains a stack of carbon sheets. This tightly packed arrangement of carbon atoms makes diamond the hardest naturally occurring material on earth. In diamond, each carbon atom is bonded tetrahedrally to its four nearest carbon atoms.
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Depending on the shapes in which the carbon atoms are bonded, pure carbon can take on many forms. Aside from biological molecules, carbon can also be found in nature in pure mineral form. Black-core pencils currently contain and have always contained graphite, not lead.Ĭarbon is the sixth element on the periodic table and is famous for forming the backbone of molecules found in fuels and in all living organisms. Werner decided that this carbon material needed a new name and proposed the name "graphite" based on the Greek word "graphein" which means "to write". Scheele finally determined pencil lead to be composed of pure carbon. Eventually, the name of the core of the pencil got shortened to "lead". Since this writing material behaved similar to metallic lead, but had a darker color, people began calling it "black lead". During the 1600's, no one knew the chemical nature of this material, as chemistry itself was still in its infancy. The first users of graphite simply dug this mineral out of the hills and discovered it could be sawed into sticks and used as an excellent writing tool. According to the book The Pencil by Henry Petroski, the graphite pencil was first developed and popularized in the 1600's. Pencils contain a form of solid carbon known as graphite. The core of a pencil does not contain lead and never has. At the other end of the spectrum is the number 1 pencil. Public Domain Image, source: Christopher S. The number 3 pencil (usually rated as H or 2H) has a tougher lead that leaves light marks on the paper and is torn through the lightweight paper. This substance was historically misidentified as lead and the name stuck. Standard pencil cores have always been made of graphite and not lead.