H: For drawing and technical drawing, HB: For writing, drawing and technical drawing, B: For writing, drawing and sketching.
This is Cretacolor’s standard model – 'standard’ meaning a very fine graphite and clay mixture with a surround of red cedarwood, the most economical wood to sharpen. We sell it in the three commonest grades for writing and drawing.
The story of the 'lead' pencil – which of course does not contain lead! – is an interesting one. One of its distant predecessors in the 14th century had lead in it – Dürer for example used an implement containing lead and tin alloy for drawing.
The history of the pencil as it is today begins in the 17th century. Graphite was discovered in England, mined and converted into the sort of substance that you find in your modern pencil. However, the graphite was very expensive to cut and early models had an aura of luxury about them. All this changed at the end of the 18th century when the Frenchman Nicolas Jacques Conté and the Austrian Josef Hardtmuth (independently of one another) worked out a process for producing graphite ceramically. They fired a mixture of graphite dust with clay in furnaces, varying the hardness according to the amount of clay used and firing duration. The pencil was on its way to becoming a mass-production article.
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