Forget the digital wizardry of the keyboard and the tablet -
you can't beat the simplicity of the pencil.
Which explains why we still buy
more than 180 million of them every year.
Not bad for a 400-year-old invention. Mm.
We've come to Germany to find out how they're made.
To the factory of the oldest pencil manufacturer in the world.
MUSIC: Ride Of The Valkyries by Richard Wagner
Whether you sharpen yours to the finest of points or chew the end,
we've all grown up with this classic writing instrument.
HE LAUGHS
I'm Gregg Wallace.
Oh! I feel like Uri Geller.
And the sharp end of German engineering...
Those pencils are almost falling over those blades.
..is rewriting everything I thought I knew about pencil production.
I'm beginning to understand there is a bottom and a top.
I'm Cherry Healey.
Wow! Oh, my goodness.
That's so bright.
I'm taking a close up-look at the mind-blowing mineral
at the heart of every pencil...
It looks like shards of glass.
OK. Is that good jug?
..and creating my own colourful crayons.
Argh!
You're kidding me.
And historian Ruth Goodman sketches out the surprising origins
of this simple tool.
Write with a rock. Yes! SHE LAUGHS
That's amazing, isn't it?
Over the next 24 hours, this factory will produce 600,000 pencils.
And this is a fascinating story
of how they get the lead into every single one.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Faber-Castell factory near Nuremberg in Germany.
Pencils have been rolling off the production line here
for more than 250 years.
This old factory is unlike any I've visited before.
And, for once, I get a break from my usual hairnet.
It's packed with bespoke machines that craft premium pencils
in all colours, shapes and sizes.
But today we follow the production of their classic green HB pencil.
The factory straddles the River Rednitz,
in the South German town of Stein.
The raw materials arrive
on an 18th-century street in the bustling town,
and the company's newest recruit, Lukas Tartler,
is here to meet today's delivery.
Lukas? Hi. Gregg. I've come to find out about pencil-making.
This is the place to come. This is where we make pencils.
What's on that lorry?
On here we have the graphite, in bags, that go into our pencil lead.
And then do you add lead to the graphite?
We don't. There has never been metal lead in the pencil lead.
Listen here, my friend.
We know for a fact that pencils are made out of lead!
No? No.
Has been graphite since pencil-making started.
OK. I'll trust you.
20 bags of graphite powder are taken through
this historic factory intake area.
How many pencils would you make out of that graphite?
Over a million, just with this one delivery.
Over a million pencils? Over a million pencils.
From that graphite? From that graphite.
The powder is walked 50 metres
through to the measuring room for weighing.
And, as the first bag is slashed open,
our pencil production begins.
This is the graphite, right?
Um, part of it is.
Bottom half - that's the graphite.
But we also need clay for HB pencils,
and this is what we have here as well.
Clay? Clay. Because the graphite is giving the pencil its colour,
and the clay is giving the pencil its structure.
So we want clay there as well.
Lukas, what exactly is graphite, please?
Um, graphite is basically carbon.
So if you have charcoal when barbecuing at home,
that's basically the same thing in a different molecular structure.
This good-looking gentleman over here,
with the shaved head and the glasses, what's he doing?
He is mixing the graphite and the clay in the proper ratio
to get the pencil which we want.
They make 16 different grades of pencil
leads here, from soft and dark...
..to hard and light...
..depending on the ratio of graphite to clay.
With more clay you'd be moving more towards the 6H,
H standing for hard in that case.
H means hard? H means hard. What does B mean? Black.
It means black. Really? Because the pencil writes blacker.
HB, B means black, H means hard?
Exactly. I've seen those letters on a pencil all my life
For ages. And never knew! OK.
We need a 50-50 mix of clay and graphite for our batch
of hard black pencils.
We follow it into mixing, where the machines look familiar...
..even if the messy materials don't.
So what is that?
I'm guessing some sort of mixer? Huge kitchen aid in which we start
putting together the graphite and the clay, adding some water.
And this is where we compose the mixture making up the pencil lead.
Is he just going to hose it in? Pretty much, yeah.
How...
Very good.
So is that going to deliver just the exact amount of water? Yes, it is.
We're not working with guesstimates here, we're working precise.
That looks like volcanic, ash that looks like a volcano about to erupt.
You've got about 250 kilos of mixture.
How many pencils is that going to make?
250 kilos will make about 200,000 different pencils.
The massive mixer has an equally heavyweight lid to seal
in the powder and water.
It'll take two hours of heating and stirring to combine them.
This traditional method dates back around 200 years, but pencils
themselves go back a little further.
Ruth sketches out the story of their invention.
Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have been making marks
with all kinds of instruments.
But the pencil is relatively recent and it began here
in the Lake District.
I'm in the Borrowdale Valley to meet author and stationary fan James Ward.
What a wonderful place you've chosen!
The story begins in the 16th century,
in a field round here where monks were looking after some sheep.
At some point, there was a big storm,
and it knocked down one of these trees. Underneath it,
the monks discovered some strange material, and it was this stuff.
Graphite.
Well, it does initially just look like a rock, doesn't it?
But there already something odd's happened with my hands.
Well, that's exactly what they realised as well.
And maybe if you want to try... OK.
..make a mark on that paper.
See if I can write with a rock.
Oh, I am.
It does if you do it in the right... Yeah.
That's amazing, isn't it?
To be able to just pick a rock out of the ground and write with it.
The monks had stumbled across a deposit of pure graphite,
which they misidentified as a type of lead,
a name that stuck.
By carving the graphite into sticks and wrapping it in string,
it became a handy new tool.
The pencil.
It's a very simple...
..and easy thing to use, isn't it?
No fuss, no mess.
The innovation took off and the nearby town of Keswick became
world famous for its pencils,
developing a valuable trade with Europe.
No-one else had graphite as pure as ours.
So when we went to war with France in 1793,
its sale was strictly embargoed, which, surprisingly,
was a bit of an annoyance to the French military.
Why were the French so worried about not having pencils?
Well, if you think about it, if you're in a war
you've got your maps, you're planning where your troops are.
They're moving all around all the time but if you're doing that in pen,
pretty soon the map would be unreadable,
but with pencil you rub it out. Yeah.
Oh, I see.
The French didn't have much graphite, did they?
Well, they did have some, but it wasn't of great quality or quantity.
That's where this guy comes in.
Now he's an interesting looking chap.
Yeah. Nicolas-Jacques Conti.
Nicolas-Jacque Conti was a talented artist and inventor.
He worked out that you didn't need sticks of pure Borrowdale graphite to make pencils.
James and I are going to follow his method.
So we've got kaolin, which is sort of fine powder. Yeah.
Fuller's earth, which is also clay, and then graphite here on the end.
I love the way this looks.
It's got a sort of shininess to it.
So only 20g. 20.
Conti discovered that by mixing low quality powdery French graphite
with clay he could make a good pencil without relying
on the treasured graphite from the Lake District.
OK. Make sure you don't lick the spoon.
It's definitely got the colour of that that one associates with the lead of a pencil, hasn't it?
I mean, it's not black.
It's sort of... It's that sort of silver grey. Silver grey.
But it's still got that sort of shine and shimmer
from the graphite as well. Yeah.
We roll our graphite mix into pencil leads and then bake them in the oven
at 230 degrees C.
Who knew that's all you needed?
Think we should wash our hands. Think we should wash our hands.
20 minutes later, they're ready.
Shall we try it?
Shall we have a go? Oh, look at that.
Yes. Well, it behaves like a pencil,
I can hold it like a pencil. Does it write?
It does! Look at that!
Conte's methods were quickly adopted, the old technique
of using solid graphite was consigned to history
and the modern pencil was born.
This is a very long one.
Wow.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
That is pretty cool.
So simple!
In Germany, I'm following Conti's method,
making what we all wrongly call lead on a much larger scale in the mixing room.
Our 250kg of graphite, clay and water mix has been heated
and stirred for two hours.
Whoa.
I never expected that, that looks to me like a lunar landscape.
That's soft.
They look like pebbles, but they're quite soft.
Quite remarkable.
I've still got no idea how you get that into a pencil.
To find out how they turn these metallic space rocks
into thin pencil leads,
I'm following them through to the extrusion room,
where they're shovelled into a giant steel press.
That seems like a very big machine to make a little pencil.
It looks like an enormous piston.
Like in a car engine. Yes.
Is that what it's doing? Pushing it through?
It really is pushing the mixture through the dye,
into the shape of the pencil lead.
A metre-long piston squeezes the soft graphite and clay mix
through a single two millimetre hole, spurting it out like spaghetti,
then cutting it every 18.5 centimetres.
Tonnes of machinery and an enormous great piston,
just to squeeze these tiny thin little tubes out of little holes.
Yeah. It seems a big, oversized job for a result that's so tiny.
And that is now the inside of a pencil, right?
That is the inside of the pencil. That's the lead.
Can I pick one up? Sure, go ahead.
Oh, it's soft.
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Oh!
I feel like Uri Geller.
I didn't expect that.
Why is it so soft?
Because there's still water in there. What we've put in earlier.
Can I stay here and play for a little while? Afraid not.
We've got to make pencils! Good?
So what's the next step? You grab one of those.
Put the leads inside and put it into the dryer.
We've made enough leads for 200,000 HBs,
but nobody wants a bendy pencil.
So we're carefully loading our soft strands into perforated drying tins.
Good.
OK.
About 300 leads go into each one, leaving plenty of room
for air to circulate.
So this dryer here, that is just to get rid of the water content?
That's just to get rid of the water.
How long? About two and a half hours.
Zweieinhalb stunden!
They're dried gently at around 100 degrees Celsius.
The water needs to come out, because next they're going
into a blast furnace.
And if there's moisture in the pencil leads, they could explode.
The temperature in here is over 1,000 degrees C, that's
close to the melting point of gold.
Now you're cooking! Cooking on gas!
Cooking with gas.
They're baked for three hours, which strengthens the clay inside.
Then they're cooled, and I'm expecting that after
all that mixing, drying and baking,
our leads must be ready to go into pencils.
But apparently not.
Take one of these, for instance.
Yeah, that's perfect.
That's the pencil lead from the kiln that we've just fired and we now
have tiny pockets of air in this piece of pencil lead.
That intense heat has a side effect,
creating microscopic holes in the pencil leads,
giving them a rough texture.
And if you were to write with this specific piece,
it would scratch destroy the paper, not be a lot of fun.
Fortunately, they've got a solution to this problem.
We have liquid hot wax to go into the pencil lead,
and we fill those tiny pockets of air with wax.
What? Wax.
All right.
It does sound a little bit odd.
So, ready when you are, feel free to drop the leads into the wax.
OK. Thank you very much.
I feel honoured.
Extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.
The wax fills the tiny air holes, helping the leads to write smoothly.
I would never have imagined a bath full of hot wax.
In a pencil factory.
Anywhere, to be honest.
It looks like an enormous chip pan.
Pretty much, we're just missing the cod.
You have fish and chips over here?
I'm afraid not as good as your English fish and chips are.
Now the lead is deep-fried,
or rather hot waxed, to thoroughly fill every jagged edge.
Every element going into these delicate sticks is vital,
but there's only one real star.
You can't make a pencil without graphite.
But as Cherry is discovering, this mineral has made its mark
in more ways than one.
I've come to the University of Manchester, where Dr Sarah Haigh
is studying the magic material inside every pencil.
Wow, what is this place?
Welcome to one of our scanning electron microscopy labs.
We're using Sarah's electron microscope to take an extremely
close look at a pencil lead to understand how it works.
That is absolutely mind-blowing.
It looks nothing like I thought it would look, so to see it like that,
it kind of looks like a mountain range.
Shall we zoom in so we can see the graphite? Definitely.
Look at that, it's absolutely incredible.
It looks like shards of glass.
So at this resolution we can see the individual pieces of graphite.
So these individual shards are what break off and slide
onto the paper creating the pencil mark?
Yes.
Next, we analyse how this graphite sticks to paper.
So what we're looking at on the screen now is a pencil trace
across a piece of paper.
The roughness of the paper has almost captured some of the graphite.
Yeah, so the pieces of graphite would be transferred onto the paper.
We zoom in now, we can see the individual pieces
of graphite. Oh, my goodness me.
That's absolutely amazing.
But making marks on paper is only one of graphite's special powers.
So we're going to make the electricity
pass between these two graphite rods.
So those are two tiny sticks of graphite.
Yes, there's what you get inside a pencil.
And now you're passing electricity through them. That's right.
And then we bring them close together.
Wow.
Oh, my goodness.
That's so bright.
So the current that we're seeing is like lightning, the graphite
that we use here, because it's a fantastic electrical
conductivity, is used in all kinds of applications like batteries.
If you have a smartphone, a laptop or a hybrid car its lithium ion
battery probably relies on graphite.
That's absolutely amazing.
That's just the same graphite is you'd find inside a pencil.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's not all.
This is just an ordinary pencil and we've sharpened it at both ends.
You can see that it's heating up, because the pencil wood has a much
lower temperature that it will survive than the graphite.
That was amazing.
The wood completely gone, incinerated.
And yet the graphite is intact.
The graphite can withstand a huge amount of heat.
Graphite is heat resistant to over 3,000 degrees Celsius,
which is why it's used to contain the molten metal in steel mills.
So it's really impressive stuff.
Yes, graphite conducts electricity fantastically well.
It's a really good conductor of heat. And it's great for pencils.
Absolutely.
It's amazing stuff.
Impressive though this is, the future uses of graphite
could be even more exciting.
Only recently, it's been discovered that if you take one layer of
carbon atoms away from graphite,
what you have is a different material, it's called graphene.
So you've discovered a new material. Yes.
And the new material has even more exciting properties.
Because graphene is just one carbon atom thick,
it's nearly invisible.
So where is the graphene on this tennis racket?
The graphene is combined together with a plastic.
And that combined graphene plus plastic is really strong,
but also really stiff.
And that means that the tennis racket responds really well
when the player hits the ball.
And it's not just for tennis racket frames.
What's this? Don't tell me it can be used in phones?
So, at the moment, the screen of your phone is quite brittle.
I don't know if you've dropped your phone.
No! I've got two children. It is never not smashed.
So, graphene we know is almost completely invisible
but also fantastically conductive.
So that's got graphene in it?
Yes, that's got a layer of graphene on it.
And we could use that to replace the brittle material
that is in your phone at the moment.
But it would still have the touch-screen capacity
and it would do everything that my phone currently does?
Better than that, you could even have the potential
to be able to fold your phone up and put it in your pocket.
Mind blown.
You could fold your phone.
So from something as humble as a pencil, you've developed
something that is almost science fiction.
Yeah, we really have a next generation material.
I had no idea that the stuff inside my pencil was so clever.
It's astonishing that such an analogue device holds the power to transform
so much digital technology.
Just amazing.
At the pencil factory, the lead spindles that will go
into our classic HBs have had a nice bath to rinse off the wax.
Ten hours and 23 minutes in, they're wrapped in paper and sent
across the river to the larger woodwork factory.
The raw pencil room is their first stop, where I'm meeting engineer Ziggy.
Ziggy? Gregg. Hello.
Nice to meet you. Good to meet you.
I've got my lead. This, I take it, is the wood?
What wood do you use? Well, you can use different kinds of wood.
This, for example, is Linden wood.
More important are the properties of the wood.
They have to be very finely structured.
So when you sharpen the pencil, sort of a flake should come off
instead of pieces breaking out.
And it should be stable in form, so when the pencil is lying in the sun
it should not bend like a banana.
Ziggy's wood comes from sustainable straight grain trees
like Linden and Cedar.
The blocks arrive pre-cut in eight by 18 centimetre slats.
The trees grow over the road and they were cut into slats
of the length of a pencil and half the thickness of a pencil.
I understand the wood for the pencil.
I've just got no idea how THAT becomes a pencil.
Well, I can show you in the next room. Please.
Right, now what happens to our pieces of wood?
Now the slats go into the machine, the machines smoothes the surface
and inserts small grooves.
So that is just cutting grooves in the wood? That's right.
But that's very important, because that's where we fill in
the leads afterwards.
The slats rush along nose to tail through sanding,
then, under rotating blades which carve out channels one millimetre deep.
Now here you can see the grooves.
So, one, two, three - nine grooves in here.
Does that mean nine pencils? Exactly. That's what you get.
Now here you can see the slats coming out,
with the grooves inserted.
And here, next very important step,
a thin line of glue is filled into the groove.
A strong but elastic glue is applied to the entire length of each slat,
which will hold the leads firmly in place.
Now here the slats are split up in two parts.
Yeah, that's like a paddle. Right, right.
It's taking every second slat and knocking it over to the outside lane.
Exactly. I'm beginning to understand there is a bottom and a top to this.
It's basically... The same. ..split in half? Right, right.
It's made of two halves, but, eh, it's done so precisely,
when you sharpen a pencil at the end,
you wouldn't see that it consists of two parts.
Ziggy, is it not possible to get blocks of wood,
drill a hole in the middle and just put lead in there?
That would mean it would be no good, because you can't drill a hole
so straight that the lead would fit in. It would be sort of wavy.
The top and bottom of our wooden glue sandwiches are sent round
for their special graphite and clay filling.
That's my lead. Right. That's my lead that's been in the wax!
Right, OK, so these leads are coming down here...
Right. ..onto this big wheel. OK.
The wheel picks up the lead sticks and as the slats travel
along the conveyor, it drops them neatly into the gluey grooves.
Well, there you have it - your nine grooves, right?
And your nine bits of lead, perfectly glued in! Right.
All right?
Now the top slices, with their empty grooves,
are moved into position so they line up precisely with the bottoms
and are glued together.
And here, the top slat comes over...
..to form sort of a sandwich. Right?
The problem is, there's like a clear separation here.
There's a clear gap between these two bits of wood.
We get rid of the separation in the next part of the machine.
100 multi-pencil sandwiches are stacked up in the drying chamber
at around 60 degrees C.
A vice squeezes them together,
then they're slowly rotated so the glue dries evenly.
Well, they are in here for about one hour.
How many pencils have we got in there?
Eh, about 40,000 pencils, approximately 40,000 pencils.
40,000 pencils.
Soon, thousands of people of all ages, and from all walks of life,
could be using these pencils for drawing and writing
in their own unique style.
In fact, many believe the way we write can reveal a great deal about us.
But can you really tell anything about a person from their handwriting?
Cherry is sorting fact from fiction.
Supposedly, big letters mean you've got a big personality.
And loopy letters indicate high aspirations.
But does any of it stack up, scientifically?
Chris French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths University,
is going to point me in the right direction.
So, can you really tell what someone is like
from just looking at their handwriting?
Well, the idea that you can is referred to as graphology,
the notion that our brains work in particular ways,
they determine our personality and other characteristics
and maybe that would show through in our writing.
To see if it stacks up in the real world,
we're taking to the streets of Lewisham armed with three different handwriting samples.
Do you actually know what these three people are like?
As it happens I do, because we got them to take a personality test
before they gave us the handwriting.
And so we've got good measures of them on those personality traits.
But can people correctly identify these traits from the handwriting?
So, first person - man or woman?
Woman. It's quite neat, but it's not... it doesn't look overly neat.
The letters are well formed, so, in a way, I think she's probably quite meticulous.
The messier the writing, the more intelligent.
Our street judges give each sample's author a score out of 100
for key personality traits, like open-mindedness.
Percentage? Probably about 80%. 80. 80%.
Extroversion.
I'd say a 60% again. OK. It depends on their moods. Yeah!
And neuroticism.
10%, maybe. 10%? Right.
Now, for handwriting B.
Man or woman? I think that may be a man. OK.
And do you think he's open to new experiences? Maybe so.
Yes, because this is a very nice little twist on the Q.
I would say about 70. OK.
The writing looks open and jolly.
Not very neat handwriting, but at the same time it's not overly scruffy.
All right. Yeah, lots of spaces in between the letters. Yeah.
What about our final sample?
All right - person C, man or woman? I would go for a man.
It's just, it's quite detailed, the writing,
but it doesn't look ladylike, if that makes sense?
I would say that he could be neurotic, so I'll put him at 70%.
The letters lean in on each other. Hm-mm.
And that suggests he has a short fuse.
The picture that I'm painting of him with this handwriting, is yes,
he'd be agreeable, but he'd be probably quite strong-minded?
I'm going to go 90% with this one.
Yeah. He sounds a bit like he might murder someone,
put them in the basement and then go to work!
We take the street survey assessments back to Chris' office
to cross-reference against the accurate psychological tests.
OK. Let's just take sample A.
This is the personality profile of that person.
This is what that person is really like, because the idea is,
that if graphology works, that, that ought to show through,
that ought to come through with shining colours.
So those are the real results.
These numbers here are what people in the street were trying to guess?
That's right. Let's see whether our members of the public picked up on that.
Chris is marking up our street judges' scores for sample A.
Oh, this is so interesting.
The one that's definitely the furthest away is neuroticism, 98%.
Yep. This is way off. And that's really way off!
Basically, I think we can see from that, that certainly
for this handwriting sample, people could not deduce
this person's correct personality.
So that didn't quite work. What about the other two?
Did our testers get any closer to the accurate scores here?
I don't want to sound sceptical, but it's all over the place.
There's really no pattern, no system.
So these were just random people on the street.
What about a professional graphologist?
If you take a group of professional graphologists and get them
to do a similar exercise, they perform just as badly as the general public.
I mean, the British Psychological Society summed it up by saying
that there's exactly the same level of validity for this technique
as there is for astrology - that is zero.
Can you tell anything about the handwriting, anything at all?
About 70% people guessing the gender is correct.
Let's just take sample A, for example.
See, I think it's a woman. OK.
In actual fact you do know who this person is.
Do I know them? Oh, my God, it's Gregg!
So it's really hard to tell anything about someone.
Yeah. So do not judge someone on the basis of their handwriting? No.
I'm making the most of my personality traits to try
and produce the perfect HB pencil.
In the raw pencil room, my wooden sandwiches have been drying
in a rotating vice for an hour.
Once released from the clamp the sandwiches waltz away
on conveyor belts.
Each one is trimmed to exactly 175 millimetres.
The standard length of a pencil is exactly seven inches.
Why? Well, that's convenient.
It's long enough to be able to sharpen a couple of times,
but it's not so long that it bends your hand back when you are writing.
Seven inches, but it'll get shorter as it gets older?
Right. That is smooth...
..like a greengrocer's head. Right, right.
The trimmed slats head into to the shaping machine,
and ten seconds later, individual pencils emerge, nine at a time.
Hey-hey!
Ziggy, we've got pencils! Right!
We have got pencils.
May I?
They are perfect hexagonals. Right.
Last time I saw them, they were an oblong block.
Right. How have they become that shape?
I can show you.
Inside the machine we have rotating reels, knives,
that rotate at a very high speed
and you can see the knives, it's the cross section of a pencil.
I can clearly see...
..the groove, the hexagonal shape.
Why hexagonal shape?
They avoid the disadvantage of round pencils to roll off the table
and fall down.
Round ones roll off the table. Right. Is that honestly why?
There are so many things I didn't know
about the ridiculously simple pencil, but it's genius.
It is.
The helpfully hexagonal pencils are carried into the painting room,
where they're stacked onto conveyors.
I like that.
I think that's a really good sight.
That, to me, because of the shape, looks like honeycomb.
These raw pencils are about to receive their coats of honour,
a dark green shade of paint chosen back in 1905,
when this pencil was designed.
Do you know why it's green?
I mean, it's a classic, but why is it green?
Well, that's an old story.
Alexander Faber-Castell, he was originally a military man.
He remembered that the colour of the uniforms of his regiment
was what he called a military green.
And he thought it might be a good idea to apply it to his pencils.
If you paint them, where do you hold it?
It must be on a clamp somewhere.
Oh, it doesn't have to.
Let's go around the corner, I show you.
You can see here the colours inside these boxes,
and the pencils are pushed through and pick up colour.
You are just pushing those pencil through a tin of paint.
But that's not green!
That's the primer.
You're putting a primer on, exactly as we would paint a door at home?
Right, exactly. Exactly the same.
Two layers of primer go on.
And then, one by one, our pencils receive
their traditional military topcoat.
That's a lovely rich green colour, isn't it? It is.
How many coats does it get?
Four coats of green.
Four?! Four. It's altogether six layers of colour.
My little green soldiers march into a heated tunnel,
which helps their coats dry.
Finally, a shiny lacquer is added
that will act as armour against any chips or scratches.
The ends of the pencils are sanded to remove excess paint.
Then there's some ceremonial polishing to be done.
What are you doing, Ziggy? Are you decorating your pencil?
No. We are branding, or embossing the pencils,
so stamped, you know. Whatever you want to have on your pencil,
it's written on the stamp,
and it pushes on this foil, warms it up a little bit,
and leaves the mark on the pencil.
Here, we print the barcode on the pencil.
The heat sticks the white plastic barcode along one edge.
The next two machines are loaded
with plastic, backed with gold coloured aluminium.
The pencils are swivelled 120 degrees to print the name in gold.
Then they're turned again for "Made in Germany".
We print it on one end,
and you start sharpening the pencil on the other end.
Is that why all the information is down the blunt end?
Of course, of course.
The pencils have been decorated,
and Ziggy can't wait to tell me about the crowning glory
that awaits our classic HBs.
But Cherry is waxing lyrical about another writing implement.
Making a colourful mark
is one of the first things children learn to do.
My weapon of choice for colouring when I was a toddler,
and now actually, if I'm honest, was one of these.
A wax crayon.
As a parent, these vibrant colours brighten up my world.
But, how are they made?
I'm in Southampton, visiting the UK's best selling children's crayon
manufacturer, Stadium Crayons.
Last year, this small factory turned out
25 million little sticks of joy.
General manager Dave Ayling is here to explain the magic.
Are you going to show me how it's done? I'm not going to show you,
I'm going to let you make them yourself.
Ah, that's how it goes? Oh, yes.
The life of the wax crayon begins as you might expect, with wax.
This is paraffin wax, which is derived from oil,
and it also can be used in candles.
So paraffin pellets. Is that it?
The wax is only about 50% of the crayon.
We have this stearic acid,
a fatty acid that is derived from plants,
similar to vegetable oil.
This actually softens the wax enough to help it to draw on paper better.
The first step is to blend these two ingredients together
in a huge 1,200 litre heater.
It's maintained at a constant temperature of 120 degrees,
which ensures that, once the mixed is melted, it stays melted.
There's just one more ingredient to go in at this stage,
and that is called PEG. What is PEG?
PEG is actually a polymer, which has a low melting point,
and it helps a colour take to the wax.
PEG, or Polyethylene glycol, also makes the crayons water soluble.
A big help when it comes to washing them off the walls at home!
Into our big crayon-y mix.
And there we have it.
With the big melt in progress,
I head to the paint shed, where Jim Belbin can create any colour
from just a small number of powdered dyes.
So, what colour crayon are we making today? We're making red today.
I imagine, if you're making a red crayon, on your need red dye.
We have to mix two shades of red
in order to get the red that we make here.
We wear masks to keep the nontoxic, but superfine pigments,
out of our lungs, and start scooping 600g of bright scarlet,
and 200g of a darker base red.
It'll give us that perfect tone for colouring in tomatoes.
All I need now is that hot wax.
Oh, my goodness. It looks like water!
It's hot wax and it'll go into the mould.
I'll take the light one. Lucky I work out.
They've certainly got me pulling my weight.
First, I pour the liquid wax into a kind of heavy cauldron.
Just like this? Yeah. It holds 40 litres.
And then I pour in our red powder blend.
It's so beautiful.
Enough for 10,000 crayons.
And then I give it a good whisk.
This tank actually keeps the wax at about 110 degrees centigrade.
It's really molten the whole way through.
Now, there's one final ingredient.
What is this stuff.
Well, it's essentially chalk powder.
So first you add something to soften it,
and then you add something to make it harder?
If we don't add this, when they set they can become quite brittle.
Here we go. Whoa!
Do I get the job? Er...
I'm ready to turn my concoction into crayons,
using this metal mould, which has 960 holes.
How do you get this boiling hot wax into those moulds?
Well, it's really technical.
We use a jug.
OK. Is that a good jug.
Ahh, it's very splatty!
Am I doing it right? Yeah.
They all need to be filled up, so we can now start
to move the wax around as it cools down.
Cold water circulating around the back of the mould
helps bring the heat down from over 100 degrees
to around room temperature.
It's a tricky balance, making sure all the crayons are solid,
with no air holes, before the wax hardens.
We can normally do about 60 batches here,
so we make about 60,000 crayons a day on this one machine.
Now, the moment I've been waiting for.
Have I filled the moulds correctly?
Oh, that is ridiculously satisfying.
960 crayons are about to be born.
They are, as soon as you pull this lever here.
If only child birth was this easy!
Oh!
You're kidding me!
Almost perfect.
There's just one rogue crayon.
Look what I found.
A wafer thin crayon. Ah!
That is an Inside The Factory crayon.
Not bad for a first attempt.
The remaining 959 are labelled, ready for boxing.
There's just one thing now that my red crayon needs,
and that is a yellow, a blue,
and a green,
ready to entertain my child,
and perhaps yours.
In the German pencil factory, it's been nearly 13 hours,
and my HBs are looking the business.
They've been painted and embossed,
but there's still a final flourish to come.
And that happens in Rounding.
What's this?
OK, this is our rounding machine.
It smoothes off the hexagonal edges from the very top of the pencil.
So that's the result of this rounding process.
You can see, it's clean, and it's lightly rounded.
Every single step of the way, it's another tiny little detail.
Exactly.
Now we need to paint the rounded end,
which is harder than it sounds.
The pencils are gathered up and pushed into trays
that hold 138 individual shafts.
Now, when the plate is filled,
the plate moves on here
to the first position of dipping.
The tray of pencils is spun upside down,
and dipped into metallic paint.
How do you know how far to dip the pencils in?
We measure the depth of the paint in the bowl,
as you can see here, with this red dot,
which is a laser to measure the depth.
And then we tell the machine that it should come up
a millimetre more than before.
As the pencils dip and the level of the paint goes down,
so the machine pushes the tray of paint? Exactly.
You guys are clever!
OK. Thank you. Very clever!
That's a nice process.
Then there's a certain elegance about that, isn't there?
It's a nice, slow process.
You could set that to music.
A new regiment of pencils joins the dance every 30 seconds.
Then 690 of them take a synchronised dip.
Once their crowning glory has been applied,
the switching machine twirls them back the right way around...
..before they trip the light fantastic to drying.
We have a box of almost finished pencils.
What you mean almost finished? Is not sharpened yet.
Right. How do you sharpen the pencil?
Well, that's a process that takes place here in this box.
Inside we have a cylinder,
which has a lot of sort of razor blades.
It turns around, like this.
A belt mechanism pulls each pencil
over a series of rotating razor blades,
angled to create the perfect point at the tip.
Well, that is an incredible sight.
Those pencils are almost falling over those plates,
and those plates are spinning really quickly.
Finally, our HB pencils are born.
How many pencils will go through here a day?
Per day it's about 600,000 pencils.
That is millions of games of bingo!
Right.
In theory, each of these pencils is capable
of drawing a line about 35 miles long,
or writing around 45,000 words,
if they pass quality control.
For 400 years, the pencil has been the simplest tool
at our disposal for writing a note, a list or a letter.
Ruth is checking out the past, present and future of handwriting.
Almost every word written these days
is created without putting pencil to paper.
They're typed on a keyboard, or a touch screen.
In 2016, Finland stopped teaching joined up handwriting in schools,
and many parts of America have done the same.
Will handwriting become as unfamiliar to our grandchildren
as steamships and telegrams are to us?
I'm meeting Professor James Daybell...
James, hello! Nice to meet you.
Ruth, lovely to meet you too.
..an expert in the history of the written word.
Should I take all the pens and pencils in the house
and just ditch them?
People have been asking that exact same question for centuries!
Over 500 years ago, people were concerned with the advent of print,
that that was going to replace handwriting.
Exactly!
And it's all down to this particular text that we have here.
This is a copy of a page from the Gutenberg Bible.
Right. It's one of the first printed texts.
It's funny actually because I would have thought
that was a handwritten manuscript.
It doesn't look printed. It's meant to replicate handwriting.
That's precisely the point in it.
Before the printing press, books had to be written out word for word,
mostly by specially trained monks.
Gutenberg's invention meant unlimited copies could be made
at speed by machine.
No monks required.
The idea was that print would make their jobs redundant.
People were concerned that the art of handwriting would be dead.
But, surprisingly, printing had the opposite effect.
As books exploded in popularity,
more people sought an education, and overall literacy grew.
In 1550, only 16% of British adults could read and write.
By 1870, it was 76%.
So, by the end of the 19th century, handwriting is everywhere.
It's absolutely everywhere.
But if we go over here, I'll show you something
that knocked it off its perch one more time.
So, here we are.
Oh, of course!
The typewriter. The typewriter.
The first commercially successful typewriter was invented in 1868.
Meaning anyone could type from the comfort
of their home or office.
As it took off, the funeral bell for handwriting tolled again.
I've got an example here from the Daily Mail.
7th March, 1936.
"The truth is that penmanship is a dying art.
"The typewriter, the Dictaphone and similar modern contrivances,
"have sealed its fate."
And yet, you know, we all know perfectly well
that handwriting did not stop.
So why did people carry on handwriting?
Well, I think we should have a competition.
James is going to retype this doom-laden article,
while I write it out longhand.
Right.
Okey doke. On your marks... Go!
Oh! My keys have stuck.
That's supposed to be a capital P.
I seem to have missed out an E.
So, where are you at James?
I'm still on the first paragraph.
How have you done? I've done to Browning. There we go.
Oh, show off! And yours looks immaculate!
So... This is riddled with errors.
See, and this is why handwriting continues.
Typing was a professional skill. Right.
Whereas everybody was taught to write.
Everybody was taught to write at school.
It would take many decades for typewriters
to evolve into handwriting's most serious threat yet,
the personal computer.
For the first time, writing without putting pen to paper
was simple, fast, and easily correctable.
If when we come back to the present,
it's like you can do everything that you did on a PC,
but now you can do it anywhere.
So, is this the death of handwriting? No.
There's a lot of hysteria about it.
Handwriting is still being used in different ways.
And it also it also overlaps with digital technologies.
You have there a stylus... I do indeed. ..for that tablet.
I do indeed.
And yes, you can write on it.
So you can annotate a digital text
in the same way that in, say the 17th century,
people might have annotated a 17th century book.
Handwriting is never going to go away.
It's never going to die.
Just different.
Our pencils are finished, and given a visual check to ensure
that the paint is perfect and that the leads are sharp.
But Lukas has invited me to do an additional test
at the castle which houses the company museum.
What a place.
What a place. How have you been? A fantastic place.
I've got some finished pencils.
I've heard there's one final quality test.
One final quality test and it'll happen right here in the castle.
You see that window up there? Yeah, what?
We're going to drop the pencils out of the window, into the castle yard.
Why would you want to do that?
It's a quality test, to test if the pencil, the lead,
is rigid enough to withstand a drop from up there all the way down here.
But have they got a lift? We're going to walk up there.
Come on. Let's go.
The factory castle was built in 1906,
when production had just started on the Series 9000 pencil
we're about to chuck out of the 25 metre high window.
High, isn't it? You're going to throw the pencils out of the window!
You're going to do it.
Like that. Just like that.
They invented this test to demonstrate the strength
of the pencil lead.
So...
..what do you think?
Well, they look all right. They are the... Not bad.
You haven't swapped them, have you? I have not.
Right, OK. They look OK.
How are you going to tell whether the lead's OK?
Because...
..we've got this guy.
So, got the knife, got the pencil...
And see? The lead is still intact.
Yeah. OK.
Very impressive. Proof enough?
Very, very impressive.
I've got one more test.
It's a British test of quality,
to make sure your pencil is OK. What is it?
Yep, that works. That's awesome!
Test passed, 12 pencils are popped in a packet,
and 24 packets squeezed into a box, ready for distribution.
They're dealing with the company's busiest period,
supplying pencils for the start of the school year.
Hello! Florian?
Ah, hello.
Truck being loaded? Yes.
Florian Swartz uses hand operated electric forklifts
to pack the company lorry with wrapped pallets of pencils.
So on that truck, is that a day's worth of pencil production? Yeah.
Half a million pencils are on the truck.
Do you know how many pencils you produce in a year?
200 million.
If you lay all the pencils we produce here,
you go once around the equator.
After 14 hours and 46 minutes of production time,
my HB pencils are loaded up and sent on their way.
That's it!
There's a lot of sketches and letters on that truck, isn't there?
Yeah. Thank you, Florian. Thanks. Thank you very much.
From Nuremberg, these pencils are exported to Britain
and 80 other countries across six continents.
I've enjoyed my time in Germany.
It's most certainly one of the better looking factories
I've been in - lots of natural light and fresh air,
and I've learned three things about our HB pencil.
One, it's made from two separate halves,
two, it's hexagonal so that it doesn't roll off the table,
and three, there's no lead in it.
There never was! In fact, there was never any lead in any pencil ever!
Well, who knew?!
Next time...
It's nice and squeezy...
..as I head to Gateshead to make spreadable cheese.
That's a massive fondue, isn't it? It is.
Big, cheesy smell.
And Cherry causes a stink.
Holy Moley!
If I smell that in my trainers, they are going in the bin!
And yet with this, I can't wait to eat it.
It's so odd.