Michael Witmer, age 8, of Lancaster, Pa., for his question:

Are pencils really made from lead?

The pencil is a very old invention, though it has been improved through the ages. One of the earliest pencils was just a lump of lead. It was used to make marks in the same way that we use a crayon. These lead pencils were used long ago when Julius Caesar set forth to conquer the world. They were used in ancient Egypt, perhaps while the great pyramids were being built.

Pencils made of lead went out of style about 1500 years a; ;o, They ware never very good pencils, for the metal lead is hard and heavy. You have to press down to make a mark and even then the mark is very pale. People were very glad to give up their old crayon type lead pencils when someone had a better idea.

The improved pencils used a material called graphite instead of lead. Graphite is a soft, soapy mineral. It is much easier to write with than lead and it makes a much darker mark. When this new pencil was invented, nobody remembered the name of the inventor. What’s more, no one bothered to change the name of the pencil. We still call it a lead pencil because lead was used to make pencils long ago.

The story of the mineral graphite is far, far older than the story of the pencil. It began perhaps 300 million years ago. This was before the human family came to live in the world. It was even before the Age of the Dinosaurs. There were no birds and no flowers, for they too came along much later.

The earth, however, had forests, though the trees would look very strange to us. There were giant ferns and strange horsetail plants as big as our oaks and elms. Many of these strange forests stood in swamplands with muddy water around their roots.

There were insects, some of them dragonflies four feet wide. There were also huge salamanders wallowing in the muddy swamps.

We call these forests the ancient coal forests. For after millions of years they turned into our beds of coal. The logs and trunks fell at last into the swamps and stayed there. In time the old forest was buried under layers of dust and all kinds of clay and mud. The buried woody material was crushed and pressed. It also changed step by stop from wood into shiny black coal. Through the ages, the ancient forest turned into brown coal, then into soft black coal, then into hard black coal. In time, the hard black coal turns into the mineral graphite  the soapy, dark substance inside our so called lead pencils.

It is not hard to see, just by looking at it, that graphite is related to the mineral coal. But it is hard to believe that graphite also is related to the clear, sparkling diamond. Nevertheless, this is true. Diamond and graphite are both made from pure carbon. They are different because the atoms of carbon in a diamond are arranged in a different pattern from the atoms of carbon in a piece of graphite.