Personalized Pencils
English and German pencils were not on deck to the French during the Napoleonic wars. It took the efforts of an officer in Napoleon's armed force to addition this. In 1795 Nicholas Jacques Conté discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mixture into rods that were then fired in a kiln. By varying the ratio of graphite to clay, the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied. This method of manufacture which had been earlier discovered by the Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth of Koh-I-Noor in 1790 remains in use.
The various graphite pencil grades are achieved by altering the proportion of graphite to clay: the more clay the harder Personalized Pencils the pencil. Two pencils of the same grade but contradistinct manufacturers will not necessarily make a mark of identical tone nor have the same hardness.