I always assumed pencil lead was so called because it did in fact used to be made of elemental lead, which was replaced by graphite in more recent times, possibly because of leadās toxicity. Turns out that assumption was dead wrong. Lead has been used for writing at various points in history, yes, but never as part of any implement we would recognize as a pencil. Iām fact, prior to the early 1500s, the closest things to a pencil that existed were the tools used for metalpoint drawing, which consisted of a wire of some metal, often jewelerās silver but never, as far as I know, lead, inserted into a wooden rod. What changed in the early 1500s you ask? Well, that was when a large deposit of strikingly pure graphite was discovered in northern England. People quickly began cutting sticks of the stuff and using it to write, but because of its softness it had to be encased to handle. Initially rope and sheepskin were used, but eventually the transition was made to wood and the modern pencil was born.
In other words, pencil lead has always been made of graphite. The thing is, for centuries people assumed that the stuff in this deposit was just some weird kind of lead ore (this is why graphite was archaically referred to as plumbago), a belief which becomes more understandable when you realize that to this day, this is the only large deposit of pure, solid graphite ever discovered. As there was no means of artificially producing solid graphite back then they had no way of knowing of its existence as a unique substance, and lead was the material whose properties most closely resembled those of the stuff in the new deposit. Or to cast it in a completely different light, today we would say itās wrong to call graphite lead because lead is the 86th element whereas graphite is a form of carbon, but if, prior to this chemical definition, lead was just a colloquial term for any soft, dark gray metallic substance, were they even wrong? Would they have understood if we tried to correct them? Maybe itās more accurate to just say that the definition of the word has changed.
(As a fun aside, one of the other early uses for graphite was as a lining for cannonball molds, making for rounder and thus more effective cannonballs, and so the deposit was quickly put under the strict control of the crown. This meant that for years graphite for pencils actually had to be smuggled out of the mine.)
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