HB Pencils

Hey Folks...

Writing after a really long time... Was little bit busy with other stuffs...
 

Neways..
Do you guys know what does this 'HB' means when we talk about Pencils...???

We use them daily.. but have you ever wondered what exactly it is..???

Let me tell you then...

Today pencils are numbered and/or lettered to tell us how hard the lead is. The higher the number, the harder the lead, and the lighter the markings. However, it wasn't always this way. 

The earliest pencils were made simply from filling a wood shaft with raw graphite. The hardness of the graphite would differ depending on the quality of the graphite, thus it was different depending on where the pencil was made.

The current style of making pencils was developed in 1794 by Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1805). Conté, a painter, chemist, physicist, balloonist, and inventor, put into practice a new method of making pencils so that they would be much more functional. 

The Conté Process, as it became known, mixes powdered graphite with finely ground clay. This mixture is then shaped into a long cylinder and then baked in an oven. The more clay that is added versus graphite the harder the pencil lead. In January 1795, Conté patented his method as patent number 32.

Conté's first pencils were numbered for varing degrees of hardness. As the Conté process made its way into the world, other pencil makers decided to use the same technique. Of course, like any product, each company came up with their own standards for how their product should be labeled. 

To further complicate things, English pencil decided to use letters instead of numbers. Soft leads were labeled 'B' for black, and harder leads with 'H' for hard. For varying grades they would just add more letters, thus very soft was 'BB', very hard was 'HH', and extra hard was 'HHH'.

Later they switched again to a combination of numbers and letters! Where you would see 2B, 9H, etc. Although more complicated, this system allowed for a much wider variety of grades to be made with no more than a two character description. This was the last major change in the English grading system, the same they use today. 

The full English scale is:

 
Many pencils across the world, and almost all in Europe, are graded on the European system using a continuum from “H” (for hardness) to “B” (for blackness), as well as “F” (for fine point). The standard writing pencil is graded HB. According to Petroski, this system might have been developed in the early 1900s by Brookman, an English pencil maker. It used “B” for black and “H” for hard; a pencil's grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as BB and BBB for successively softer leads, and HH and HHH for successively harder ones.