Hi Gunnar,
You wrote,
" The argument is that something as simple as a pencil is so complex that one person can't even fully understand how to do everything involved in making a pencil, let alone actually make one."
My sister lives in a beautiful old schoolhouse in the UK Lake district. It is close to Lakeland pencil factory and their museum (the Lake District mountains are meta-morphic so besides slate there is lots of mineable high quality solid graphite in Borrowdale. Apparently the only pure supply in the world?) and juniper trees , hence pencils - see http://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/171188/factsheet_geology.pdf ).
Having been to the museum (and as a child dismantled pencils with boiling water or leaving them in the rain) it doesn't look too difficult, even if you need to make the tools to cut the timber for the pencils. At the end of the day, the whole thing seems to hinge on whether a community can design a process to make steel.
What amazed me historically was how pencils were a critical industrial and military technology at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Apparently it was of serious concern for France who couldn't access pencils from the UK mines or from Germany.
The real interesting question though is the material of the blue lead pencils that one used to lick to get them to write - seems to be absent from Google. If you know - please tell.
Warm regards,
Terry
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