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My Family Tree
as told to LEONARD E. READ

I AM A LEAD PENCIL - the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to allboys and girls and
adults who can read and write.1

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is
interesting. And, next, I am a mystery - moreso than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of
lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere
incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of
the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too
long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of
wonder, not for want of wonders."2

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt
to prove. In fact, if you can understand me - no, that's too much to ask of anyone - if you
can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom
mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this
lesson better than can an automobile or an aeroplane or a mechanical dishwasher because -
well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This
sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and
one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye - there's some
wood, lacquer, graphite lead, a bit of metal,and an eraser.

Innumerable Antecedents

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is impossible for me to name and
explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon
you the richness and complexity of my background. My family tree begins with what in
fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon.
Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in
harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and
the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel
and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all
the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the
cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in
every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals
who make fiat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the
communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil length
slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for
the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a
pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the
making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, and light and power, the
belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my
ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific
Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty
carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

Once in the pencil factory - $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated
by thrifty and saving parents of mine - each slat is given eight grooves by a complex
machine,after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places
another slat atop - a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically
carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.

My "lead" itself - it contains no lead at all - is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon.
Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper
sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and
those who put them aboard ships and those who make ships. Even the lighthouse keepers
along the way assisted in my birth - and the harbour pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in
the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulphonated tallow - animal
fats chemically reacted with sulphuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the
mixture finally appears as endless extrusions - as from a sausage grinder - cut to size, dried,
andbaked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and
smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax
from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who
would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil 'are a part of
it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow
involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labelling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon blackmixed
with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal - the ferrule - is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper
and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature.
Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickela nd how is it
applied? The complete story of why the centre of my ferrule has no black nickel on it
would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to as "the plug", the part man uses to
erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing.
It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies with
sulphur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes.
Then too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from
Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its colour is cadmium sulphide.

No One Knows

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this
earth knows hoe to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even
knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating
the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that
this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in
all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than
a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only
difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type
of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be ispensed with, any more than can
the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field - paraffin being a by-product
of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the
digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the
one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of
the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less,
perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this
vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their
motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees
that he can thus exchangehis tiny know-how for the goods and service he wants or needs. I
may or may not be among these items.

No Master Mind

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or
forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a
person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to
which I earlier referred.

It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why do we agree with this? Isn't it
because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a
tree? We cannot,except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain
molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that
could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in
the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on.
But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary
miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies - millions of tiny
know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and
desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can makea tree, I
insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows
to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can be come aware of the miraculousness
which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if
one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into
creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand - that is, in the
absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding - then one will possess an
absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free men. Freedom is impossible
without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the
delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently
delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he
himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes
that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses
enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery anymore than any individual
possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of a faith in free men -
in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form
and cooperate to satisfy this necessity the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous
conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding".

Testimony Galore

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men can accomplish
when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is
testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple
when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a
grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why,
in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the
world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's
home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less
than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at
unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the
Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard - halfway around the world - for less money than
the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

Leave Men Free

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize
society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles
the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men
will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly
simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical
faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. . . .

Notes

1 My official narne is "Mongol 482." My many ingredients are assembled, fabricated, and
finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

2 G. K. Chesterton

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