On April 2, 1827, the first industrial production of pencils begins. It begins in Salem, Massachusetts on the initiative of an inventor and entrepreneur who Joseph Dixon was not yet 30 at the time.
Dixon, however, is not considered the true inventor of the pencil, which in fact dates back to many years before: the credit goes to French scientist Nicholas-Jacques Conte, who was in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. It was he who guessed that the perfect material for a pencil was some kind of charcoal it had been discovered in some mines in Germany and that from 1789 it was decided to call graphite in homage to the Greek verb grafein, which means to write.
In short, the first pencil as we know it is from 1795. On April 2, 1827, however, came first pencil produced in the United States (in Europe it happened in 1832 in England). The company already existed: it was born in 1795 from the merger of the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company of New Jersey with the Bryn Mawr Corporation of Pennsylvania. In short, the flagship product became a legendary pencil, the Dixon Ticonderoganamed after a graphite deposit discovered in New York State.
Over the past twenty years, the company has experienced a rapid decline that has tried to slow down moving production outside the United States, not without great controversy. Since 2005 it has been bought by Fila, the Italian Lapis and similar factory, based in Milan.