Pencils and Vinyl Records

Tomorrow, April 16, 2016 is Record Store Day, an annual event dedicated to supporting your local record store!  Hundreds of people of various ages and from different walks of life gather to show their support and buy physical copies of albums and limited run pressings of their favorite artists.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why is there a blog post about Record Store Day on Pencils.com? Well, the inventor of the phonograph, the precursor to the vinyl record, was quite the notable pencil user. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor and holder of over a thousand patents, wrote an estimated 5 million pages throughout his career.  It would be safe to say most, if not all, his notes were written in pencil. 

And it wasn’t just any pencil.  

Edison was very particular about his needs for a pencil, so he ordered customized pencils through the Eagle Pencil Company. Thomas Edison’s unique personalized pencil was a short, 3 inch pencil, which were fatter than the ordinary pencil, and filled with a softer graphite core. Some say that the short pencil length was so that they would comfortably fit into his jacket pocket.  

To learn more about records and why we love them, check out the blog post on Blackwing602.