Joseph Dixon

Joseph Dixon was born on January 18, 1799, in Marblehead, Massachusetts. In 1812, he created a pencil, which eventually became famous worldwide.

Childhood
Young Joseph Dixon liked to experiment with graphite products found on his father's sailing vessels. In 1812, he mixed this graphite with clay and water, and baked it in his mother's oven. Once pressed into cedar wood, the mixture became a pencil, the first Dixon pencil.

Adulthood
By 1827, Dixon had discovered many uses for graphite, including lead pencils, stove polish, lubricants, and crucibles. So, he began a business in Salem, Massachusetts. One of his inventions was a heat-resistant graphite crucible that became very popular during the Mexican-American War. It was so successful that in 1847, Dixon built a crucible factory in New Jersey. He secured patents on the crucibles in 1850. During the Civil War, soldiers wanted more practical things than quills to write home with. The pencil was then widely adopted, and rising demand promoted Dixon to invent a machine capable of producing 132 pencils each minute. Richard Dixon died on June 15, 1869, in Jersey City, New Jersey.