Petroski, H. (1992). The Pencil: A history of design and circumstance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
"Yet the pencil's graphite is also the ephemeral medium of thinkers, planners, drafters, architects, and engineers, the medium to be erased, revised, smudged, obliterated, lost - or inked over." (p.6)
"Used like the Socratic method, the pencil can draw out of us realizations about htings of which we might never have thought." (p.11)
"The persistence of the names of things deriving from the materials of which they were first made suggests the intimate relationship that can exist between ingenious objects and their materials." (p.18)
"There ten to be three broad areas into which technological developments fall: new concepts, new magnitudes, new materials." (p.21) After novelty sets in or substitute materials cause disaster.
"Many times the mere articulation of a shortcoming in an artifact implies the means of correcting the shor...
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