Episode 7: I, Pencil - The Hidden Complexity of Simple Things | Dormant Knowledge Sleep Podcast

Host: Deb
Duration: ~75 minutes
Release Date: September 22, 2025
Episode Topics: Economic theory, supply chains, DIY experiments, human cooperation

Episode Summary

That yellow pencil sitting on your desk looks deceptively simple—just wood, graphite, metal, and rubber assembled into a tool so basic a child could use it. But in 1958, economist Leonard Read wrote an essay that would forever change how people think about everyday objects. "I, Pencil: My Family Tree" revealed a startling truth: no single person on Earth actually knows how to make a pencil from scratch.

In this episode of Dormant Knowledge, the educational sleep podcast for curious minds, Deb explores Read's influential essay about the miraculous complexity hidden in mundane objects. The journey begins with the pencil's deceptively simple appearance and unfolds into a fascinating exploration of supply chains, specialized knowledge, and human cooperation spanning continents and centuries.

But this isn't just theoretical economics. We follow the real-world adventures of two determined individuals who decided to test Read's thesis through hands-on experimentation. Andy George spent six months and $1,500 attempting to make a simple chicken sandwich completely from scratch—growing wheat, raising livestock, even traveling to the ocean to boil seawater for salt. Thomas Thwaites embarked on an even more ambitious quest: building a working toaster from raw materials, which led him to abandoned mines across Britain and a backyard aluminum smelting operation that concerned his neighbors.

Their discoveries reveal profound truths about the limits of individual knowledge, the beauty of spontaneous economic coordination, and the invisible networks of expertise that make modern life possible. What begins as a story about pencils becomes a meditation on interdependence, humility, and the remarkable fact that somehow, against all odds, our complex world mostly works.

What You'll Learn

• Discover how Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil" revolutionized thinking about economic coordination and hidden complexity
• Learn about the surprising global supply chain behind a simple pencil—from cedar forests in Oregon to graphite mines in China to aluminum smelters powered by distant hydroelectric dams
• Explore the fascinating history of materials like graphite (once more valuable than gold), rubber (revolutionized by accidental discovery), and aluminum (formerly more precious than gold)
• Follow Andy George's six-month, $1,500 quest to make a chicken sandwich from absolute scratch, including growing grain, raising livestock, and extracting salt from seawater
• Understand Thomas Thwaites's ambitious attempt to build a working toaster from raw materials, involving mining iron ore, processing aluminum, and creating plastic from potatoes
• Examine the concept of "spontaneous order" and how millions of people coordinate without central planning to create everyday objects
• Reflect on the implications of economic interdependence for questions of expertise, humility, and human cooperation across cultural and political boundaries
• Appreciate the accumulated knowledge of generations embedded in seemingly simple tools and how specialization makes modern life possible

Episode Transcript

[Soft ambient music fades in]
Deb: Welcome to Dormant Knowledge. I'm your host, Deb, and this is the podcast where you'll learn something fascinating while gently drifting off to sleep. Our goal is simple: to share interesting stories and ideas in a way that's engaging enough to capture your attention, but delivered at a pace that helps your mind relax and unwind. Whether you make it to the end or drift away somewhere in the middle, you'll hopefully absorb some knowledge along the way.
If you like what we are doing, we would love your help to spread the word! You can find us at dormantknowledge.com or follow us on social media @dormantknowledge on Instagram and Facebook, or @drmnt_knowledge—that's d-r-m-n-t-underscore-knowledge—on X. You can also support us on BuyMeACoffee.com at dormantknowledgepodcast.
Tonight, we're exploring one of the most deceptively simple objects you've probably used today: the humble pencil. But this isn't just about graphite and wood. This is about a fascinating economic essay that changed how people think about modern life, and the brave—some might say foolish—individuals who actually tried to prove its point by making everyday objects completely from scratch. So settle in, get comfortable, and let's begin our journey into the surprisingly complex world of making things... really making them.
[Music fades out]

[Sound of papers shuffling]
Deb: You know, I was looking at a pencil earlier today—just a regular yellow number 2 pencil sitting on my desk—and I started thinking about how utterly... well, boring it looks. [Yawns softly] Six inches of yellow wood, maybe with some text stamped on the side, a little metal band holding a pink eraser. If someone asked you to list the world's most mundane objects, a pencil would probably make the top ten, wouldn't it?
But in 1958, a man named Leonard Read—that's R-E-A-D, which is rather fitting for someone writing about pencils—wrote a short essay that would change how people think about that boring yellow stick forever. The essay was called "I, Pencil: My Family Tree," and it was written from the perspective of the pencil itself.
[Sound of chair creaking]
Now, Leonard Read wasn't just some random guy with too much time on his hands. He was an economist and the founder of something called the Foundation for Economic Education. And he had this... this insight about pencils that was really quite profound, when you think about it. The pencil in his essay basically says, "I bet you think you know me, but you have no idea how I came to be. In fact, not a single person on Earth actually knows how to make me."
[Pause]
And that sounds ridiculous at first, doesn't it? I mean, come on—it's a pencil. Wood, graphite, a little metal thing, an eraser. How complicated could it be? But Read's point was that while the pencil looks simple, the network of knowledge, materials, and processes that creates it is... well, it's staggeringly complex.
Think about it this way: someone had to grow and harvest the cedar wood. Someone else had to mine the graphite. The metal ferrule—that's the fancy name for that little crimped band that holds the eraser—someone had to extract and process that aluminum or brass. The eraser itself comes from rubber, which comes from rubber trees or petroleum... and on and on it goes.
[Sound of papers rustling]
But Read went deeper than just listing ingredients. His argument was that no single person on Earth possesses all the knowledge needed to make a pencil from absolute scratch. The logger doesn't know how to mine graphite. The graphite miner doesn't know how to vulcanize rubber. The rubber specialist doesn't know how to smelt aluminum. Each person knows their tiny piece of the puzzle, but the complete picture? That exists nowhere in any single human mind.
This was Read's way of illustrating something economists call "spontaneous order"—the idea that complex systems can emerge without any central planner or coordinator. Thousands, maybe millions of people cooperate to make pencils, but they're not doing it because someone told them to. They're doing it because... well, because it works. Because there's a market for wood and graphite and aluminum and rubber, and all these individual decisions somehow coordinate to produce something as simple and cheap as a pencil.
[Yawns]
The essay became quite famous, especially among people interested in free-market economics. And Read's choice of a pencil was brilliant, really. Not a computer or a car—something so simple that a child could draw with it, yet so complex in its creation that it demonstrates the beautiful interconnectedness of human knowledge and cooperation.
But here's where our story gets really interesting. Because decades later, some very determined—or perhaps very naive—individuals decided to actually test Read's thesis. They asked themselves: "Okay, but what if someone really tried to make a pencil from scratch? What if we took Read's thought experiment and turned it into a real experiment?"
[Sound of paper turning]
Spoiler alert: it didn't go quite as smoothly as you might expect...

Let's start with what seems like the simplest part: the wood. Just wood, right? You go outside, find a tree, cut it down, shape it into a hexagonal rod with a groove down the middle. How hard could that be?
[Soft chuckle]
Well, first off, pencil makers are pretty picky about their trees. They don't just use any old wood. The classic yellow pencil is made from incense cedar, which grows primarily in the forests of Northern California and Oregon. It's chosen because it's soft enough to sharpen easily but hard enough not to splinter, and it has this lovely, straight grain that makes it perfect for precision cutting.
So already, we're not talking about the oak tree in your backyard. We're talking about specific trees from specific climates, harvested by people who know which trees are the right age and quality. But let's say you somehow found yourself the perfect incense cedar. Now what?
[Sound of paper shuffling]
Well, now you need to cut it down. And unless you're planning to gnaw through it with your teeth—which I wouldn't recommend—you're going to need some tools. Let's say you decide to use an axe. A nice, simple tool. Just a sharp piece of metal attached to a wooden handle.
But wait... how do you make an axe?
[Pause]
For the metal part, you need iron ore. Iron ore comes from mines—often very deep mines that require sophisticated equipment to access safely. The ore has to be extracted, transported, processed in a blast furnace to remove impurities, turned into steel through carefully controlled heating and cooling processes... and that's just to get the raw material for your axe head.
Then you need to forge it. Forging requires a furnace hot enough to make the steel malleable, hammers to shape it, files to sharpen it, and a deep understanding of metallurgy to create an edge that will hold up to chopping wood.
Oh, and you need a handle for your axe. Which means you need... more wood. Different wood, usually—something strong and flexible like hickory or ash. Which means you need another tree, which means you need another axe to cut it down, which means...
[Yawns softly]
You see where this is going, don't you? It's turtles all the way down, as they say.
Alright, let's say you somehow solve the axe problem—maybe you find one lying around somewhere, though that feels a bit like cheating. Now you can cut down your cedar tree. But pencil wood isn't just rough lumber. Those little hexagonal shafts are precision-cut. The grooves that hold the graphite core are machined to exact specifications.
Modern pencil factories use incredibly sophisticated equipment for this—computer-controlled saws and routers that can cut wood to tolerances of fractions of a millimeter. But even if you went back to more traditional methods, you'd still need saws, planes, chisels, measuring tools... all of which require metal, which brings us back to mining and metallurgy.
[Sound of chair shifting]
And that's assuming you can get your cedar tree to the right place to work on it. Cedar trees are big and heavy. Moving them requires vehicles, roads, fuel... which opens up entirely new supply chains of engineering and chemistry.
You know, there's something almost poetic about this recursive problem. It's like those Russian nesting dolls, except each doll you open reveals not just a smaller doll, but an entire family of dolls, each with their own complex backstories and requirements.
The indigenous peoples of North America had sophisticated methods for felling trees using stone axes and controlled burns. But even those stone axes required knowledge of which stones split in the right way, how to knap them into sharp edges, how to bind them to wooden handles with plant fibers or animal sinew...
[Pause]
Every solution creates new problems. Every tool requires other tools to make it. It's wonderfully maddening, really. And this is just the wood—supposedly the simple part.
But let's move on to the graphite, because that's where things get really interesting...

Here's a fun fact that might surprise you: pencil "lead" isn't lead at all. It never has been. The name is just one of those historical accidents that stuck around.
The confusion goes back centuries to when graphite was first discovered. People noticed that it left marks like lead, but it was actually a completely different mineral—a form of carbon, related to diamonds, believe it or not. But the name "lead" persisted, even though putting actual lead in pencils would be... well, problematic for obvious health reasons.
Real graphite was first mined in significant quantities in a place called Borrowdale in Cumberland, England, sometime in the 1500s. And for a long time, England had basically a monopoly on high-quality graphite. The stuff was so valuable it was actually smuggled and stolen. There are stories of armed guards escorting graphite shipments, if you can imagine such a thing.
[Yawns]
But pure graphite alone doesn't make a good pencil core. It's too soft, too crumbly. You'd end up with graphite dust all over everything instead of nice, clean lines. So sometime in the late 1700s, a French chemist named Nicolas-Jacques Conté—that's C-O-N-T-É, with an accent on the e—figured out that you could mix graphite powder with clay to make it more stable.
This was actually a pretty brilliant discovery. The ratio of graphite to clay determines how hard or soft the pencil will be. More clay makes it harder—that's your H pencils, like 2H or 4H. More graphite makes it softer and darker—your B pencils. The standard No. 2 pencil is right in the middle, what they call HB.
[Sound of water being sipped]
So now, to make your pencil core, you need graphite and clay. Let's talk about getting these materials from actual scratch.
Graphite comes from metamorphic rock formations, usually formed when carbon-rich materials are subjected to intense heat and pressure over geological time scales. The major deposits today are in China, India, Brazil, and North Korea. Mining graphite isn't just a matter of digging a hole and hoping for the best. You need to locate the deposits through geological surveys, remove enormous amounts of overburden—that's the rock and soil above the graphite—and then extract the graphite through various mining techniques.
Most commercial graphite mining today uses open-pit methods, which requires heavy machinery—bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks, crushers. All of which require steel and rubber and fuel and electronics... we're back to that same recursive problem.
Clay, thankfully, is a bit more accessible. You can find clay deposits in many places, often near rivers and lakes where fine particles have settled over time. But not just any clay will do for pencils. You need clay with specific properties—fine particle size, the right chemical composition, appropriate plasticity when wet.
[Sound of chair creaking]
Once you have your graphite and clay, you need to process them. The graphite has to be crushed and purified. The clay has to be refined and prepared. Then they're mixed together in precise proportions—and I mean precise. Getting the hardness just right requires careful measurement and testing.
The mixture is then formed into thin rods. In modern factories, this is done through an extrusion process—the graphite-clay paste is forced through dies to create uniform cylindrical cores. But you could probably do this by hand, rolling the paste on a flat surface like making very thin sausages.
Then comes the firing. The graphite-clay rods have to be heated in kilns to temperatures around 1000 degrees Celsius. This process bonds the materials together and gives the final pencil lead its properties. Too hot, and you might burn off some of the graphite. Too cool, and the materials won't bond properly.
[Yawns softly]
Operating a kiln requires knowledge of ceramics, temperature control, proper ventilation... and building a kiln requires bricks or other refractory materials, which require their own supply chains of mining and manufacturing.
You know, one of the fascinating things about the graphite-clay discovery is how it democratized writing instruments. Before Conté's innovation, high-quality graphite was expensive and limited. His process meant that pencils could be mass-produced affordably, which contributed to rising literacy rates and the spread of education.
[Pause]
But we're not done yet. We still need to put our graphite core inside the wood, and we need that little metal band and eraser. And that's where things get... well, even more complicated, if you can believe it.

[Soft ambient music begins to fade in]
Deb: I'm going to take a quick break here. When we come back, we'll continue with the metal ferrule and discover just how much engineering goes into that tiny crimped band that seems so insignificant.
[Music plays for transition]
Deb: Welcome back to Dormant Knowledge...
[Music fades out]

[Sound of paper turning] That little metal band that holds the eraser on your pencil? It has a name: a ferrule. From the Latin word "viriola," meaning little bracelet. And that little bracelet is actually a tiny marvel of precision engineering.
Most modern pencil ferrules are made from aluminum, though some use brass. Let's talk about aluminum first, because it has one of the more fascinating origin stories in industrial chemistry.
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, but for most of human history, it was incredibly difficult to extract from its ore. In fact, aluminum was once more valuable than gold. Napoleon III served his most honored guests with aluminum cutlery while lesser guests had to make do with gold utensils. [Soft chuckle] Imagine that.
The problem was that aluminum doesn't occur naturally in pure metallic form—it's always bound up in compounds like bauxite ore. And separating it requires enormous amounts of energy. It wasn't until the late 1800s that two young men, working independently on different continents, figured out how to extract aluminum economically using electricity.
[Sound of water being sipped]
Bauxite mining happens primarily in Australia, Jamaica, Brazil, and Guinea. It's usually strip-mined, which means removing everything above the bauxite deposits—trees, topsoil, rocks. The environmental impact is... significant.
Once you have the bauxite ore, you need to process it into alumina through something called the Bayer process, named after Karl Bayer—not the aspirin company, different Bayer. This involves crushing the bauxite, mixing it with hot sodium hydroxide solution, filtering out impurities, and precipitating aluminum oxide crystals.
Then comes the energy-intensive part: turning alumina into aluminum through electrolysis. This requires massive amounts of electricity—it takes about 13-15 kilowatt hours to produce just one kilogram of aluminum. That's why aluminum smelters are often built near hydroelectric dams or other sources of cheap power.
[Yawns]
But having aluminum metal is just the beginning. To make a pencil ferrule, you need thin aluminum sheet that can be stamped and formed. This requires rolling mills, stamping presses, dies... all very sophisticated machinery.
The ferrule itself is a small miracle of design. It has to grip the pencil firmly without cracking the wood. It has to hold the eraser securely but allow it to be replaced. It has to be crimped in just the right way to create those little ridges that give it holding power.
[Sound of chair shifting]
If you were trying to make a ferrule by hand, you'd probably start with a thin strip of aluminum, wrap it around the pencil end, and crimp it closed. But even that requires tools—pliers at minimum, probably some kind of forming die, maybe a small hammer or crimping tool.
And making those tools? Well, we're back to metallurgy again. Steel for the pliers, handles made from wood or plastic, precise machining to create the gripping surfaces...
You know, there's something beautiful about how all these supply chains interconnect. The aluminum refinery needs electricity, which might come from a hydroelectric dam, which required massive concrete pours, which needed cement, which required limestone quarrying and high-temperature kilns...
Every industry depends on every other industry in ways that are largely invisible to us. The person operating the bauxite mine probably never thinks about pencils, and the person making pencils probably never thinks about dam construction, but they're all connected in this vast web of economic cooperation.
[Pause]
Brass ferrules add their own complexity. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, so now you need copper mining—often from places like Chile and Peru—and zinc mining, often from China and Australia. Copper extraction involves crushing ore, flotation separation, smelting in reverberatory furnaces... zinc involves roasting the ore to convert sulfides to oxides, then reduction in a distillation process...
I'm getting a bit lost in the details, aren't I? [Soft laugh] But that's the point, really. Each component, no matter how small, opens up these vast universes of specialized knowledge and industrial processes.
But wait—we haven't even talked about the eraser yet. And that little pink nub has its own surprisingly complex story...

The eraser. That little pink cylindrical piece of rubber that we take completely for granted. But rubber... oh, rubber has quite a story.
[Sound of papers shuffling]
For most of human history, people didn't have erasers at all. They used bread crumbs, pieces of leather, even balls of wax to remove pencil marks. The idea of a dedicated erasing material didn't really exist.
Rubber came to European attention through the indigenous peoples of South America, who had been using latex from rubber trees for centuries. They made waterproof boots, containers, even bouncing balls from this strange, milky tree sap. When Spanish explorers first encountered it, they didn't quite know what to make of it.
[Yawns softly]
The scientific name for the rubber tree is Hevea brasiliensis, and for a long time, Brazil had essentially a monopoly on natural rubber production. The trees grow in the Amazon rainforest, and harvesting rubber requires cutting shallow spirals into the bark and collecting the latex that oozes out. It's labor-intensive work that requires considerable skill—cut too deep and you damage the tree, too shallow and you don't get enough latex.
But early rubber had problems. It got sticky and smelly in hot weather, and brittle and hard in cold weather. It wasn't until Charles Goodyear—yes, that Goodyear—accidentally discovered vulcanization in 1839 that rubber became truly useful.
[Sound of chair creaking]
Goodyear's discovery was genuinely accidental. He was experimenting with mixing rubber and sulfur when he accidentally dropped some of the mixture onto a hot stove. Instead of melting into a gooey mess as he expected, it charred around the edges but remained flexible in the middle. He realized he'd found a way to make rubber stable across a wide range of temperatures.
Vulcanization—named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire—involves heating rubber with sulfur and other chemicals to create cross-links between the polymer chains. This makes the rubber more elastic, more durable, and less sensitive to temperature changes.
[Sound of water being sipped]
But here's where things get really complex if you're trying to make an eraser from scratch. First, you need rubber trees, which only grow in certain tropical climates. The trees take about seven years to mature before you can harvest latex from them. And latex collection is a daily process—you make fresh cuts and collect the latex in small cups, usually early in the morning when the flow is strongest.
Processing raw latex into usable rubber requires several steps. The latex has to be coagulated—usually by adding acid—to separate the rubber particles from the water. Then it's pressed and dried. The dried rubber sheets are then ready for vulcanization.
The vulcanization process requires sulfur, which comes from sulfur mines or is extracted as a byproduct of petroleum refining. It also requires heat sources and mixing equipment, usually some kind of industrial mixer that can handle the thick, resistant rubber compounds.
[Pause]
And then there's the matter of making the eraser pink. That classic pink color comes from dyes—often iron oxide, also known as rust, mixed with other colorants. Iron oxide mining and processing adds yet another supply chain to our growing list.
[Yawns]
Modern erasers often use synthetic rubber instead of natural rubber. Synthetic rubber is made from petroleum through complex chemical processes. Petroleum... well, that opens up the entire oil and gas industry. Drilling, refining, cracking petroleum molecules into smaller compounds, polymerization...
You know what's fascinating? The ability of rubber to erase pencil marks depends on a delicate balance of chemistry and physics. The rubber has to be soft enough to conform to the paper's surface and pick up graphite particles, but not so soft that it tears or leaves residue. It has to have the right amount of abrasiveness to lift the graphite without damaging the paper fibers.
Different erasers are formulated for different purposes. Art erasers might be very soft and non-abrasive for delicate work. School erasers need to be durable and effective on regular pencil marks. Some erasers are designed specifically for ink, using different chemical compositions altogether.
[Sound of paper turning]
The process of attaching the eraser to the ferrule requires yet another set of considerations. There's usually a small metal plug that the eraser is molded around, creating a mechanical bond. Sometimes there are adhesives involved as well. The eraser has to fit snugly enough not to fall out, but not so tightly that it can't be replaced when it's worn down.
All of this—the rubber cultivation, the vulcanization chemistry, the color formulation, the precision molding—just for that little pink nub that lets you fix your mistakes.
[Soft laugh]
It really makes you appreciate the miracle of spontaneous coordination that Leonard Read was writing about, doesn't it?

[Soft ambient music begins to fade in]
Deb: I'm going to take another quick break here. When we come back, we'll meet some actual people who decided to test whether it's really possible to make everyday objects from scratch. Their adventures are... well, let's just say they're both inspiring and humbling.
[Music plays for transition]
Deb: [Chuckle] That music sure had me nodding off. But if you’re still here with me, then welcome back to Dormant Knowledge...
[Music fades out]

[Sound of papers rustling] So far, we've been talking about Leonard Read's theoretical pencil and all the complexity hidden in its simple appearance. But what happens when someone actually tries to make something from scratch in the real world?
Meet Andy George, a guy from Minneapolis who decided to find out. Andy started a YouTube channel called "How to Make Everything," and his mission was exactly what it sounds like—to see if he could actually make everyday objects completely from scratch.
[Yawns softly]
His first major project wasn't a pencil, but something even more basic: a sandwich. Just a simple chicken sandwich. How hard could that be, right? Well, it took him six months and cost about $1,500. And by the end of it, he admits it didn't even taste very good.
[Sound of water being sipped]
But Andy's sandwich experiment perfectly illustrates the same principles that Leonard Read was writing about. To make a sandwich from scratch—really from scratch—Andy had to grow his own wheat for the bread. That meant finding land, preparing soil, planting seeds, watering, weeding, harvesting, threshing, grinding flour, and then finally baking bread.
For the vegetables, he had to grow lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. Again, that meant months of gardening, dealing with pests, weather, soil conditions...
For salt—just salt!—he had to travel to the ocean and boil down seawater. He loaded up containers of Atlantic Ocean water and spent days evaporating it to get a few cups of salt. As he put it, you can't make salt in Minnesota. We're completely dependent on trade for something as basic as salt.
[Sound of chair shifting]
For the chicken, well... he had to raise and slaughter his own chicken. For the cheese, he had to milk a cow. For the honey he wanted to add, he had to work with beekeepers to harvest honey from actual beehives.
The whole process gave him a profound appreciation for the complexity hidden behind simple things. As he said in interviews, most people have no idea what goes into making the stuff they use every day, and yet they feel confident making sweeping policy decisions about economics and trade.
[Pause]
But here's what's interesting about Andy's approach: he had to make compromises. He couldn't make absolutely everything from scratch because it would literally be impossible. He used modern transportation to get to his various locations. He used existing tools when he had to. He bought some materials that would have taken years to produce on his own.
In other words, he discovered the same thing Leonard Read was arguing: the web of interdependence is so complex that true self-sufficiency is essentially impossible in the modern world.
Andy continued his project with other objects—he made his own eyeglasses, his own clothes, even attempted things like making gold from electronic waste. Each project revealed new layers of complexity and interdependence.
[Yawns]
For the eyeglasses, he had to learn about optics, lens grinding, frame making... He cut down trees to make wooden frames, which meant he needed saws and axes and wood-working tools. He had to source sand to make glass, and then learn the precise techniques for grinding and polishing lenses to the correct prescriptions.
What fascinated him—and what fascinates me—is how each project revealed what he calls the "everyman's overconfidence." We tend to think we understand how things work because we use them every day, but actually making them reveals enormous gaps in our knowledge.
[Sound of paper turning]
Andy eventually evolved his channel into something even more ambitious: recreating the development of human civilization from scratch. Starting with stone tools and working his way forward through history, trying to understand how each innovation led to the next.
He learned flint-knapping to make stone tools. He figured out how to make pottery from river clay. He collected native copper and learned primitive smelting techniques. He made bows and arrows, dugout boats, increasingly sophisticated tools and technologies.
But even with all this hands-on experience, he readily admits that he's barely scratching the surface. Each technique he learns was developed over generations by people who devoted their entire lives to perfecting these skills. He's getting a taste of the knowledge, but not the deep expertise that would have been required to actually survive using only these methods.
[Soft laugh]
There's something both humbling and inspiring about Andy's work. Humbling because it shows how much we depend on other people's knowledge and skills. Inspiring because it demonstrates human ingenuity and our ability to learn and adapt.
But Andy wasn't the only person crazy enough to try this kind of experiment. There's another story I want to tell you about a British graduate student who decided to tackle an even more challenging project...

Thomas Thwaites was a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London when he encountered Leonard Read's "I, Pencil" essay. And like Andy George, he decided to put the theory to the test. But instead of a sandwich, Thomas chose to make something that seemed simple but was actually fiendishly complex: a toaster.
[Sound of papers shuffling]
Not just any toaster, mind you. He went to a store and bought the cheapest toaster he could find—a basic two-slice model that cost about four pounds, maybe six dollars. Then he took it completely apart to see what he was up against.
[Yawns softly]
Four hundred and four parts. That's what he found inside his simple toaster. Four hundred and four separate components, made from dozens of different materials: steel, copper, aluminum, nickel, various plastics, mica, ceramic materials...
Thomas set himself some rules. He had to make the toaster himself, from scratch. He could get advice from experts, but he had to do the actual work. And he had to source all the raw materials himself—mine the metal ores, extract the oil for plastics, everything.
[Sound of water being sipped]
Nine months later, having spent over $2,600 and traveled thousands of miles across Britain, Thomas had created... well, something that looked vaguely like a toaster. It was a beautiful object in its own way—crude, handmade, clearly the product of enormous effort and ingenuity.
He plugged it in for a demonstration. It glowed briefly, made some concerning sounds, and then stopped working after about five seconds.
[Soft chuckle]
But those five seconds represented an incredible achievement. Let me tell you about some of what Thomas had to do to get even that far.
For the steel frame, he traveled to an abandoned mine in the Forest of Dean to collect iron ore. Actual chunks of rock containing iron oxide. He filled a suitcase with this ore—imagine the looks he got at airport security—and brought it back to his mother's backyard, where he built a makeshift foundry.
[Sound of chair creaking]
His first attempt at smelting involved putting the iron ore in a microwave oven. This did not go well. The microwave died a dramatic death, and Thomas learned that metallurgy is not as simple as it looks in books.
His second attempt used what he called a "leaf blower furnace"—essentially a homemade blast furnace using a leaf blower to provide air flow and reaching temperatures high enough to melt iron ore. He based his design on methods described in 15th-century metallurgy texts.
After many failures and modifications, he eventually managed to produce a small lump of iron. Not steel, mind you—that would have required additional carbon and more sophisticated temperature control—just iron. But it was metal that he had extracted from ore with his own hands.
[Yawns]
For copper wiring, he had to learn about a process called froth flotation, where copper ore is separated from waste rock using chemicals, water, and air bubbles. The copper-bearing ore particles attach to the bubbles and float to the surface, where they can be collected.
For plastic components, Thomas tried to make his own plastic from potatoes. He extracted starch from potatoes and attempted to mold it into the shapes he needed for the toaster casing. This... also did not go entirely according to plan.
When he couldn't convince BP to let him extract his own petroleum from an offshore oil rig—apparently they weren't impressed by his academic credentials—he had to get creative about plastic production.
[Sound of paper turning]
For the mica components—mica is used as electrical insulation in toasters—he traveled to Scotland and tracked down an abandoned mica mine. Mica splits into thin, transparent sheets that can withstand high temperatures, making it perfect for electrical applications.
The heating elements required nickel-chromium wire, which meant finding nickel ore and chromium ore, smelting them separately, and then creating an alloy. This turned out to be one of the most technically challenging aspects of the entire project.
[Sound of chair creaking]
Nickel ore typically comes from places like Russia, Canada, and New Caledonia. The most common nickel ore is called pentlandite, which contains nickel sulfide mixed with iron sulfide and other minerals. Extracting nickel requires crushing the ore, concentrating it through flotation processes, then smelting it at very high temperatures.
Chromium comes from chromite ore, found primarily in South Africa, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Chromite is an iron-chromium oxide that's extremely hard and has a very high melting point—over 2,000 degrees Celsius.
Thomas managed to source small amounts of both ores through various contacts in the mining and geological communities. But processing them in his backyard setup was... ambitious, to put it mildly.
[Yawns]
For the nickel, he had to roast the ore to convert sulfides to oxides, then reduce the oxides to metallic nickel using carbon as a reducing agent. This required his leaf-blower furnace running at maximum temperature for extended periods. The process is energy-intensive and produces various toxic gases, which made for some interesting conversations with the neighbors.
The chromium proved even more challenging. Chromite ore is notoriously difficult to process because of its high melting point and chemical stability. Industrial chromium production uses electric arc furnaces that can reach temperatures well beyond what Thomas could achieve with his improvised equipment.
[Sound of paper turning]
After many failed attempts, Thomas managed to produce small amounts of both metals, though their purity was... questionable. Creating the alloy required melting both metals together in precise proportions—typically about 80% nickel and 20% chromium for heating element wire.
The wire-drawing process presented its own challenges. Industrial wire production involves pulling the hot metal through successively smaller dies to create thin, uniform wire. Thomas had to improvise this process using hand tools and tremendous patience.
His final wire was irregular, probably didn't have the correct electrical resistance properties, and certainly wouldn't meet any industrial standards. But it was recognizably wire, made from metals he had extracted and alloyed himself. When he wound it into coils for his toaster's heating elements, it represented hundreds of hours of work and learning.
[Pause]
And then came the moment of truth. After nine months of mining, smelting, molding, and assembling, Thomas had something that looked... well, it looked like a toaster that had been built by someone who had never seen a toaster before but had it described to them by someone who had only heard about toasters secondhand.
The casing was an odd color—that potato starch plastic had a yellowish, slightly translucent appearance that was nothing like the smooth white or black of commercial toasters. The metal frame was rough and irregular, clearly handmade. The mica insulation was visible in places where it shouldn't have been. The heating element coils were uneven and didn't quite fit properly in their housing.
But it was recognizably a toaster. It had a slot for bread. It had heating elements. It had a plug.
Thomas plugged it into the wall. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the heating elements began to glow. A faint orange light appeared in the slot where bread would go. The potato plastic casing made some concerning creaking sounds as it warmed up. There was a smell—not quite burning, but definitely the smell of materials being heated beyond their comfort zone.
[Sound of water being sipped]
For about five seconds, Thomas Thwaites had a working toaster. It was crude, it was inefficient, it probably violated numerous safety regulations, but it was generating heat. Bread placed in that slot would have actually started to toast.
And then, with a small pop and a wisp of smoke, it stopped working. The heating elements went dark. The great toaster experiment had ended.
[Soft chuckle]
Thomas later speculated that the failure was probably due to the irregular properties of his homemade wire—either the electrical resistance was wrong, or the alloy couldn't handle the thermal stress, or the connections were faulty. In industrial toaster production, these are precisely controlled engineering parameters. In Thomas's backyard toaster, they were educated guesses at best.
But for those five seconds, it had worked. Five seconds of actual toasting functionality, achieved through nine months of learning mining, metallurgy, chemistry, and craftsmanship from scratch.
What I find most fascinating about Thomas's project is not that he "failed" to make a proper toaster, but that he got as far as he did. The fact that his contraption worked at all, even briefly, represents a remarkable feat of individual determination and learning.
But more importantly, his project beautifully illustrated Leonard Read's original point. As Thomas put it, it's really not possible anymore to make things "from scratch," not in any practical sense. The items we use every day are still made from rocks and sludge that come out of the ground, but the process of transformation has become so complex that no single person can master it all.
[Soft laugh]
Thomas spent nine months and thousands of dollars to create a toaster that worked for five seconds. Meanwhile, the global economy can produce toasters that work for years and sell them for less than ten dollars. The efficiency of that coordinated system of specialization and trade is really quite remarkable when you think about it.

[Sound of papers rustling] You know, there's a quote often attributed to Carl Sagan that goes something like this: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." [Soft chuckle] It's a humorous way of pointing out the same thing that Leonard Read, Andy George, and Thomas Thwaites all discovered in their different ways—that nothing is really made "from scratch" because everything depends on everything else.
[Yawns softly]
The more you dig into any manufactured object, the more you realize how much accumulated human knowledge and cooperation goes into its creation. That pencil sitting on your desk represents thousands of years of technological development, geographical exploration, scientific understanding, and economic organization.
Someone had to discover that graphite makes marks on paper. Someone else had to figure out that mixing it with clay makes it more stable. Someone had to develop the techniques for mining bauxite and extracting aluminum. Someone had to invent vulcanization to make rubber useful. Someone had to design the machinery that cuts wood to precise tolerances.
[Sound of water being sipped]
But here's what's really remarkable: none of these people were thinking about pencils when they made their discoveries. Charles Goodyear wasn't trying to improve erasers when he discovered vulcanization—he was trying to solve the general problem of rubber's temperature sensitivity. The aluminum extraction process wasn't developed for pencil ferrules—it was developed because aluminum was seen as a potential replacement for expensive metals in various applications.
This is what economists call "spontaneous order"—the idea that complex, beneficial systems can emerge without any central planning or coordination. No one designed the global pencil supply chain. It emerged organically as thousands of individual actors made decisions based on their local knowledge and incentives.
The cedar grower in Oregon doesn't need to know anything about graphite mining in China. The aluminum smelter operator doesn't need to understand rubber chemistry. The rubber plantation worker doesn't need to know about wood processing. Yet somehow, their separate activities coordinate to produce pencils.
[Sound of chair shifting]
Adam Smith called this the "invisible hand"—the idea that individuals pursuing their own interests can, through the mechanism of markets, end up serving the broader social good without intending to do so. The pencil manufacturer isn't trying to educate children or enable creativity—they're trying to make a profit. But in doing so, they create tools that enable education and creativity.
This is why Leonard Read's essay was so influential among economists and political philosophers. It demonstrates something profound about how complex societies function. We often take for granted the incredible coordination that happens every day to keep our modern world running.
[Yawns]
Think about your morning routine. The coffee beans that came from farms in Colombia or Ethiopia, processed by people you'll never meet, shipped by companies you've never heard of. The electricity powering your coffee maker, generated perhaps hundreds of miles away by power plant operators working the night shift. The water flowing from your tap, treated by municipal workers and delivered through infrastructure built by generations of engineers and construction workers.
Each of these systems represents the coordinated efforts of millions of people, most of whom don't know or think about the others, yet together they make your morning coffee possible.
[Pause]
But there's another lesson in these "making from scratch" experiments, and it's about humility. In our age of strong opinions and confident pronouncements about complex policy issues, there's something refreshing about Andy George's and Thomas Thwaites's willingness to admit ignorance and actually try to learn.
Both of them started their projects with a kind of naive confidence that things couldn't be that complicated. Both ended up with a deep appreciation for how much they didn't know, and how much expertise exists in the world that they had never considered.
[Sound of paper turning]
Andy George often talks about what he calls "everyman's overconfidence"—the tendency for people to think they understand systems they interact with daily. We use pencils, so we think we know how they're made. We eat sandwiches, so we think we understand food production. We live in houses, so we think we understand construction.
But actually trying to make these things reveals how much specialized knowledge exists that we're completely unaware of. The farmer knows things about soil and weather and crop rotation that took generations to develop. The metallurgist understands crystal structures and phase transitions in ways that would take years of study to appreciate. The rubber chemist can manipulate polymer properties in ways that seem almost magical.
[Yawns softly]
This has implications for how we think about expertise and specialization. In our interconnected world, no one can be an expert on everything. We have to rely on other people's knowledge and judgment in countless areas. The alternative—trying to become self-sufficient in everything—is what Andy George and Thomas Thwaites demonstrated to be essentially impossible.
Yet there's often a temptation to dismiss expertise, to think that common sense and good intentions are sufficient to solve complex problems. The pencil reminds us that even simple things can be incredibly complex beneath the surface.
[Sound of chair creaking]
There's also something profound about the way these supply chains cross political and cultural boundaries. Your pencil might contain graphite from China, wood from California, aluminum from Jamaica, and rubber from Thailand. In some small way, that pencil represents international cooperation on a massive scale.
People from different countries, speaking different languages, with different political systems and cultural values, somehow coordinate to produce objects that we take completely for granted. It's a kind of economic diplomacy that happens below the level of conscious awareness.
[Pause]
Leonard Read wrote his essay in 1958, during the Cold War, when the world seemed deeply divided between competing ideological systems. But his pencil story suggests something different—that human beings have this remarkable ability to cooperate and coordinate even across vast differences in background and belief.
The communist graphite miner and the capitalist pencil manufacturer don't need to agree about politics or philosophy. They just need to agree about the price and quality of graphite. The market provides a language for cooperation that transcends other forms of human division.
[Soft laugh]
Of course, this system isn't perfect. There are environmental costs to mining and manufacturing. There are labor issues in global supply chains. There are questions about sustainability and inequality. Andy George and Thomas Thwaites both grappled with these concerns in their projects.
But recognizing the problems doesn't negate the miracle of coordination that makes modern life possible. It just reminds us that we need to be thoughtful about how we organize and regulate these systems.
[Yawns]
You know, there's something poetic about ending where we started—with that simple yellow pencil. After everything we've discussed tonight, it no longer looks quite so simple, does it? It looks like what it actually is: a small miracle of human cooperation and ingenuity, a testament to our species' ability to share knowledge across time and space.
The next time you pick up a pencil, maybe you'll think about the cedar forests of Oregon, the graphite mines of China, the aluminum smelters powered by distant rivers, the rubber trees of Southeast Asia. Maybe you'll think about the thousands of people whose work made that pencil possible, most of whom never met each other but somehow cooperated to put that simple tool in your hand.
[Sound of papers shuffling]
Leonard Read ended his essay with the pencil saying: "If you can become 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 people."
Whether you agree with Read's political philosophy or not, there's something profound in his central observation: the world is far more complex and interconnected than it appears on the surface, and we depend on each other in ways we rarely stop to consider.
[Yawns softly]
Andy George and Thomas Thwaites, through their quixotic attempts to make things from scratch, reminded us of the same truth in a more hands-on way. They showed us that independence is largely an illusion, but that interdependence—when it works—is something beautiful.
[Sound of paper being set down]
And maybe that's enough to ponder as we drift off to sleep. The miracle of cooperation. The beauty of shared knowledge. The humbling complexity hidden in simple things. And the remarkable fact that somehow, against all odds, it mostly works.
[Soft ambient music begins to fade in]
Thank you for listening to Dormant Knowledge. If you're still awake and hearing my voice, I appreciate your attention. But if you've drifted off to sleep somewhere along the way—which was partly the goal—then you won't hear me say this anyway. Either way, I hope some knowledge about pencils, erasers, toasters, and the beautiful complexity of our interconnected world has made its way into your consciousness or perhaps your dreams.
Until next time, this is Deb wishing you restful nights and curious days.
[Music fades out]
END OF EPISODE

Show Notes & Resources

Key Historical Figures Mentioned

Leonard Read (1898-1983) Economist and founder of the Foundation for Economic Education who wrote the influential essay "I, Pencil" in 1958. Read was a prominent advocate for free-market economics and classical liberalism, using the pencil as a powerful metaphor for spontaneous economic order and the limits of central planning.

Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1805) French inventor and chemist who revolutionized pencil manufacturing by discovering that mixing graphite powder with clay created a more stable and controllable writing material. His innovation allowed for mass production of affordable pencils and different hardness grades (H for hard, B for black/soft).

Charles Goodyear (1800-1860) American inventor who accidentally discovered vulcanization—the process of treating rubber with sulfur and heat to make it stable across temperature ranges. This discovery was crucial for making rubber useful in everything from erasers to tires, transforming rubber from a curiosity into an industrial necessity.

Andy George Contemporary YouTuber and creator of "How to Make Everything" who gained fame for his six-month, $1,500 attempt to make a chicken sandwich completely from scratch. His experiments demonstrate the practical impossibility of true self-sufficiency in the modern world.

Thomas Thwaites British graduate student at the Royal College of Art who spent nine months and over $2,600 attempting to build a working toaster from raw materials. His project involved mining iron ore, processing aluminum, and creating components from scratch, resulting in a device that worked for approximately five seconds.

Important Concepts Referenced

Spontaneous Order The economic principle that complex, beneficial systems can emerge without central planning through the individual actions of many participants. The pencil exemplifies this—no single entity designs the global pencil supply chain, yet it functions efficiently through market mechanisms.

Supply Chain Complexity The intricate network of materials, processes, and knowledge required to create modern products. Even simple objects depend on resources and expertise from around the world, creating webs of interdependence largely invisible to end users.

Vulcanization The chemical process discovered by Charles Goodyear that treats rubber with sulfur and heat to create cross-links between polymer chains. This makes rubber stable across temperature ranges and suitable for industrial applications.

Economic Interdependence The condition where individuals, regions, and nations depend on each other for goods, services, and knowledge. The pencil demonstrates how this interdependence enables complex production while making complete self-sufficiency practically impossible.

Froth Flotation A mineral processing technique used to separate valuable minerals from ore using air bubbles, water, and chemicals. Thomas Thwaites encountered this process while learning to extract copper for his toaster project.

Modern Applications and Connections

Global Supply Chain Resilience Recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain disruptions have highlighted both the efficiency and fragility of global manufacturing networks. The pencil story helps explain why shortages of seemingly simple products can have cascading effects.

Maker Movement and DIY Culture Andy George and Thomas Thwaites's experiments connect to the broader maker movement and DIY culture, though their work reveals the limits of individual self-sufficiency and the value of specialized knowledge and industrial cooperation.

Environmental and Labor Considerations Modern awareness of environmental and labor issues in global supply chains adds complexity to the pencil story. While Read focused on economic coordination, contemporary discussions must also consider sustainability and worker welfare.

Technology and Knowledge Transfer The internet has democratized access to information about manufacturing processes, as evidenced by Andy and Thomas's ability to research historical techniques. However, their experiments show that information alone is insufficient—hands-on expertise developed over generations remains irreplaceable.

Further Learning

Books:

• "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" - The original 1958 essay that started it all, available as a short pamphlet from the Foundation for Economic Education
  https://amzn.to/4nDzr1L (paid link)
• "The Toaster Project" by Thomas Thwaites - A detailed account of his nine-month quest to build a toaster from scratch, including photographs and technical details
  https://amzn.to/4nFjAjk (paid link)
• "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith - The foundational text on economic coordination and the "invisible hand" that informs much of Read's thinking
  https://amzn.to/3ItAEdb (paid link)

Documentaries:

• "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel by Andy George - Ongoing series documenting attempts to create everyday objects from scratch
  https://www.youtube.com/@htme

Online Resources:

• Foundation for Economic Education (FEE.org) - Read's organization continues to publish educational content about economics and spontaneous order
  https://fee.org/

Episode Tags

#Economics #SupplyChain #Manufacturing #DIY #SpontaneousOrder #Interdependence #Specialization #LeonardRead #AdamSmith #Cooperation #Complexity #Philosophy #SleepPodcast #EducationalContent #ModernLife #GlobalTrade #Knowledge #Humility #DormantKnowledge