The square lead was glued into the slot and a thin strip of wood was used to fill the rest of the slot. In 1812 in America, William Munroe, a cabinet maker of Concord, Massachusetts manufactured pencils. He used a graphite paste that dried, but he did not fire it. It took 10 years for him to perfect the machines. He made machines for hexagon and octagon pencils.
Pencils have a extraordinary connection with literature.
Before his literary career began, Henry David Thoreau made pencils with his father. In 1824 they won a prize for their pencils at a manufacturing exhibition. They varied the amount of clay to manufacture pencils with different hardness, and gave them grades of 1 to 4. As far as the shape of the pencils, they were packaged in a bewildering variety of ways by that time. In 1824, the pencils made by Dixon were criticized as having gritty leads, not laid in evenly in their wood case, which itself was only roughly finished.