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History of the Pencil
In 1564, a shepherd in northern England stumbled through the mud after a storm and found something strange — a black, waxy mineral unlike anything anyone had seen before.
Within a decade, the English Crown had declared it a strategic asset. Within a century, stealing it was a felony punishable by transportation to the other side of the world.
All of this. Over a pencil.
In this episode of Hidden History with Aiden Thomas, we follow graphite from a hillside in Cumbria to Napoleon's battlefield — where a one-eyed French scientist named Nicolas-Jacques Conté had exactly six days to solve a…
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