1. Pencil: Origin In 1564, a catastrophic hurricane hit the island of England, and many large trees in the severely affected Cumberland area were uprooted. After the storm, a black mineral was discovered under the roots of the trees. As long as you lightly scratch the object, you can leave a black mark, which is "graphite". Local shepherds often use it to mark their sheep for easy identification. Later, someone made it into a stick shape and sold it to merchants for marking packaging. In 1781, after many experiments, the German chemist Faber mixed graphite powder with sulfur, antimony, and rosin to make a paste and then squeezed it into a bar shape. This was the prototype of the pencil. This kind of pencil has a certain hardness and is much easier to write with than a graphite rod. Inspired by this, people cut graphite blocks into small strips for writing and painting. This is the earliest pencil. Soon, King George II simply took the Barrodale Graphite Mine into the royal family and designated it as a royal exclusive product. However, writing with graphite strips can easily stain your hands and break easily. 2. The origin of the writing brush: In 223 BC, General Meng Tian of the State of Qin led his troops to fight abroad. He would regularly write battle reports and submit them to the King of Qin. At that time, people used bamboo sticks to write, which was very inconvenient. They had to dip in ink again after writing a few times. One day, while hunting, Mengtian saw a rabbit's tail dragging blood on the ground, and he couldn't help but feel inspired. He immediately cut off a rabbit tail, inserted it into a bamboo tube, and tried to use it to write. But rabbit fur is shiny and does not absorb ink. Meng Tian tried a few more times, but it still didn't work, so he threw the "rabbit hair pen" into the lime pit in front of the door. One day, he accidentally saw the brush he had thrown away. After picking it up, he found that the wet rabbit fur had become whiter. He dipped the rabbit hair pen into the ink pan, and the rabbit tail became very "obedient" and wrote very smoothly. It turns out that the water in the stone pit contains lime. After soaking in alkaline water, the fat of rabbit fur is removed and becomes soft. Legend has it that this is the origin of the writing brush. 3. The origin of the fountain pen. There is a story behind the invention of the fountain pen. It is said that when an Englishman named Waterman was signing a contract, his quill leaked and soiled the contract paper. When he went to pick up the new contract, another competitor snatched it away. He was deeply stimulated and decided to design an advanced pen. He invented the pen based on the principle of capillaries in plants transporting liquids.