The Portland Pudgy safety dinghy is a self-rescue boat, even without the optional inflatable exposure canopy and other survival gear. With the exposure canopy, sea anchor, and sail kit, the Portland Pudgy is an unsinkable, dynamic lifeboat.
The âlead pencil,â containing no lead, was invented in 1564, a turning point in pencil history. Although civilizations were centuries away from making mechanical pencil history, the pencil invented in the sixteenth century advanced the writing instrument. Before 1564, artists mainly used stylus-like pencils. The history of the pencil owes a dept to the discovery of a graphite mine in Cumbria, England.
Today pencils are numbered and/or lettered to tell us how hard the lead is. The higher the number, the harder the lead, and the lighter the markings. However, it wasn't always this way. The earliest pencils were made simply from filling a wood shaft with raw graphite. The hardness of the graphite would differ depending on the quality of the graphite, thus it was different depending on where the pencil was made. The current style of making pencils was developed in 1794 by Nicolas-Jacques Cont (1755-1805).