The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

By Henry Petroski

434 pages. Illustrated. Knopf. $25.

Long ago, when this reviewer was a college undergraduate, there were three kinds of students. There were the people majoring in the humanities, the people majoring in the sciences and the engineers. The engineers were the beings with the slide rules hanging from their belts.

That we English majors were not alone in harboring such a narrowly biased view is acknowledged by Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University, in his diverting new book, ''The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance.'' Mr. Petroski, who has written two previous books on engineering, ''To Engineer Is Human'' and ''Beyond Engineering,'' concedes that at one end of the spectrum is the ''stereotypical characterization of the engineer as one who is a 'pencil head' or 'lead head,' with no thoughts but calculations. . . .''

However, he goes on to observe, at the other end of this spectrum is Henry David Thoreau. Much is known of Thoreau as the artist and individualist who withdrew into the woods and wrote ''Walden.'' Less is known of Thoreau as the professional engineer who developed for his family's business the finest lead pencil available in mid-19th-century America.

Thoreau, too, tended to overlook the pencil. When he made his famous list of essential supplies for a 12-day excursion into the Maine woods, he neglected to mention the very object with which he was recording the list.

For reasons like these - the image of the engineer as a ''pencil head'' and the image of the pencil as an object too humble to be remembered by engineer heads - Mr. Petroski has decided to devote his latest meditation on engineering to the pencil. ''To reflect on the pencil is to reflect on engineering,'' he writes. ''A study of the pencil is a study of engineering.''

But can the point of the pencil bear the weight of a 400-page history? Not quite, I'm afraid. The great riddle of pencil making is too easily answered. They get the lead into the pencil simply by cutting grooves into a flat slat of wood, by laying into the grooves rounded lengths of a baked mixture of graphite powder and clay, and by gluing onto this leaded slat another slat with matching grooves. The resulting lead sandwich gets sliced and sanded into a quantity of smooth hexagonal cylinders.

The history of pencil making is too easily boiled down to three dramatic events. One was the mid-16th-century discovery near Borrowdale in the Lake District of England of a deposit of graphite so extensive and rich that it proved adequate by itself to supply the infant pencil industries of both England and the Continent. The second event was the modern development of a substitute lead made of powdered graphite and clay by a French engineer-inventor named Nicolas-Jacques Conte, when, late in the 18th century, pure graphite became unavailable to France because of the outbreak of war with England.

And the third significant event was the mid-19th-century discovery of another rich graphite mine on a Siberian mountaintop near the border of China. This Oriental mine replenished the supply of graphite that had declined as the Borrowdale mine ran out, although the demand for graphite from this and later discovered mines diminished as the secret of the Conte method gradually spread throughout the world.

The rest of the history of pencil making all too predictably follows the phases of modern industrial development: the rationalization of the manufacturing process, the boom of war and the bust of depression, the international competition for markets, the quest for new materials, the rise of advertising and the continuing dream of a more perfect pencil.

As for the vital lesson about engineering that Mr. Petroski keeps trying to teach us through the example of the pencil, this can be summed up by any one of a dozen of his gnomic statements: ''There is no such thing as pure engineering - making a perfect pencil, whether in the artifact or in the abstract - for that would be nothing but irresponsibility or mere hobby. Engineering, far from being applied science, is scientific business.'' Could there be less here than meets the eye?

Perhaps there is, but there is also in these pages Henry David Thoreau, who could, in the admiring words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, from ''a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils . . . take up with his hand fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.'' There is the story of how Armand Hammer built a highly profitable pencil industry in post-revolutionary Russia, until people began to complain about the capitalistic techniques Mr. Hammer was employing, whereupon the Moscow plant was turned over to Soviet control, had its name changed to the Sacco and Vanzetti Pencil Factory, and was driven into inefficiency.

And there is one of the various reasons pencils became yellow. ''The emergence of Siberian graphite as the standard to come up to, coupled with the success of the yellow-finished Koh-I-Noor, later advertised as 'the original yellow pencil,' apparently led manufacturers to use such names as Mongol and Mikado in order to associate their pencils with the Orient and thus with the source of the then finest graphite.'' With the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, the Mikado quickly became the Mirado.

It is one of Mr. Petroski's particular concerns that throughout history the activity of engineering has been a nonverbal process. ''Even the most able and articulate of ancient engineers, whether they were known then as artisans, craftsmen, architects or master builders, might have had no more time or inclination or reason to articulate what it is they did and how they did it than do some of the most able of today's engineers.''

Perhaps this lack of articulation by engineers explains the distorted view of them that sometimes arises in the nonengineering eye. If so, Mr. Petroski has done more than his share in filling the void of words. But, unfortunately, his words prove more than enough to make the point of ''The Pencil,'' which, it of course pains me to say, could have stood considerable sharpening.

photo: Henry Petroski (Catherine Petroski)