Most Marbleheaders know that their town is famous for many things, including having the original copy of the Spirit of ‘76 painting by artist Archibald Willard on display inside the Marblehead Select Board room in Abbot Hall. But many may not realize that every time they pick up a pencil, they are writing with an instrument which owes its popularity to Joseph Dixon, a 19th century Marblehead resident.
Dixon was born in Marblehead in 1799 on Darling Street. He was an inventor and manufacturer who pioneered in the industrial use of graphite.
The son of a ship captain, Dixon was expected to carry on the family tradition and go to sea. Instead, he chose a different career route—the study of petrology (rocks) and mineralogy (minerals).
Seeking a cheaper alternative to European pencils
Graphite came into widespread use following its discovery in England in the 15th century. The mineral proved so soft and brittle that it required a holder. The graphite was inserted into hollowed-out wooden sticks, and thus, the wood-cased pencil was born.
Because pencils were manufactured overseas and imported to the United States, they were expensive to purchase.
When Dixon was a teenager, he learned that sea captains used graphite from Sri Lanka as ballast aboard their ships. Working in his family’s kitchen, he mixed graphite powder with clay, baked the hand-formed tubes in the oven and then inserted them into wood casings.
He went door-to-door selling his homemade graphite pencils with little success.
While working in the family kitchen, he accidentally spilled a box of powdered graphite all over a rusty cast iron stove.
Attempting to clean the powder off the stove, he quickly discovered that it worked wonders as a polish. He learned that his neighbors found the stove polish more useful than his pencil.
Dixon, an avid inventor, supported his losses in the pencil trade with numerous innovations. He invented colorfast tanning dyes, pioneered photolithography, created color inks to prevent currency counterfeiting, improved galvanic batteries and refined metal casting crucibles. Thomas Edison said that he owed much to Dixon for the graphite filament in his incandescent bulbs.
In the 19th century, Dixon traveled to Sri Lanka to purchase graphite that he had first found in the cargo holds of Marblehead vessels returning from foreign ports.
In the 1820s he began the manufacture of lead pencils, stove polish and lubricants in Salem, later moving his business to Jersey City, New Jersey, and starting the Dixon-Ticonderoga Pencil Company and then the Dixon Crucible Company.
Dixon discovered the merits of graphite as a stove polish and an additive in lubricants, foundry facings, brake linings, oil-less bearings and non-corrosive paints.
Dixon and the American Civil War
In 1861, Dixon sent a donation of $100 to the town of Marblehead to assist the men who volunteered to fight in the American Civil War.
“To The Selectman of Marblehead:
Gentleman, claiming the privilege by birth, to bear a part in the noble rally of my fellow-townsmen, in their quick response to the call of our country for her defense, you are at liberty to draw on me for one hundred dollars, which you will please add to the subscriptions for the support of the volunteers. Be assured gentleman that the proudest moment of my life was first in the field where duty calls; The same spirit that manned with Marblehead men the boats at Trenton which carried George Washington across the Delaware in 1776, is still manifest in the Son’s of those Noble Fathers whose history is interwoven with that of the United States.
Yours with much respect,
Joseph Dixon”
Dixon also wrote to his mother, in response to her letter to him, asking his opinion about the Civil War.
“Dear mother you anxiously ask my opinion of the end of this unnatural and before unheard of southern insanity. I will give you an outline of a meeting which I attended in this place on Saturday evening last, by which you can judge a little of my opinions.
To say that it was enthusiastic, would be nothing, it was beyond anything I think, that your life has ever dreamed of. You may imagine the feelings of the people here when I tell you every man woman and child are filled with the patriotic feeling of “liberty or death.” I will not try to describe my feelings when people spoke of my native state as being the first to give their blood for freedom they are now the first to sprinkle its sacred altar again with their blood in its perpetuity what a singular coincidence on the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and concord that Massachusetts should now seal that contract with blood in Baltimore in 1861.
Yours with much respect,
Joseph Dixon”
The Dixon legacy
At the time of Dixon’s death in 1869, the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company was the largest manufacturer of graphite products in the world. By 1870, it was the world’s largest dealer and consumer of graphite. By 1872, the Dixon company was making 86,000 pencils a day.
A noted New York newspaper ended his obituary: “Many prominent men are forgotten in a year, but Mr. Dixon will live on in his works and will be best known a half century hence.” He is buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
