This article was contributed by community members. The views expressed here are those of the author.

Whenever you pick up that unique yellow #2 pencil engraved with Dixon Ticonderoga, you are dealing with some Salem history. This pencil and several other common objects we all use are the brainchild of Joseph Dixon, who lived and owned his first factory in North Salem in the 1820s.

Joseph Dixon was born in Marblehead in 1799, the son of a sailor. Although Joseph has no formal education, he has a wide range of interests. When he was a teenager, he invented a machine for making and cutting documents by hand. When he was young, he became a printer, but could not afford metal movable type, so he taught himself to carve wood to make movable type.

Interested in trying to cast his own type, he learned about metallurgy. The difficulty of casting is that once the ore is heated to melt, it must be poured from the crucible or holder into the mold. Depending on the temperature, the metal will melt to the crucible and mold, which can lead to undesirable results or damage to the crucible and/or mold. The higher the temperature required to melt the metal, the more difficult the problem.

Dixon tries to build crucibles that can withstand high temperatures and even pouring consistency. After grinding lenses with lead lead or black lead (now called graphite), Dixon was fascinated by its characteristics. When graphite was used as ballast for trading ships from Ceylon, he encountered graphite for the first time. Through his graphite experiments, he invented a graphite crucible that works well at high temperatures.

In 1827, he moved to Salem and opened a factory on North Street to manufacture his high-temperature crucible. At the same time, he still focused on graphite and its uses, invented lubricants and furnace polishes, and solved the rust problem that plagued most people's cast iron furnaces.

Continuing his graphite work, he invented a hand-cranked machine to mass-produce pencils that were all handmade before. This work requires treating graphite with clay to make leads, and cutting and grooving cedar wood for the bracket. The machine he uses to cut and shape wood can produce hundreds of pencils a day.

Without a distribution network, Dixon joined other vendors, including his friend George Peabody, who later became a banker and a well-known philanthropist, roaming the local town and selling his wares. Although his stove polishes, lubricants, and crucibles were very successful, the pencils did not sell well.

While developing his business, Dixon also became interested in various other inventions. He and another inventor Isaac Babbitt (Isaac Babbitt) collaborated to develop Babbitt alloy, this kind of metal is used in machinery, friction usually destroys the metal. This metal is still used in car engines. It was also written that Dixon helped Fulton develop the steam engine.

He has also made progress in photography. The mirror system he invented provides photographers with a true vision. This system became the basis of single-lens reflex cameras. He developed new chemical processes for color lithography and used these processes to invent hard-to-forge currency for the U.S. government. He also invented the gold and silver smelting crucible for the American Mint, which was used to make coins.

When the Mexican War began in 1846, the government needed a large number of crucibles to produce iron. In response to demand, Dixon established a factory in New Jersey to produce crucibles mainly for the government. In the same factory, he also installed ever-improving pencil production machines that could be sold to dealers in New York and New Jersey. In 1848, he closed his factory in Salem and the family moved to New Jersey.

Although his pencils did not sell well, the demand for the cauldron and the new cauldron for the production of steel made him a wealthy man. Over the years, Dixon has a veritable crucible monopoly in the United States.

In the 1840s, the first German pencils began to be produced in the United States, which increased competition and quality comparison. Through a series of improvements to his machine, Dixon was able to produce high-quality pencils.

After imposing tariffs on foreign goods during the Civil War, it provided an open area for American pencil manufacturers to enter a rapidly expanding market, and everyone wanted this cheap writing instrument. Dixon's pencil sales soared, making his distinctive yellow pencil with the Dixon Ticonderoga logo the most common pencil in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His company has been producing pencils for many years, with meager profits, and suddenly it produces 86,000 pencils a day. Dixon acquired the graphite mine in Ticonderoga, New York, which resulted in the name being added to the pencil's logo.

Throughout his life, Joseph Dixon (Joseph Dixon) continued to invent new machinery and processes in various fields. In addition to perfecting his own crucible and pencil, he also perfected the process of grinding lenses with graphite; invented a method of printing color quick-print cloth patterns; produced galvanic batteries, and even designed a method for digging underwater tunnels. method.  

Although Dixon died in 1869, his legacy still exists. The Dixon Ticonderoga brand still exists under the corporate ownership of FILA Group, an Italian company with multiple brands of art materials.

When Joseph Dixon sold his pencils door-to-door in Salem in the 1820s, he hardly realized that his company and pencils would one day be sold all over the world.

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