When I was a kid our family had a friend whom you couldn't know for ten minutes and he would show you his NASA pen that could write upside down. Apparently they're still selling them:
https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce...
The key would be superior marketing, having celebs or astronauts using your pencils. Look at what Shinola has done with watches, in fact Detroit would probably be the best place to start your pencil factory.
As far as I can tell, luxury writing instruments have remained an extremely small niche. Apart from Montblanc, perhaps Caran d'Ache and very few others, most brands aren't well-known outside of it.
In a less unneccessarily luxurious price bracket, Kickstarter sees quite a lot of pen projects. Most revolve around minimalist design and/or using interesting materials like titanium. Reception seems, as far as I can tell, so-so.
[1] http://www.graf-von-faber-castell.com/writing-instruments/pe...
I don't doubt that having astronauts using your pencil would be cool, but I thought I'd mention why astronauts needed a pen and not a pencil: graphite shavings/powder or eraser bits floating around and causing problems was a real worry.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
I was inclined to agree with you but then I reminded myself that pretty much everything around me, cheap or expensive, is designed on purpose to be disposable - to wear down quickly and be replaced with a new purchase. XXI century is an era of throwaway wealth. I can totally imagine someone selling very expensive pencils.
Then the hard step - extruding the paste into a rod. For a big-diameter "lead", you might be able to get away with rolling the paste into a rod by hand on a board, like working with dough. The rod then has to be dried and fired, like pottery. All this is a lot of work, but you'd make a batch of them at a time.
The wood casing could be made by whittling, in two halves. Cut a notch for the "lead". Then glue, which probably has to be made by boiling down hide scraps or pine tar. Some early pencils were wrapped with leather thongs.[2]
If you've made it to pottery, which most civilizations got early, you can get to a pencil.
[1] http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html [2] http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions-collections/curr...
[0] "I, Pencil" http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
I think the article assumes that "from scratch" means that you have to make those, too (including the kiln), and including all the tools you need to mine the graphite.
The way I like to frame this is by telling people to imagine they are strapped on an island with no clothes or tools. Let's assume there is fresh water and access to food (some fruits here and there and a decent amount of animals to hunt). Even if you have good knowledge about how our current world and economy works it would still be really challenging to create/build anything that has even a small degree of complexity.
Let's say you believe using some metal would help you build some useful tools and you want to start mining for metal. How would you to it with your bare hands? You need tools for that, but what tools can you build with your bare hands? Even cutting down a tree to make something out of it would be really challenging. What would you use, a rock? Imagine cutting a tree using a rock. With no tools it's almost impossible to do anything.
But this is the story of humanity, we started naked and without tools, and also with no knowledge about the world, we didn't know that we can make fire, nor how we could use it, we didn't know what to eat and what not to eat. We didn't know why we get sick or what a diseases is. We didn't know where we come from nor where we are heading and yet somehow, afters many years we now build rockets that go to space, algorithms that know what we want before we do, surgeries that make the blind see, devices that make the deaf hear and so much more. These humans are truly amazing.
http://www.officemuseum.com/pencil_history.htm
This website reminds me of "slate pencils" (soft slate wrapped in paper). I remember my parents having some of these for a message board in our house. You can still get them:
http://www.amazon.com/Slate-and-Pencil-by-KCFT/dp/B017N0U4CS...
Other related projects include:
Thomas Thwaites making a toaster from scratch: http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/
That guy who made a ceramic-tile-roofed house with underfloor heating from scratch just posted about adding a kiln and firing more pots: https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/ This one is really "from scratch"; he starts the project (in a previous video) by making stone tools from rocks he found onsite.
kd5bjo points out, "Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop!" They build a machine shop starting from scrap metal, starting with a charcoal foundry for casting aluminum and pot metal; there's now a US$75 hardbound edition of what was originally a seven-book series. http://gingerybooks.com/index.html
Jeri Ellsworth demonstrating how to make integrated circuits at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
The Global Village Construction Set is working on a set of 50 machine designs capable of reproducing themselves: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...
Of course we all know about the RepRap project that spawned the current proliferation of 3-D printer companies.
Project Oberon is one of a few different projects that has a whole self-hosting toolchain including CPU architecture, compiler, networking, GUI, filesystem, and applications in a form comprehensible by a single person; it's free software: https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.h...
Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential
supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods...
But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that
he most certainly carried himself... without it he could not make
his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods.
You can read a critical article on the back story to Friedman and Read's writings on pencils here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/
Usually, you start with a top-level entrance (records for musicians, games for programmers, translations for language learners). Then, step by step, you go backwards in time.
That album was composed of songs. These songs are composed of harmonies and melodies. Harmonies are composed of chords and voicings. ... on and on until you're dissecting the very sound waves themselves.
This beautiful curiosity that exists in every deep learning experience is what sets apart the hobbyists from the geniuses.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility-Prosp...