BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ADVISED them in his paper. Henry David Thoreau made them in his father's Concord factory. Most Americans don't even know that much about the pencil—a tool so ubiquitous it often goes unnoticed except by students. Turns out, like every important artifact, it has its own history, complete with inventors, thieves and battlers. No one knows who slapped the first piece of rock between two bits of wood, but pencil makers began working in Stein, Germany, nearly four centuries ago. Kaspar Faber set up shop in 1761 and in the mid-19th century, Lothar von Faber created the hexagonally shaped...