William Brockeden was born on 13th October 1787 in Totnes, Devon, the son of a watchmaker. He too trained as a watchmaker but also earned money as an author and artist. He worked with Sampson Mordan in 1831 on the development of a pen nib with an oblique form.
However is was later as an artist that he made the discovery that was to revolutionise not only pencil making but also the preparation of medicines and enabled apothecaries to replace laborious pill-rolling with efficient and reliable tablet making machines.
Pencil making was in difficulty the late 1830's. The sources of real lead, such as the highly-valued Cumberland Plumbago, had become rarer and more expensive. As high-quality graphite got more expensive, cheap imitations with sulphur or clay added as additives became common.
Brockeden was frustrated that he could not obtain drawing pencils which were free from grit and he had the idea of compressing pure, powdered graphite in a die between two punches. Brockeden exhibited at the Crystal Palace showing how powdered graphite could be reformed into a block without binder. Powder was poured into a tube, and then compressed with a mallet until solid. Realising that his invention could have other uses, he then took out a patent for a device for 'Shaping of pills, lozenges and black lead by pressure in a die'.
In 1844, just a few months after Brockeden's patent was granted, the Pharmaceutical Journal in Britain recorded that: 'We have received a specimen of bicarbonate of potash compressed into the form of a pill by a process invented by Mr Brockeden and for which he has taken out a patent. We understand the process is applicable to the compression of a variety of other substances into a solid mass, without the intervention of gum or other adhesive material”.
