You're inadvertently moving the goal posts. A "straightforward pencil" isn't what that 1958 essay is about. It's talking about the modern manufactured pencils[1] commonly used in schools.
It's very unlikely that a single person on Earth knows how to make such pencils from raw materials. The person who knows where to find graphite and how to mine for it will not be the same person who knows how to formulate the paint. Neither of them knows how to chop down raw trees and make small hexagon shaped tubes to hold the pencil lead. Then there's the steel or brass ring coupling the eraser to the the wood. There's also the chemistry and materials science to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser. No single person on the planet knows how to make that type of pencil.
I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from materials mined from the earth): as a maker, with a PhD in biophysics, I can learn how to do all those things and, through an incredibly tedious process, reproduce what they've done. For pencils, that's pretty easy. Graphite mining, paint formulation, wood sourcing and processing, ferrule production and application, rubber polymer manufacture and application- those are all straightforward industrial things that a well-educated person can learn to do with a combination of the Internet and a good university library.
A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab- I don't think any one person could master all the techniques required to do that from raw materials. Too much tech stack to walk u.
>I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from materials mined from the earth)
Sure, you can take a different view but that doesn't change the truth of the essay. Citing an experimental toaster is repeating the same mischaracterization in your previous comment. The essay is not about making "any usable pencil" or "any toaster".
It seems like you want the "I, Pencil" essay to be something other than what it is. You want a MacGyver[1] themed essay but instead, got an unwanted essay about the cooperation required to make a simple manufactured object.
>I can learn [...] a well-educated person can learn [...]
The essay isn't about what a single person can _learn_. Instead, it highlights the counterintuitive point that no single person with the complete knowledge _exists_.
>A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab
Yes, things like silicon computer chips, communications satellites orbiting Earth, and particle accelerators are much harder but it misses the poetry of the essay. We already have intuitive sense that no single person knows how to build advanced technology projects. The author deliberately chose something that looked deceptively "simple" and dissected how much coordination in society it takes to make it. The "hidden" complexity is high enough to exceed the knowledge of a single person.
Take just the wood of the pencil. I'd have to chop trees. I don't even know how to make an ax tool to chop the tree. Sure, I guess I could learn how to make an ax -- which means I guess I could learn how to smelt steel... which means I have to learn... and so on. The groove channel in the wood to hold the lead?!? Another series of rabbit holes of learning to manufacture that cut. Glue? Again, the learning is not impossible (given enough time). It still doesn't change the fact that no single person knows it all. I suppose I could make _a_ thing that people might call a "a pencil" in a few days... but to replicate _that_ specific "Number 2 hexagon painted pencil with a synthetic rubber eraser"?!? That would take me a lifetime of learning. Most of the learning time is spent learning how to reinvent tools that make other tools that are several steps removed from the final assembly of the pencil.
I think that far exceeds "a little effort", however. And there's the problem of access. I might be able to mine graphite, but where am I going to get a graphite mine?
I enjoy the How to Make Everything channel on Youtube for this reason. Here's what's probably their most popular video, the $1500 Sandwich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE
You're inadvertently moving the goal posts. A "straightforward pencil" isn't what that 1958 essay is about. It's talking about the modern manufactured pencils[1] commonly used in schools.
It's very unlikely that a single person on Earth knows how to make such pencils from raw materials. The person who knows where to find graphite and how to mine for it will not be the same person who knows how to formulate the paint. Neither of them knows how to chop down raw trees and make small hexagon shaped tubes to hold the pencil lead. Then there's the steel or brass ring coupling the eraser to the the wood. There's also the chemistry and materials science to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser. No single person on the planet knows how to make that type of pencil.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=no+2+school+pencil&source=ln...