Dixon Ticonderoga Pencil

The Ticonderoga is the pencil of American schoolrooms and standardised tests: six-sided, lacquered a warm yellow, with a green-and-yellow striped ferrule holding a pink rubber, and stamped in green with its name. Inside a case of California cedar is a No. 2 core, the grade the answer sheets ask for. The company sells it as the world's best pencil, and for many Americans it is simply what a pencil looks like.

Its maker was already old when it appeared. Joseph Dixon, an inventor from Marblehead, Massachusetts, started his company in 1827 and was making graphite pencils two years later; by the 1870s, from a works in Jersey City, it was turning out 86,000 a day. In 1873 it bought a graphite mine and mills at Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, and in 1913 gave the place's name to a new yellow pencil. The name tied the product to its graphite, and it sounded distinctly American, which was the point.

The pencil's look settled during the Second World War. Metal was short, and in the early 1940s the brass ferrule gave way to one of green plastic and cardboard. When metal came back the company kept the colours, and the green-and-yellow bands became the pencil's signature.

The making has moved more than once. Dixon set up a manufacturing subsidiary in Mexico in 1954, the business became the Dixon Ticonderoga Company in 1983, and since the early 2000s nearly all its pencils have been made in Mexico or China; in 2005 it was bought by FILA, the Italian maker of pencils and art supplies. None of that has changed the object. A Ticonderoga bought today is the same cedar, yellow lacquer, green ferrule and graphite that generations of American children have sharpened, chewed and filled in answer bubbles with.