Ken Lizotte

speaker

336 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 27 Feb

Ken Lizotte’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles · Does Your Life Matter? Reclaiming Worth With Thoreau | Ken Lizotte - EP 735 · 27 Feb 2026 podcast

And he noticed that there was something wrong with even the successful pencils that his dad produced.

At that time in America, pencils were very sloppy, unpredictable.

We were starting to come out of the inkwell era and into the pencil era.

And it wasn't, a pencil might write things.

cleanly and clearly, or it might slop all over the page.

There was a problem.

And yet that could be considered a successful pencil because it was a state of the art, even though it's not pushing the phrase state of the art.

Anyway, Henry had a feeling that there could be something better.

So I write in a book about how he decided to do some research and he went back to Harvard where he graduated and he went to the library there and he started hitting the books.

And he found that in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, pencils were much, much better than in America.

So why was this?

And he determined what the recipe, as they call it, for the lead inside was, how it was mixed and constructed and all.

And he brought that information back to his dad and also created an invention, I'll call it a contraption, that allowed just the perfect kind of ingredient to be created in the pencil factory and then

mixed together and used for the lead inside the pencil.

He basically reinvented the pencil because his process caused it to be something that you could, it was predictable.

You could rely on it.

You knew that it wasn't going to get sloppy all over the page.

And it then spread to the rest of America.

So successful pencil makers, just like his father, that type of pencil went away because of what Henry had done.

That's the only thing he did in his life that would have been enough to make his mark on history.

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