A Brill Calendar: August 4

Few inventors are as closely associated with one single invention as Nicolas-Jacques Conté (Aunou-sur-Orne, France August 4 1755 – Paris, December 6 1805) is with the pencil.

The association has become highly exclusive one. But for his ‘crayon’, Conté would seem a nonentity in the Great Hall of Cultural Achievement. Still, undoing this crass reduction opens a panorama on interdependencies within European civilization during the first sixteen years of the French Revolution.

Conté was a member of the great band of artists and scholars accompanying young Bonaparte on his extravagant expedition to Egypt during the final years of the 18th century. It is seldom that a fashionable portrait-painter like Conté increased the variety of his accomplishments as spectacularly or as quickly. Napoleon – who, (seemingly on the following evidence), developed his skills for ‘impression management’ much later – made Conté the Chief of his Balloon Corps.

Following the ‘déconfiture’ inflicted by Horatio Nelson on the French Fleet off Aboukir and the Battle of Cairo, Conté proved to have a genius in inventing supply alternatives for an enormous army, finding itself all of a sudden without the usual support of fresh equipment and food. Safely returned to ‘La Patrie’, Napoleon commissioned his ‘jack-of-all-trades’ to commence a grand scholarly work on Egypt. An early and unexpected death prevented Conté from building a revolutionary engraving machine which should have facilitated such an extraordinary publishing project.

And the pencil? That pencil was invented to compensate failing supplies of plumbago from Borrowdale, Cumberland, the traditional source of a basic utensil during the Napoleonic era; a small ‘amuse’ within Conté’s rich menu of inventiveness.