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Pencils were invented by the British military during the Napoleonic War and their raw materials and manufacturing process were a military secret at the time. They were an instrument for instant writing with no time wasted waiting for the ink to dry before you could handle the document just written. They were a vast improvement over writing with a quill, having sprinkle sand on the paper to soak up any excess ink, then shake the sand off and wait for the ink to finish drying before you could do anything with the paper afterwards, otherwise the ink would smear.
When attending classes in the 1970's, I would take notes via a self-developed version of shorthand and then transcribe them into regular english later that day.
When they used to have a test where you could bring in all the crib notes you could fit on a 5" x 3" notecard, I used to write notes/formulas/equations on the card with a fine tipped pen using several colors of ink so I could overlay the notes on top of each other and would read them by adjusting my eye/brain "color filter" to read only in one color. By using 4 colors of ink (black, blue, red, green) I could get almost 4 times of amount of info on the card.
Once when I had two classes that I needed to graduate that year scheduled at the same time, I took one class using a tape casette recorder. I would drop the started recorder off at the one class, attend the other class, then afterwards go back to the first class to pick up the recorder and copy any notes the professor had on the blackboard.
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